watching paint dry...in the desert!

[quarrel]

The internet makes it hard to make games hard. Walkthroughs, FAQs, and Q&A forums are only an Alt-Tab away. One of the biggest wikis in the world is dedicated to one game. Players are tempted to look up solutions at the slightest roadbump.

I have to admit something. I don't really like when players can just look up an answer. Much of that is projection. As a player, I know how satisfying it is to figure something out. So as a designer, I know I put a challenge there for a reason (which may very well be to give you the satisfaction of figuring something out). But I also know, as a human, how frustrating it is to be stuck on something you can't solve and how habit-forming it can be to take the easy way out. So I keep one eye open for ways to create challenges that don't permanently and completely halt your progress until you overcome them, but that you can't skip past with thirty seconds and a browser window either.

A Tale in the Desert is an MMORPG focused on the seemingly unrelated subjects of social competition and crafting. A major aspect of the game is reverse-engineering a wide assortment of harvesting and manufacturing mechanisms — when crops produce extra seeds, what governs mining yields, which combinations of culinary ingredients cook into useful stat-boosting meals, and so on. Obscure mechanics are a stand-in for the mysterious workings of the real world at the dawn of human history. Lack of formal documentation and the deliberate reconfiguring of fundamental rules every year and a half require players to make a coordinated effort just to figure out how most of the game works. It's a parallel to how primitive technologies formed and how knowledge of them spread.

So how does a game that relies on players sharing information avoid being trivialized by everyone looking up answers in a wiki? The main method, by far, is tying crafting to minigames that reward skill with more or better items. Gemcutting involves shaving slices off the ends and edges of a raw 3D gem embedded with complex random holes, looking for a usable solid shape somewhere in the interior. Glassmaking requires maintaining a furnace's temperature within a workable range by adjusting airflow and adding charcoal in realtime. A website can give strategy suggestions but not step-by-step solutions.

Another technique is random differences between characters that render universal solutions impossible. Paint mixing takes this approach. The core mechanics are the sort of thing that can just be looked up on a wiki and used by anyone. There are about a dozen standard pigment ingredients, each with fixed red/green/blue values in the 0 to 255 range. Combine enough pigments and you make paint with an RGB value that's a weighted average of its ingredients'. That's fine for colors with moderate RGB values, but it's mathematically impossible to make something like pure blue paint that way unless one of the pigments is pure (0, 0, 255) blue to begin with; you can't average a bunch of midrange values to get one on the edge.

That's where the clever part comes in. Some pairs of ingredients interact in additional ways. For example, mixing carrot juice (a light orange pigment) and cabbage juice (a dark purple pigment) might cause an unexpected rise or drop in green in addition to the predicted orange/purple blending. If you gathered enough data on your reactions and you weren't unlucky, you could devise a custom recipe that blended to a low red, low green, and high blue value and also accumulated several red and green penalties and blue bonuses. It would be your own personal pure blue recipe.

The result is interesting. Everyone can mix most of the game's possible paint colors, but only someone who experiments and takes detailed notes on his personal reactions can make all of them. He couldn't use someone else's work. That's a comfortable middle ground between everyone looking up all the answers and a global barrier to entry at square one. A person who knows his reactions may also discover he and he alone has an alternate method of mixing a common paint color from cheaper ingredients. That can be huge in a game with so much crafting and trading.

Variations in ingredient availability add a second layer of nonuniformity to paint recipes. Cabbage and carrot juice are easy pigments to make, but mushrooms grow only in temporary random patches between certain hours of the game's day/night cycle (and only two varieties out of dozens can be used as pigments), and powdered silver requires a silver mine (rare) and a barrel grinder (requires four to fifteen players working together to operate and a full replacement of all its oiled leather parts after each batch). And then there's red sand. Sand is literally cheaper than dirt in ATitD; if you're standing on it, you can pick up an arbitrarily large amount in zero time with no tools. But red sand only occurs in a single patch about 100' square in a game world dozens of miles to a side, and it's not weightless. Where a character lived, what his player liked to do (or what he was good at, which isn't the same thing), and how big his guild was could all make a prefab paint recipe useless or wastefully inefficient.