It’s a couple of weeks later, though, and I don’t seem to be stop playing; so I figure I might as well talk about it now while I have some slight chance of convincing y’all to join me in game and trade with me! (I could particularly use a good source of iron…)

So, what’s in the game? The basis is, of course, familiar since (before) FarmVille: in particular, building on your land to be able to produce is a big theme. There’s a wider range of types of production than in earlier games in the genre: Social City was where I first saw the population => money => happiness => population cycle, and Empires & Allies throws more into the mix. (I’m trying to remember how CityVille was in that regard: my guess is that it falls somewhere between Social City and Empires & Allies, and in particular it’s where I first saw government buildings in the role that they play here.) The relations between buildings are:

• Farms produce coins.
• Other production buildings let you convert coins into resources: wood, oil, and one kind of ore.
• Military buildings let you convert coins, oil, and (frequently) ore into military units.
• There’s a research building that lets you add powers to your military units.
• Buildings cost coins and wood to build; once you get to higher levels, they cost ore as well.
• Production buildings are unlocked through population; population buildings are unlocked through level.
• Your population is determined by your housing buildings. These also produce coins, but not as much coins as farms.
• Your production cap is determined by your government buildings. These are neighbor-gated, and also produce (decent) amounts of coins.
• The market lets you trade for forms of ore that you can’t produce yourself.

That’s a lot of building types! Unlike the Social City example above, it’s also not a cycle: instead, you have a population growth pattern that’s gated by neighbors and a military growth pattern that goes from farms through production buildings to military buildings. And, in both cases, ore plays a role, including ores that can most easily be acquired through trade.

The flip side of the variety of types of buildings: the functional importance of the different types of buildings means that there’s not much scope for personalization. When playing Social City, I really enjoyed designing my city; that level of personalization is completely absent here. (There’s not even the shop naming for personalization that CityVille had.) Which is fine, even good: it’s a different sort of game, with a different focus.

Back to that last building mentioned above: markets. I’ve seen them in other Facebook games before, certainly: Verdonia had them, for example (and I can’t imagine that that game’s implementation of markets was original to it, the game was quite derivative), City of Wonder added them eventually, and so forth. But ores in Empires & Allies give them a different feel: while you can trade lots of different resources in your markets, there’s one specific class of resources that you can get much more easily through markets than through anything else.

So ores are a Treasure Isle-style resource mechanic, but requiring a different kind of action than either simply visiting friends’ towns or having them actively give you gifts. Which turns out to work well for me: I like it more than Treasure Isle‘s mechanism (admittedly, I only played that game a little bit, and did so a long time after launch), and I like it more than unfocused markets. (Not that a game about markets couldn’t be cool; actually, given the employment of economists by Facebook game companies, I’m surprised there aren’t more such games, I was lobbying for more markets ever since the GDC 2010 Habbo Hotel talk…)

Though ores are also much more muted than Treasure Isle style exclusive goods, in that you can buy them for coins. It’s more expensive to do that than to get them from your friends, and it took me a while to discover that option, but it’s there.

In fact, I actually haven’t found anything yet that you need friends or hard cash (i.e. currency that you have to spend real money on) to get, though I’m sure it’s there somewhere. Most building games have used neighbor gating for expansions; in Empires & Allies, however, you buy expansions with coins and through a special item. You can get that special item from your friends, but you also get that special item from battles; so every ten battles that you win lets you get an expansion. (At least as of now, they may of course tweak the balance later; incidentally, the expansions are the CityVille-style “buy a chunk of land adjacent to your current territory” expansions as opposed to the previously popular “your territory expands by 1 on all four sides”.)

Another way in which games like this have used neighbor gating is in population growth. And here, you need to hire friends to run your government buildings. But even there, it’s not so simple: if you leave a post in a government building unstaffed for long enough, eventually an in-game character will fill that post. So yeah, it takes longer to expand if you don’t have friends and don’t spend hard cash, but it’s not prohibitive.

There is some amount of neighbor gating in combat: eventually, you run into battles that you need allies to help you fight in, and the proportion of such battles and the number of allies rises. So it would be difficult to play the game if you didn’t have any friends playing it at all; assuming you have a few, though, you’re as likely to not be able to fight more battles because you’ve run out of energy as because you’ve run out of friends for the day.

