SBURBDEV Forum

This is an extremely important question, and one we're going to need to answer if we're going to make this game.

Now, at first you might think, "Of course we should follow the canon exactly, because Homestuck is awesome and I want to play a game exactly like that!" I know that's how I thought at first, and I would assume that's what most of you guys think too, because well, why else would you be here in the first place?

However, as I've read discussion about the various aspects of the game and thought through making the game myself, I've come to a realization: SBURB is a game designed to make a good story, not a good game. In fact, in many ways it would make for a terrible game. For starters, you spend almost 90% of the game all on your own, with almost no interaction with the rest of your "team", and then are thrown together for the last 5 minutes to kill the final boss and bam, it's over, time for newgame+. What's the point of even having the game be multiplayer at that point? You get to mess around building your client player's house, but that's hardly "interaction". You build their house, then they climb up a few stories, go through a gate, and get on with the "real" game. You can chat with your fellow players, but you can do that anyways, and there's not all that much to talk about. "Got to gate 5" "Cool, I just finished killing my denizen, I'll grind in the battlefield while you catch up I guess."

Another problem is the length of the game: You enter the game, kill a few imps, get to the top of your house and go through the gate. You spend a few minutes to get to the next gate, then build up at your server player's house, go through their world for a few minutes, repeat the process at your server player's server player's world, build up one more time and kill the denizen. That's what, maybe an hour total? Throw in a few side-quests for killing the black queen/king, ecto-babies, the battlefield, frogs, and whatever else we can think of, and we've got a 2-hour game, tops. In-comic, this works because all the drama and time shenanigans and sub-plots bulk it up to the full, epic story that it's become. In a game, however, such story will only go so far. We need more gameplay.

Despite it's flaws, however, I'm not here to say that SBURB isn't worth making. The worlds, the titles, the plot, the setting, the style...there's a lot to say in favor of SBURB as a game. All I'm saying is that we all need to take a step back, look at SBURB for what it is, and acknowledge where it's strong, where it's weak, where it needs to be changed and where it needs to stay true to the source.

For starters, we need to decide on the first major issue I brought up: In the comic, the game is multiplayer, but you don't really interact with the other players all that much. There's a few ways to resolve this:

1) Make the game singleplayer. This would probably allow us to stay the closest to the comic's canon, since you would only be playing one of the players in the game, or swapping between them such that you play one for a while, then once you go through a gate or whatever you play the next kid for a while, and so on.

2) Make the game multiplayer. To really justify doing this, we would need to make some significant changes to the structure of the game. Most importantly, the players should all be together in the same place, fighting through each world together. We could keep much of the basic framework of the game the same: each player has a world themed after them, and you travel through gates and eventually fight the black king. It's just that, instead of each player starting on their own world and venturing on their own, you would all enter one players world, play through it, go to another player's world, play through it, and so on until you've gone through all of your worlds. Denizens would likely take the form of a "end stage" boss in this mode.

3) Stick directly to the canon. (ie: mutiplayer, but with separate paths) While I don't think this would make for all that spectacular of a game, I'm sure many people would love for an as-canon-as-possible mode be added to the game, which they can play once with their friends for the shiggles, or use it to roleplay, or maybe even some people would enjoy it as a game, who knows.

4) Have some or all of them as different modes. This isn't really an option per se; we should be focusing on one of the above options and finish it before we go about creating the others. However, it's worth noting that whichever option we do, if we eventually want to add in the others, say as alternate game modes, then we should build the game with both/all options in mind, to keep us from having to re-build the game from scratch when we eventually decide to get around to the other modes.

Option #3. If a client and server pair coordinate, they can arrange to meet on the server player's world and adventure together without necessarily following the gates. We could program Sprites to encourage players to work together as much as possible when not messing about with specific things. In fact, they could even be encouraged to work together on everything except maybe Denizens! This addresses your concern, right?

(In-canon examples: John+Rose in the Skaian Castle, Karkat+Terezi, Karkat+Gamzee, Tavros+Vriska, Equius+Aradia, Equius+Nepeta, Feferi+Sollux)

I vote Option #3, because it will give players enough room to be able to complete their Domain and Class-specific quests while giving them the option (and tons of "subtle" hints) to meet up with each other through Gates on someone's world.

Legendary wrote:Option #3. If a client and server pair coordinate, they can arrange to meet on the server player's world and adventure together without necessarily following the gates. We could program Sprites to encourage players to work together as much as possible when not messing about with specific things. In fact, they could even be encouraged to work together on everything except maybe Denizens! This addresses your concern, right?

(In-canon examples: John+Rose in the Skaian Castle, Karkat+Terezi, Karkat+Gamzee, Tavros+Vriska, Equius+Aradia, Equius+Nepeta, Feferi+Sollux)

Except that raises all sorts of problems. Either the game is built such that you team up, or it's built such that you all play on your own. You can't design it to work both ways, at least not without screwing everything up. If the game's built such that teaming up is assumed, then you're forced to team up because otherwise the game is too difficult to progress on your own. If the game's built such that going solo is assumed, then if you team up the game becomes overly easy, you get very little gear, and it takes twice as long or more because you all have to go through each world one at a time. The only real way to handle this would be to build the game such that the difficulty scales based on how many players are currently present, which brings up all sorts of problems on it's own.

