Hi everyone, welcome to the first installment of the HinterWars development team blog where we hope to give you an insight into our work and the evolution of the game as we take it from idea to reality.

Let’s start by talking the unique nature of this beast. HinterWars has been billed as an MMOG for mobiles phone and PCs, but I’d like to provide a little more detail here.

We are aware of other approaches where the main bulk of the game world is accessible only on the PC and the mobile client basically exposes a small portion of that world to the mobile player.

What we are trying to provide here is probably the world’s first seamless gameplay experience across two very distinct platforms. That means regardless of whether you are playing the game via a mobile handset or a PC, every single element of the experience is available to you, in real-time.

In order to meet this goal, we’ve had to make some very interesting game design decisions which we will get into in the coming updates.

And having said that much, it’s time to get back to working on the game itself. Stay tuned for the next update, where I’ll point out how in some ways an MMOG on a mobile phone is a paradox.

Victor Ho
Technical Manager
Activate Interactive

	HinterWars Blog 2_19 July 2005

Hi everyone, we are back for another update.

When we began designing this MMOG to provide seamless gameplay between mobiles phones and PCs, my first thoughts were about how the uniqueness of the mobile platform would affect the player’s experience.

Think about the conventional design of an MMORPG for a second, it almost seems to go against the grain of conventional wisdom of how to design a mobile game.

Think about it….

Mobile phones as game platforms are greatly limited in storage capacity. MMORPGs however boast data sizes several magnitudes over normal PC titles.

Games that are played on a mobile phone are designed for what we term low player commitment. This means games designed for mobile phones need to provide the player with a rewarding experience in the space of 2 to 3 minutes, that’s about all the time a player can commit to the game before his bus comes, his date arrives or he’s reached his stop. MMORPGs on the other hand provide for extremely long hours of play, allowing the players to spend hours on end exploring the depths of what the game world has to offer.

While the differences are more than a little challenging to reconcile design wise, to say the least, there is one synergistic element to this cross-platform concept that makes this project irresistible to both the team and to a lot of MMOG fans as well.

That element is connectivity.

The game never leaves you. Imagine being able to connect to the game and advance your progress while on the move. For hard core players out that, play time has now been extended. For those of you who’ve never had the time to get into an MMOG, it’s now going to be possible….

This entry is getting a bit long, so I leave off here. Next time, I’ll touch on some of the design decisions we made and how they serve to reconcile the differences I mentioned earlier and in the process, I’ll mostly likely end up giving you a peek at what playing Hinterwars is like.

Until then…

	HinterWars Blog 3_10 Aug 2005

When we last left off, I was talking about the connectivity element being a key distinguishing feature of HinterWars. This time round let’s talk about some of the design issues we’ve to solve in our design.

The first problems we tackled were those of the mobile platform’s hardware limitations. Limited memory, storage and bandwidth are chief concerns since these three aspects are fully exploited on the PC to give the vast worlds and epic experience that are the staple, as well as distinguishing factor of the MMORPG genre.

So after a lot of head scratching, here are what we eventually came out with:

The HinterWars game world is divided into zones that we call colonies, and players will move between zones to interact with each other. We intentionally keep the number of players-per-zone low for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the amount of player and zone data can be kept to a manageable size. Secondly, the amount of data that needs to be sent over the network is also reduced. Thirdly, the player will feel less overwhelmed while trying to keep up with interactions occurring within the zone.

Limited bandwidth also affected our design of HinterWars’ combat gameplay. Combat is one of the main aspects of the game experience since it is through combat that the players reap rewards that allow them to progress further with the game. And since it’s such an essential part of the game, we didn’t want limited and sometimes unavailable bandwidth to mar a player’s fun.

There’s nothing more frustrating as playing a masterful game only to be defeated by a lag or a lousy connection. It kills immersion and frustrates the player no end because he’s been presented with a problem that no amount of skillful gameplay can remedy.

To this end, we made our combat turn-based and aimed to make skill play out in the dimensions of tactics rather than twitch reflex.

So now we’ve got a design that addresses the memory and bandwidth limitations. Storage limitations of the mobile platform, on the other hand, continue to be a problem we have to contend for the rest of project. We are pushing the envelope and trying to be real smart about where and how we store our data, but it’s still something we keep at the back of our minds as we progress with the game development.

And that’s the first bunch of issues we worked through and that’s also all the time and space for this entry. Next time I’ll carry on with description of how we hope to get around the low commitment level on the mobile platform.

	HinterWars Blog 4_2 Sep 2005

The design concepts I’ll be musing on today take a little more than the space of a single blog entry to expound on, so what follows might seem conceptually sketchy. You been forewarned!

When people are on the move, the dynamics of their entertainment is very different from what they might do when lounging around at home. Their attention span is short, subjected to a large variety of distractions. Their bus came, they reached the head of the taxi queue, an incoming call, well you get the idea.

So how do we ensure that they can still enjoy a game like HinterWars while on the move? The main problem we are basically trying to solve is the impact of player distraction, and we did two things to address this problem.

First of all, we’ve kept all the play areas spatially small. That means no crossing of vast landscapes to get from one point to another. What we’ve essentially done here is make it easy for people to get into the game, so even if you’ve got only 10 minutes to spare, you could be in the thick of combat two minutes into the game.

Secondly, as mentioned in our previous blog entry, we’ve gone with turn based combat. This decision also works into helping to make the game more forgiving towards players who get easily distracted. If you find yourself interrupted while facing off with some monsters, the game will simply stop at your turn and wait for you to continue from where you left off. This would not be possible if we had gone with a real time type twitch game approach to combat.

There is still a caveat of course. In a multiplayer game where everyone takes turns, waiting on someone’s turn for duration longer than normal can get boring very quickly. To get around this, each combat turn in HinterWars has a time limit, so that no one person “hijacks” the game by holding on their turn. The downside is that you could have a legitimate interruption outside the game, and if it lasts too long, the game still does continue without you.

Game design is a series of trade-offs, and in this case we decided that helping the majority of the players in combat to have an enjoyable experience outweighed the need to be completely tolerant of players who get called away from the game.

I hope to show other examples of game design trade-offs in future entries of this blog.