MMOGs on Mobile Phones Speakers: -
The idea most developers have is to try and cram the PC/Console games into a mobile phone. Phones need a new approach. TibiaME – Simplified 2D interface. There is still a lot of latency, which is very noticeable. Also with a smallscreen it is really hard to interact with the game. Tibia is also a very popular german web game. Era of Eidolon – (Mistral Grove) – Danish developer, out for quite some while. Hack and slash isometric 2.5d. Built in Java. PocketKingdom – When players battle each other they are planning the battle, and when the fight occurs they are just watching it to take place. It is much more latency resistant. SuperModel, Players battle it out on the catwalk with hairdues and fashion accessories. Free game, but players can buy upgrades to their character. Released only in denmark, but has 40,000 users already.
History! 1997 – First mobile phone game, Nokia6110: snake 350million copies world wide. 1999 – WAP games (game logic in a server, phone has interface). Didn’t take off, not a good model. 2001 – monochrome 2D games. Also Botfighters, a location based game. Popular in Russia. 2003 – First traditional MMO for a webphone. Same year Nokia launched NGage. 2006 – 3D accelerated cards in the mobile phone. STRENGTHS: Broad reach. Players often already have the hardware. Connect. Unless the player is in a tunnel or out of the network reach we know the player is accessible. We can allow the game server to connect to the player when he is not playing the game. Social Device. By nature you use it to communicate.Also provides an opportunity for viral marketing.
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Always with the user, and there are always opportunities to play. Using a few minutes to do something meaningful in the mobile game is something players will do.
CHALLENGES: Total device anarchy. More then a thousand phone models. Varying screen sizes, file sizes, processor power, battery life, and software. Emulators are availabled, especially for the big manufacturers (SonyEricson and Nokia) For testing purposes you need actual hardware, which can be very expensive. Constantly changing target. The mobile phone market is evolving very rapidly.
This is slowly getting better. Now there are some standards, it is slowly coming up to speed. SPECIFIC ONLINE DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES: - Ground breaking Technical. Behavior – Players don’t KNOW they want to play MMMOs yet Buisness – Very difficult to get a subscription fee for a MMMO - Data pricing Many carriers still charge a rate per kilobyte of data. It can be very difficult to gauge for the end user and for the developer. - Carrier If you develop a PC MMO you don’t need to know, ISPs get customers onto the internet. With mobile carriers the situation is dismal. Latency in Mobile Networks. Average round trip is not very bad (about 2ms), but occasionally delay spikes make implementing networked mobile games difficult. Can be 10ths of seconds or more. This won’t go away in the near future.. Case 1: Spirits Massively multiplayer game. Collectible. Made in 2003 with in association with Nokia. Hunt-collect-complete. Player collects game items in order to compete against other players. Can trade with other players. The spirit battle is One vs One. Each player chooses 6 spirites and issues commands to the spirits. Tick based (FF7 type). A Latency resistant model. It is very difficult for players to understand unique concepts on the mobile phone when you have that little space to explain it to them.
DESIGN PHASE - Reviews, - Focus groups, - Lo-fi playtesting. IN THE IMPLEMENTATION PHASE: - Expert evaluations, - In laboratory, - first time gameplay experience - Field testing. - Long term gameplay experience, interviews and questionairs, play diaries. Case Study 2: Sea of Fortune From Nokia wanting a rather casual MMMO. Move around the map, run into encounters, fight in ship battle, if you win you get money/upgrades/goods. Go into town and you can get missions, trade, upgrade the ship (many different small components). It was asked to keep the client below 128 megabytes. Not possible, but they would download images realtime into the cline to allow a very graphical experience but keep data size down. 150kb data transfer per hour. Only a couple of dollars for the end user probably. Case study revealed surprise: Players would get hooked and play on the couch for 6 hours at a time. Mobile Games in a few years time - Technologies enabling new game styles. Camera * already starting to be used. Wifi Voip SIC – Session Initian Protocol. (This information is gathered from a story being done in nokia research center. Most of the current popular mobile games are puzzle type games. ) - Variety - Combining Services (Example: Lost with alternate reality game entwined with it) - Online multi-player - Multi-Platform games. (Eve online, Hinterwars, watagame) PROS: Pervasiveness. Consume the users life with your game. Strengthening the community Leveraging the existing IPR and get more players between the game titles. CONS: Delivering a consistent game experience is difficult What features can be available, but limited. (Best is that if it is designed from the beginning for both platforms) Compromises.
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Balancing
Multi-Platform For existing MMOG, More frequent access. New game functionality. Chance of standing out. Working business model. For New multiplatform title. Innovative game play opportunities.
Example: Hinterwars PC and mobile interface are similar. Characters look the same (see less on mobile), countdown timer (compromises), Chat (smaller for mobile), options panel more limited on phone. Extending current MMOGs with mobile client - Communication access ** - Notifications (typically using SIP technology) Desired more by young players. For older players, they want to be able to separate the experiences. - Asynchronous Gameplay ** - Synchronous player-to-player interaction - Observing Summary Technical limitations, that can be overcome by design. Robust development process decrease costs Multiplatform is a powerful way to utilize phone 3MOGs are not yet in peoples mindset yet, but they want to play these games. Just need the first hit.
Interaction Design A tree HTML-site layout. A good way to structure your information (screen relations, etc). - Clicking on one of the nodes takes to that page to get additional information. Hyperlinks to get from ‘scren to screen’. Works better then a GDD. (available as a feature in Visio). Presentation: http://pesentations.jadestone.se/austin06.pps (Nokia MMOG game study): http://research.nokia.com/people/elina_m_koivisto Question: Do the same people play on MMOGs as for mobile phones
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No hard research, but in field research the players who were already familiar with traditional MMOGs were more receptive. Supermodel: 40,000 users, 90% women playing in Denmark.
Question: How long would a PC user want to wait for someone typing something on the mobile ‘keyboard’? That depends on the situation they are in. If they are doing something else, they don’t need to wait. If it is a stopping issue, it may be a problem. Teenage girls in Sweden type faster on the T9 then on a keyboard. Question: Problem of different versions for every model cellphone? We try to work on that by using Ants, build scripts that will generate code for each build model. There are some models that are alike. Good article on Gamasutra about that. Nokia next generation mobile gaming platform is trying to tackle this, by bringing the ngage platform to the smartphones.