Speaking of combat: the style and use of combat in this game is new to me and kind of fun. It shows up on a screen that looks reminiscent of individual Advance Wars battles (though without the surrounding troop movement of that game), with a rock-paper-scissors mechanic underlying it. It turns out to be more simplified than it looks, however: at any give moment only one unit is attacking the other side, so you don’t have as many tactical possibilities as there might seem.

Still, there are definitely some tactical considerations beyond the obvious ones of making sure you’re on top on the rock-paper-scissors chain: figuring out how to weight your units once you’ve picked the overall mix, figuring out whether to put out older, less powerful units as sacrificial lambs or to only use newer units. And then there are power-ups which you can spend hard cash on; I have yet to need them, though, but maybe I’ll have to as the battles go on? (It looks like I’m about a third of the way through the currently available battles.) It ends up being a surprisingly pleasant form of combat, one which I’m enjoying more than in any Facebook RPG that I can think of. (Though, don’t get me wrong, this is clearly still a Facebook game, which I’m totally fine with.)

And, as I mentioned above, more powerful units require ores, bringing that mechanic into play. I also just encountered a different upgrade mechanism, involving blueprints that you can send to your friends; I think that it was just added to the game today, because I didn’t level up or unlock it in any other obvious way? I’m not sure, I’ll need to explore more.

Combat also turns into a friend mechanic in another way: you can both invade your friends and protect your friends from invasion! Which I haven’t done too much, but it sounds like a potentially good idea; my guess is that they also see that as a potentially significant source of revenue.

And there are other Zynga / Facebook standbys, which I think of as coming from FrontierVille. The game is pretty dooberiffic; normally, they annoy me, but for whatever reason I’m finding them fine in this game. Maybe that’s because I’ve found the money bonus for collecting them useful at times (you don’t have to click on them if you don’t want to, but you get a bonus if you click on a long sequence of them); but I think a big part of that is that it works well with the rhythm of combat, where you alternate between attacking enemies and collecting doobers, trying to space your doober collection such that you don’t have long enough gaps to miss out on the bonus.

And, also like FrontierVille, you always have four or five externally-given tasks to work on. (Though they don’t have the same narrative as in FrontierVille.) Which is great, it’s good to have the game pointing out reasonable actions that I could take, and nudging me to keep my economy reasonably level.

I think that’s everything. Well, doubtless not everything, but it’s a lot! Now that I’ve said all of that, I have two questions.

The first is: where is Zynga making their money from this game? (Or hoping to make their money.) It’s newly launched, so it’s possible that they simply aren’t focused on money now, but instead want to bump up the audience. Still, there’s only so much you can do to tweak the economy of a game in a money-making fashion without getting people mad, so I’d be a little surprised if they changed too many of the existing parameters in that regard. (Adding new money-focused mechanics wouldn’t surprise me at all, however.)

And, as I said above, I’ve been very surprised at how little gating there is, whether on neighbors or hard currency. There are lots of situations where other games would require me to pay money or spam my friends or do without where this game seems happy enough to let me progress through my in-game actions, possibly while waiting a bit.

So, of course, that’s part of the answer: as always, if you’re impatient, you’ll need to make money to progress faster. And it’s possible that will hit me at some point: e.g. a couple of minutes ago I took a break from writing and went back to the game to fight a couple of battles, and I would have fought a couple more if I hadn’t run out of friends that I could use as allies today. (And I imagine I’ll need more allies as I get further through the battle sequence.)

My guess is that they’re hoping/expecting combat between friends to be a big driver of currency: people want to level up their units to win battles, and maybe spend money to get special attacks or to revive troops. It’s typically thought that games with lots of player-versus-player combat make money disproportionately to their user base, so I imagine that’s a lot of the thinking here.

And it may be the case that, as I need more upgrades to fight harder battles, it will become harder and harder to earn them strictly through in-game actions. We’ll see.

The other question I have is: how much do I actually like the game? Clearly Zynga (and the industry as a whole, of course) is finding ways to throw more elements into their games in a not unpleasing fashion. I had a good time playing CityVille for a couple of weeks; eventually, though, I’d seen enough of the mechanics and wasn’t finding any hook in the game to make me want to keep on clicking to rehash those mechanics. (Similarly with Ravenwood Fair.)

