UIBuzz - Software and game development

Peter: 00:05

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the UI Buzz Podcast. This one, we're gonna talk about game development, and we're gonna talk specifically about a problem that I have encountered with my game. And it's one of those funny problems that you playtesting is so important. Let's just put it like that.

Peter: 00:22

Right? So, talking about my Project Hack game here. You can find it at projecthack.net. And I put a new version up on itch.io for folks to play, and I posted it out to one of my developer Slacks that I hang out on. And since it's a game, not aimed at developers, but certainly developers can script with it and everything else.

Peter: 00:45

So there is definitely an element in there for developers to play the game, or at least hopefully it makes it attractive to them. The problem was that someone had tried the game, which was fantastic, and I appreciate it. And they wrote a script that enables them to hack the servers, and they can almost instantly hack all the money from all the servers that's available to them, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. That is how it's designed to play.

Peter: 01:14

And then they have to sit and wait twenty minutes for those servers to restock the money. And it struck me as both funny and one of those like, how did I not think of this? And this is why it is important for getting people to play the game and give you feedback. Especially if it is like a developer orientated game and a developer plays it because it is super important. They found something that I had not thought of.

Peter: 01:43

Right? They went away and wrote a script that does all this in the game. Again, that is the idea here. But I had never thought to approach it from this aspect of what if I hack all the servers at once and get the money? Now, this presents me a bit of a problem.

Peter: 01:59

And let me be transparent here. It's a great problem to have. Somebody did exactly what I asked, which is why you should reach out to folks, and they played the game. And they played it, they liked it, and then they said, hey, what about this scenario? And do you want to be able to solve it before you ship the game in a final version?

Peter: 02:20

I'm very much in a prerelease state still. And so it's given me something to go away and think about, which is, yeah, what if someone writes a really good script, hacks all of the servers straight away, and now especially at the beginning of the game, when they've not unlocked a lot of the other features, what do they do now? They do have to wait thirty minutes for the servers to restock some money, and then do it again and wait again. And, of course, once they get more levels, other things open up. Things like the research, things like the AI tools, fighting the bosses, and then eventually hacking other players.

Peter: 02:58

But in this very early stage of the game, if you write a script that is this good, or, as I hope will happen, someone writes scripts and shares them on the web somewhere, other people go find these scripts to help them improve playing the game, that kind of thing. This presents a real challenge. What what do I do for those folks who are really good at taking advantage of this scripting here? The answer is I genuinely don't know right now. I've been thinking about this for a few days.

Peter: 03:29

The solutions that I presented to myself just don't work for me. Right? Number one is I somehow slow down the hacking so that they can't do this at the beginning and be crippling it in a way, and that doesn't feel right. If someone is that good at writing the script and they do it, they should get the reward for it. That's the whole point of this game, is you play it the way you want to.

Peter: 03:54

So locking it down, essentially preventing them from doing this, is not the answer. I was like, what other things can we do in between? I could put some mini games in there like I had in a very early version of the game, and that is an attractive idea. I'm still think that I'll probably do that at some point here because it did work out great in the early version of the game. Now, I don't think it's perfect, and I don't think it solves all the scenarios.

Peter: 04:19

And I should be realistic here and say, I don't think in this style of game, this hacking game, I can solve all of the scenarios. Right? Because the whole sort of sub line of the game is, can you become the best hacker? If you can do this and take advantage of the features in the game to essentially make you the fastest hacker, if you like, this, you've just played the game really well, and that has to be acknowledged and certainly not penalized in any way. So it's been an interesting few days.

Peter: 04:52

I've gone through highs and lows. I've gone from, oh, you know what? I'm just not good at making games, and I should quit this, to, no, this is good. Someone did this. They liked the game.

Peter: 05:06

They enjoyed it. They took the time to do this. This is exactly the kind of thing you want people to have and experience with the game, and you just gotta find a solution to this problem, Beta, And everywhere in between. And I still don't know what the right answer is, other than to experiment with a few things in this early pre release version. And then I'll put a link in the show notes for you to go play the game.

Peter: 05:29

It is free on itch.io. I don't intend it necessarily to live there forever, but it's a good place to put it in this pre release stage where folks can get to it and just play it in a web browser. Go to projecthack.net. There's a link there as well. And there's a community there.

Peter: 05:46

I'd love your feedback on this. If any of you have any suggestions as to, like, here's what you could do. There is a community on that link there that you could put some suggestions. Cause Lord knows I need them right now. I'm not sure what the right answer is.

Peter: 06:01

I'm not even sure that I've got answers that I wanna try. I know that I just don't wanna cripple a player for being that good. So anyway, I just don't know what to do, and I'm laughing to myself cause it's so frustrating. You do all of this, you're so and this is a good lesson. You're so focused on building the system, building the game, building out all these ways for people to play it, that essentially, I have built a feature that is too good.

Peter: 06:27

And it sounds funny to say it, but that is the scenario here. So I am working through the stress of it. The highs and the lows. And I'm sure I'll come up with something, because I'm not gonna give up. If I can I should just accept these challenges and solve them as we go?

Peter: 06:45

Right? This is what's gonna make the game significantly better, I think, and offer more longevity to it, especially while I'm working at the storyline. But again, you don't have to pay any attention to the storyline. That's the whole point. Play the game the way you want to.

Peter: 07:00

So anyway, I wanted to put that out here in this episode. To all you game developers out there, you probably will experience this if you haven't already. And if you have, please reach out to me, peter winham dot com. I'd love to know how you're dealing with these scenarios. Or if you wanna come on the podcast and talk about them and your game and how you solved problems or challenges and things like that, let's do that.

Peter: 07:22

Because this is a really interesting time in my game development cycle here of, yeah, dang it, it was too good. So, again, please reach out. Peterwidom dot com. Other than that, folks, yeah, if you're a game developer, hang in there. Right?

Peter: 07:37

Don't just give up. This is good. You got someone interested enough to play it and give you feedback on something that you need to make better. So that's it, folks. I will speak to you in the next episode.