Principles of Casual MMO game Design

This is an excerpt from the Article

Toontown Online: Building Massively Multi-Player Games for the Masses
by Mike Goslin, Joe Shochet and Jesse Schell


Problem: Conflict is essential yet violence is forbidden.

Creating a MMP for the mass audience and for families in particular, has some special challenges. While it is nice to imagine a happy game world where all the players just walk around beautifying their environment and doing nice things for each other, the truth is that to create an interesting world, some kind of conflict is required. The challenge is to make the conflict meaningful and important to players, but not so intense that it turns away crucial segments of your audience, such as parents or girls. We approach this problem in the following ways:

Fight Enemies for the Right Reasons
Many games let players take treasures from defeated enemies. We generally avoided this in Toontown, because it is one thing to defeat an opponent to prevent him from taking over your town, and it is altogether a different thing to defeat him so that you can take his possessions. There were exceptions to this, such as cases where defeating a Cog lets you reclaim an item that was stolen from another Toon.

Teamwork
Letting the players team up in small groups against opponents feels more justified than fighting alone, because in addition to protecting yourself, you are fighting to protect the others on your team.


Problem: Too many choices can overwhelm the player.

Traditional MMP games let players create a character, and then just put them out in the world. It is then up to the player to discover what they need to do next. Casual gamers are often frustrated by this lack of structure. Since these same players are often unwilling to read a lengthy manual, the best approach is to build an instructional structure into the game itself.

Tutorial
A much better solution is to gradually lead the player into the depths of the game, starting out very simply, with very few choices, and gradually offering more choice to the player as they learn their way through the game. Toontown features an integrated Tutorial and Quest system that gradually transitions the player through the following steps:

1. Single player, non-interactive tutorial
2. Simple tasks that must be completed as part of the single-player tutorial
3. Introduction to multi-player features through interactive tutorial
4. Exposure to the multi-player world, while performing simple tasks
5. Simple multi-player tasks (making friends)
6. A series of gradually more complex game tasks selected by the player, and completed in the order that the player prefers

For most players, the tutorial will be their first taste of the game, and a designer only gets one chance to make a good first impression. Be sure to schedule enough time to design the tutorial wrong a few times, because you will. Weaving the tutorial into the game is a difficult design challenge, but it is well worth the extra effort of design, implementation, and play testing that it takes.

Quests
In Toontown we decided to give the player a series of explicitly stated quests throughout the course of the game so that there would not be any question about what the player was supposed to be doing. We even provide a Quest Page that clearly shows current quests, quest requirements, and current progress. To personalize the experience for each player, though, we implemented a tiered Quest Pool” system, so that each player gets choices between randomly selected quests. When the player has finished enough quests in one tier, they graduate to the next tier, which features more difficult quests. As the player advances, they are allowed to work on multiple quests simultaneously.

While long-term goals (Drive the Cogs out of Toontown) provide good context for the player, it is the series of short-term quests (Bring this bread to the baker”, Defeat three Pencil Pusher Cogs) that make the game addictive. However, climbing the same quest ladder all the time can grow tedious, so we have found it useful to have more than one way to progress in the game. In addition to the quest system, which gives out many of the progress rewards, such as improved laff meters and larger jelly bean jars, there are other ladders, such as a separate ladder for experience gained in battle. The battle ladder is completely separate from the quest system, and gives out a different set of rewards (new types of gags). There is also a fishing ladder, which helps players recover lost laff meter points. Although players will often find themselves climbing more than one ladder simultaneously, the ability to shift focus from one ladder of achievement to another helps keep the game interesting and give it variety and depth.


Problem: The audience is impatient for the fun to begin.

Hardcore gamers will put up with a lot in order to play a game. Casual gamers want to start enjoying their game right away. The quest system described above helps lead players toward the fun elements of the game, but Toontown also tries to inject fun into some of the more mandatory aspects of a MMP.

The Download
While Toontown is downloading, instead of asking the player to stare at a load bar, we created a simple Flash movie and game for players to enjoy while they were waiting for the initial download to finish. This was also a good chance to introduce some of the game elements and back-story.

Create-A-Toon
Designing your avatar is an amusing game of mix and match. Even picking a name (in some MMP games, a frustrating experience involving multiple rejected names) is fun due to the funny name generator” that suggests all kinds of crazy Toon names.

Teleporting
The act of teleporting is necessary to get around quickly. Toontown makes the act whimsical by using portable holes. Toons pull a portable hole out of their pockets, jump in, and pop out another hole at their destination.

If you found this post interesting you should checkout the full article in the book MMP Game Development.