Kongregate
I am designing a game for Kongregate.com.
The site is founded by Jim and his sister Emily Greer. Jim is the former technical director of Pogo.com and his new idea is a "YouTube for games" community site where anyone can create and upload games. The idea is that Kongregate provides infrastructure such as chat, friends lists, promotions, and support for micropayments so that game creators can focus more on creating a game than all the boring stuff that needs to surround a game.
The site is currently in an alpha state, but you can request an account on the homepage and you'll get one. Then you can check out game like The Fancy Pants Adventure (with great pants comes great responsibility) and the Trauma Center-inspired Dark Cut (now you can perform medieval surgery from the comfort of your own home), among many others.
Another aspect of the site is that there is a site-wide rewards sytem, similar to Xbox Live's achievements. Don't be too quick to judge who is stealing ideas from who because Xbox Live's own system is substantially similar to Pogo's achievement system and Jim Greer was intimately involved with Pogo's implementation. Anyway, Kongregate's new twist is that instead of these achievements being entirely for bragging rights, they will also have actual function and fun to them. By completing various challenges in various games on Kongregate, your "achievements" earn you virtual cards in a giant meta-game. Game creators should be rooting for that to succeed because it's promotions like that that will help bring players to your game. Kongregate splits ad revenue with game creators at about 50/50 and takes a much smaller cut than that when you sell additional content/levels with micropayments.
This meta-game thing is where I come in, as it's my job to create it! It has to playable and fun with only a few starter cards, and yet it has to invite the player to earn many, many more cards, too. I'm very wary of the rip-off schemes usually associated with TCG's, so I'm trying to make sure that even casual players have reasonable access to these cards. To satisfy the people who simply want to play this metagame and the people who want their collection of achievements to "mean something," we're probably going to implement a "black bordered" trade system. In Magic: the Gathering, first run cards are printed with black borders. Kongregate achievements that you earn will be denoted in a similar way. Also in MtG, white bordered cards denote a reprint. These cards are functionaly equivalent for gameplay, but they allow collectors to have something cool to collect (namely the limited edition black bordered cards). We'll try something similar where cards you get through trading or other means will become white bordered while cards you earned yourself (the "real way"!) will get a black border. Actually, we'll surely end up using graphics cooler than just black borders, but I'm just using that term to explain it in MtG terms.
So what is the meta-game like? Unfortunately, you can't play it yet, as it's still in development. I will say that it is inspired by Pokemon's NetBattle game (different from the Pokemon TCG). Each card represents a character with several moves. This way you can play a game with around 6 cards (one for each character) rather than needing a 60 card deck to do anything. The game system has some modifications to character switching and counter-switching and so forth, but perhaps it's better to hold off on details until the thing is further along. Oh, and the character art is to be drawn by Udon, creators of the excellent Street Fighter comic.
Wish me luck that thing turns out well, and I'll invite you all to help me test it once we're ready. (Note that I still work for Backbone Entertainment as well and you should all check out Sega Genesis Collection and Capcom Classics Collection 2, available this week and produced by me!).
--Sirlin
November 13th, 2006 at 10:21 am
Here’s wishing you luck. *raises a cup*
Here’s also to praying that black borders always remain functionally equivalent to white borders. *raises a mildly threatening weapon*
November 13th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Awesome. Can’t wait to both see a nice place for sharing of games and a new game with sirlin as the designer.
Definitely count me in for testing when that’s available.
November 13th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Sounds badass. Would developers be able to submit art or suggestions for their cards? For example, let’s say you complete a certain objective in a candy store sim game. Would you then be rewarded with a card that’s inspired by a character in the game?
Also, how does the system keep track of what’s been accomplished in what games? Would developers have to crack open a project they’re already working on and add in a bunch of flags just for the site?
November 13th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
edit: Also, you’re links don’t work unless you have an account there… Sorry.
November 14th, 2006 at 12:44 am
Sirlin, call me up when you get the chance at (702) 557-1313. If you’re not too far into development I have a card game design that will absolutely blow you away, and is designed for internet play.
Hell, call me anyway. I could use some advice on how complicated certain aspects would be, particularly with how difficult the coding would be.
November 14th, 2006 at 12:56 am
Awesomeness. Good luck.
November 14th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Hey Sirlin, nice writeup.
Ixis, good questions.
> Would developers be able to submit art or suggestions for their cards?
Yes, we love that. The only caveat is that we need your permission to use a character that is your intellectual property. Normally when you upload a game to Kongregate you can take it down any time. But if we’re building your IP into our metagame, we need a permanent license for that character at least…
> Also, how does the system keep track of what’s been accomplished in what games? Would developers have to crack open a project they’re already working on and add in a bunch of flags just for the site?