And I’m sure I’ll hit a wall like that with Empires & Allies, too. Heck, for all I know I’ll hit a wall like that tomorrow: some day I’ll realize that I’ve spent too much time in the evening clicking or thinking about clicking, for no particular gain. In particular, I’m not finding the game to be intrinsically rewarding in the way that building my city in Social City was; and I also don’t like the core game play as much as I like the core game play in, say, Gardens of Time.

But I like the core game play somewhat, at least: the combat is pleasantly soothing in the way an easy puzzle game or form of solitaire can be. And the volume of other mechanics that the game provides adds up to something that is still keeping me going, too.

If you’re curious, give it a try, I’d be interested to see what my non-Facebook-game-playing friends think. And if you have access to iron ore, all the better, I’d like to buy it off of you.

In particular, we’ve taken care of a ridiculous amount of house stuff. Earlier this year, we got the only major bit of planned house work taken care of, namely fixing our front door / steps. (And that was before the GTD implementation changes.) But there were a lot of small items to take care of, too, items that had been bugging me for months (some of them for years, actually).

So, when I looked at those items, I decided that yes, they really were high enough priority for me to keep them on my Next Action list. The result was that, within half a week, I’d made a phone call to kick off getting non-plumbing house items taken care of; and as soon as that was done, I made another phone call to start dealing with the plumbing. The upshot:

• Our dryer is no longer blowing lint into our crawl space.
• We are no longer being driven crazy by flickering lights in the kitchen.
• Two towel racks and a rag hook are now firmly attached to the wall.
• Two sinks have working drain catches.
• The showers are all regulating their heat properly.
• The upstairs toilet doesn’t drip. (I can’t take (almost) any credit for that one, though, it was all Liesl’s doing.)

Which is great! And the best thing is: it was really easy. All I had to do was decide that these tasks were important: I actually already had phone numbers for people to call. In one of the cases (the non-plumbing case, I’d already used the plumber in question twice before), I wasn’t sure that he was the right person for the job, but that worked out great. Which means that it will be even easier for us to take care of this sort of thing in the future: in particular, in a couple of years we’re probably going to do some kitchen work, and now we know whom to call when we decide to think seriously about that. Obviously it would have been harder if I hadn’t already had an idea of whom to call, but still, the same principal applies: decide that something’s important, figure out the next step to make progress towards it, and do it.

So, with the house work out of the way, what next? I’m actually working on a few too many things right now: each of Rock Band 3 and Minecraft is taking up rather more time than I’m used to spending on a single video game, I’m going through a book on iOS programming, and I’m reading about CoffeeScript and using it to write a bare-bones game framework for a project that Miranda and I are vaguely working on. And those are all substantial enough that it’s hard to make progress on all of them.

So I should wind them down. Rock Band 3 is far too rewarding for me to want to stop it now—I’m just getting to where I’m actually learning to play guitar!—so I think I’ll keep going with in for the indefinite future. (And, honestly, given that I’ve been playing one Rock Band game or another for three and a half years straight, why stop now?) And the game project with Miranda is the most potentially rewarding of anything on the list, so I’ll keep on going with that.

I don’t have as much active energy to write iOS software now as I did two or three months ago, however; so, while I plan to finish going through that book, I probably won’t actually do anything concrete with that knowledge in the short term. And, as much as I love Minecraft, I may be starting to reach a point of diminishing rewards, so it may be the case that, after finishing my train stations, I’ll give that game a pause, too.

Or maybe not! Who knows, maybe at some point over the summer somebody will come up with a great iPad game proposal to work on with me, and I’ll dive into that; or maybe the Minecraft railroad work will suggest further projects that I have to build. I suppose it’s even possible that I’ll get frustrated with Rock Band Pro Guitar and give up on it in a month or two. All I’m committing to is what I’m doing in the short term, and I’m planning to keep all four of those strands going for the next few weeks; after that, all bets are off.

At any rate: yay for limiting (and being honest about!) work in progress.

Deep Realms

Deep Realms is Playdom’s most recent RPG. And it’s quite different from the vast majority of Facebook RPGs: most entries in the genre have little to explore and give you almost no control over your actions (other than player-vs-player combat): either you have the items necessary to perform an action or you don’t. Deep Realms, in contrast, is a dungeon crawler where you take more of an active role in exploring the terrain (similar to Treasure Isle in that regard), and where you’ve got some amount of customization in terms of weapons/armor, leveling up, and abilities. (Plus a bit of a plot, too.)