Let's say we have a team of 4. Two of these players go through the game on their own, never meeting up until the end. The other two players team up, going through each of their worlds in turn. The two solo players get the normal level of monsters, get the normal level of loot, get the normal amount of experience, and take the normal amount of time to get through to their worlds. The team players, on the other hand, get twice as difficult monsters, the normal level of loot, the normal amount of experience and take a bit less than twice as long to get through their worlds. But wait! The monsters are twice as difficult and it takes twice as long, so why would they even team up in the first place? They're just holding their team back! Surely they should get more loot, to compensate for the additional time and difficulty? But now the solo players have to wait around for a long time once they reach the end, and they have much less loot and are severely under-leveled compared to the teamed players, how's that fair?

The only real balance for this might be that the solo players would reach the battleground sooner, and thus can grind there for levels/loot while they wait for the teamed players. Even that would simply be a band-aid on the problem, at best. It would be extremely difficult to balance it right, if that's even actually possible, and any solution that relies on having players grind for extended periods of time is a poor one in my book.

No, if we're going to do this, we need to be focused on what we want to provide. If we're going to focus on making the game canon, then we need to focus on that, and accept that it's gong to come at the cost of gameplay. If we're going to focus on gameplay, then we need to accept that not everything in the game can be 100% true to canon. If we try to go for a middle ground, we're just going to end up with a mediocre game that does a mediocre job of sticking to canon, and nobody will be happy. That's not to say that we need to completely sacrifice one if we go for the other, but we have to know what our priorities are.

This is a true point, but I'm not convinced that it can't be worked around to some extent. For starters, players don't have to stay teamed up or remain solo, and perhaps should be encouraged to fluctuate as the situation calls for it. Not forced, just, yeah. Second, Prospit, Derse, Skaia, and the Veil can all have quests and interesting character interactions that aren't part of the Seven Gate progression. Third, the Reckoning is a double countdown: One to the start, when the WK dies; one to the end of the game, when hopefully the BK is dead. If the Reckoning is a specific speed, remaining in a group completely won't be an option unless you're hella fast, so you'll have to split up at some point and just skip up to your Seventh Gate. After all, there's no rule about level progression. You can do as you please. (Alternatively, the time between start and Reckoning is long enough that solo players are encouraged to just explore the other planets they don't have to go to). Just ensure every player has a chance to make a flying item to reach their seventh gate at the start of the Reckoning if necessary. I think this equalizes loot and Grist better.

We could also, if we try to make both groups and solo players equal, encourage people to find other players who have a similar playing style. This invites trolls, but trolls are always going to be a problem; and self-regulation works reasonably well if people are upfront.

I admit I'm not sure about this, but this is a balance problem that I don't think can be addressed until we have most of the game up and running. I honestly think that Option 1 is the worst of the options, and that Option 2 is an admittedly fun-sounding idea but that I think people who want to play Sburb want the closest experience possible.

As I stated, a direct canon approach can work, but the gameplay will invariably suffer. If you guys are fine with that though, then we'll do the best we can and hopefully end up with a playable game. My vote personally goes for Option #1. It seems to me that SBURB's main strength is it's potential for story, and single-player allows us to have that more than any multiplayer experience could.

Okay, one last little spiel here and then let's see what the other like, two of us think:

One of Andrew's first plans with Homestuck was thinking about what it would be like, BEING the Sim, and furthermore having the person who controls your house being under your control. The appeal was in the interactions between the two characters. In much the same way, I honestly think the appeal of a Sburb game is logging in with your friends, messing with their environment, sending silly messages and ranting about the things that went wrong while wondering how you're possibly going to finish everything on time.

Spiel over, other people time. Not contributing here unless

EDIT: Unless I fail at sentence composition. Let me try that again. Not contributing here again unless I need to directly defend my point or clarify something.

Perhaps we should tweak the cosmology to provide a better experience.

What do we want to capture of sburb? Certainly the server messing with the client's house is cool. The build up from trivial to epic is something I rather like too.

Perhaps we should switch it around like this:
All players start in the homes on <insert home planet name here>. Connection establishment and entry into the medium proceeds as normal. But instead of separate planets, each house is brought together on a single planet, in close but disconnected biomes corresponding to the players. In addition to rising up to new gates, quests will unlock paths between the player's areas, and further afield.

Or otherwise change things up to bring players together faster.

Not sure if my opinion matters much, but here's what I think:

The beginning of the game should be single-player, so that they can get their feet wet and earn enough skill and gear to work with, until they reach the second gate, when the player can access the next planet and actually have the chance to meet up with the others. Then, the player can travel freely between worlds that have the second gate available and meet up with his/her sessionmates. (of course, if the destination planet's player hasn't reached the second gate yet then you're kind of stuck until they do, but yeah.) This way, there can be some quests that are significantly more difficult and require a larger party to complete, alongside the solo quests and challenges. Thus, if a player needs help, he can pester one or more of his friends and if they aren't busy, come rushing to help.

So I guess that would be closer to aforementioned option 3, only the players are encouraged to meet up more often than in canon. Class quests, denizen battles, god tier, etc would still be strictly solo, but the rest of the game can be completed with a larger party at the players' discretion. Experience and loot would still be divided evenly among the party, and difficulty does not change regardless of current party size. Those two balance out perfectly in my opinion.

I wouldn't mind sticking with one planet at a time, either; it would work just as well, and we wouldn't have to worry about auto-balancing planets, as the game could just sort them by difficulty and have the players clear them in ascending order. As for houses, they could still be placed on the planet of the player who owns it, giving the party gradual access to a wider array of items with which to alchemize.

I'd add more but my brain is broken, so.

Added a poll to the OP.