Unfortunately, yes. You can upload a game to the site without making any changes at all, but for it to participate in the achievements system/metagame, it has to make some calls to our Event Reporting API. It should be pretty simple - the game will open a Flash LocalConnection to our chat object, and then make calls like this:
import com.kongregate.api.Event
Event.gameStart()
Event.report(”killedEnemy”)
Event.report(”killedEnemy”)
Event.report(”killedEnemy”)
Event.report(”died”)
Event.report(”gotTrophy1″)
Event.report(”finishedLevel1″)
Event.report(”died”)
Event.report(”died”)
Event.gameOver()
Event.reportScore(575)
Note that this would tie you into our high score system as well, if appropriate.
I’d love to hear what people think of that API, and if there’s anything we can do to make it simpler.
Thanks,
Jim
November 14th, 2006 at 9:34 am
Well, I’ve been accepted and I’m trying things out. It’s pretty cool so far, I just kinda wish there was a search function.
Ok, more about the CCG deal (sorry for buggin ya with all these questions, but it seems like a badass idea, if at least a bit complex to setup, and very fragile to implement somewhat.) What’s in place to make sure a creator, for example, creates a game, gives you the liscense for the character and whatnot, and even sets up the event to upload data to your site.
Then, for whatever reason, the creator gets upset or a little… Inebriated, and decides to tweak the code so either anyone can get a certain card just by participating, or makes it impossible to get a certain card? I’m guessing the best way would be for you to selectively choose each and every game and take care of it yourselves behind a glass case. Otherwise things could get really sticky on the developers side.
Damn, this makes me want to develop my own flash and upload it to the site, even though I suck at actionscripting! lol.
Thanks for reading,
Ixis
November 14th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
I’m really looking forward to seeing what this system will be like; you certainly know your stuff when it comes to rule design.
November 14th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
If you’re referring to Pokemon Netbattle the online simulator created by TVsian and popularly played by the online Pokemon community, most notably www.smogon.com, you are mistaken in thinking it has anything to do with cards. It’s a simulator for the link battling feature of the RPGs on the Gameboy line of systems, and those were always far and away better designed games than the TCG. If you’re referring to what I think you are, I immediately have to note how awesome that is that you would know about our obscure simulator, but if you’re not I’m really curious as per what you are referring to since I am very much into Pokemon(basically just for the brilliant RPGs and not at all for the lame spin offs, horrible TV show, or unremarkable TCG), and I wonder what else might share the same name. That something else with the name “Pokemon Netbattle” exists would really surprise me.
As per the site to which you refer, it has the potential to be incredibly awesome. I don’t think I can say anything more about it really.
November 14th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
Guest: I meant what I said. “Inspired by Pokemon Netbattle (which has nothing to do with TCG).”
Each character will have several moves built into it, creating gameplay similar to the RPG combat found in Pokemon. The characters are represented by “cards” but not in a way that has anyting to do with having a hand of cards or a deck you draw from.
My designer brain picked up on the great potential of a game system similar to NetBattle, but I must admit I’m a little out of my element as it’s not a game-type I’m deeply familiar with. I’ll probably need a bit of help from gamers out there to get it right. If people from Smogon.com give advice on how to make this game good, it would be greatly appreciated. Once it’s actually ready for anyone to see, I’ll put another call out and you guys can tell me what we’re doing wrong. ;)
For now I’ll just say that I’m very conscious of reducing the learning curve of the game. A 17×17 grid of resistance types is not exactly easy for new players to deal with, so I’m trying to replace that with other systems that don’t require so much memorization. Right now, there are only 2 or 3 damage types. Some moves hit multiple times while some moves only hit once, and having armor or resistance becomes doubly or triply effective against multiple hitting moves…but those same multi-hit moves are very dangerous if you don’t have any armor or resist against them. I’m hoping this type of system allows for the paper, rock, scissors countering without requring anyone memorize whether “psychic” is good against “grass” or whatever.
It was probably too early to mention this, even. Give me a bit to make the numbers at least somewhat work out and I’ll put out another call.
–Sirlin
November 16th, 2006 at 12:54 am
Nice to know that Sirlin himself will be working on Kongregate’s metagame. ;) Good luck with that.
I’m planning on releasing Flash games on Kongregate as well.
November 17th, 2006 at 7:22 am
So… is this test open only to developers or can plain users like me request an account?
November 17th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Thrazz, I think you’ll still be able to get an account if you request one from the front page of kongregte.com. I know they really appreciate it when new users join up and play the games and give feedback on how to make the whole experience better, so go for it. Just remember it’s still beta and they are very responsive to your feedback.
–Sirlin
November 20th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Thanks, got one.
May 5th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
I whant it to be a online game
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