I’m not used to playing a Facebook game where I spend a bit of time calculating probabilities of different chains of attacks, but I sometimes do that when playing Deep Realms. (Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to, but the option is there.) And there’s an interesting gesture at an asynchronous party system, where you do better if you have friends playing the other four classes who send you gifts regularly; not exactly a rich party system, but better than the gifts in most games, I suppose. Certainly my first play session was rather interesting.

The pacing, however, doesn’t work for me at all. In the first session, they give you enough energy to make it through the first dungeon (which actually was almost too long); I’ve played it several times since then, however, and I haven’t made it to the end of the second dungeon yet. Which would be okay if I were enjoying the dungeon crawling itself a bit more than I am; as is, it’s okay, but, well, I’d rather be writing blog posts or something most of the time when I’m at a computer at home. I’d definitely be playing it more if I could dip into it several times during a day (clearly my former coworkers are playing it a ton, judging from the volume of gift requests I get), but that’s not how my Facebook game usage works now; and, even with that, I wish I made more progress during individual sessions. Also, the pricing is screwed up: I’m all for asking users to pay for your game, but Playdom is asking basically a buck a pop each time you want to extend your play session, and I’m not getting enough out of the play sessions to want to be doing that. (Playdom’s insistence on going through its own in-game currency doesn’t help either.)

I’m glad the game exists, and maybe with tuning I’ll like it more. Though even with that, who knows how many users it will attract: it doesn’t seem to be geared at the mainstream Facebook audience at all. (On which note, I appreciate its flaunting current Facebook convention in not having any space to decorate. Not that it’s avoided all Facebook conventions: it’s quite dooberiffic, and collections are there too.)

Gardens of Time

Gardens of Time is also a Playdom game, a hidden object one. Which I’m actually finding a surprising amount of fun! Hidden object games aren’t exactly the richest of genres; but they’re a perfectly pleasant way to spend a few minutes, this one has nice art, a couple of variants on the core gameplay, and well done hint and scoring systems. Unlike Deep Realms, also, they got the pacing just right: you can do six puzzles in a session, plus a few more if you have lots of friends playing the game, and that’s a perfectly nice bite-size chunk of gameplay. The per-puzzle friend leaderboards work well, and it’s also a game that Miranda and I enjoy playing together.

It does have a decorative space, which I have mixed feelings about. It makes sense in the context of the game to be decorating your own garden with items from those time period; and they use decoration as the gating factor for opening up new levels, which is probably better than having them opened by, say, some sort of direct point value mechanism. Or maybe not: the problem is that you can be in a situation where you like the way your garden looks but don’t have enough points to open up the next puzzle, so you end up stuffing your garden with decorations that you don’t want. So I’m not convinced that they’ve gotten that balance entirely right, but still, it’s not too obtrusive.

Or, of course, you can open up puzzles by paying for them; and one sixth of the puzzles can only be unlocked by paying for them. Which I actually think is great: there’s nothing special about those puzzles, so you’re not losing anything at all by giving them a pass; but if you do decide you want to unlock them, you can do so permanently for around a couple of bucks per puzzle, which seems eminently reasonable. (Or fifty cents for unlocking a puzzle that you don’t want to unlock by decoration, which is also fine.) My only gripe there is, again, Playdom’s insistence on inserting its own in-game currency in the middle: you can’t buy exactly what you want using Facebook credits, you have to instead spend too much money. I would be perfectly happy if Facebook were to prevent companies from doing that: as a game player, I far prefer having as few different layers of currency between myself and things that I want to buy.

In contrast Deep Realms, Gardens of Time is apparently quite popular, and I’m not at all surprised. (Of course, who knows how much ad spend is affecting that, but I’m sure Playdom isn’t spending ad money blindly.) Incidentally, Tami Baribeau wrote a post contrasting the two games as well.

Little Cave Hero

Little Cave Hero is by a company named Atakama Labs that I’d never heard of, and I think it’s totally charming. I like the pixelated art style, I like the way that it takes the same sort of tile-based dungeon exploration that Deep Realms and Treasure Isle have (without the combat of the former) but somehow manages to give it a more puzzle feel instead of a pure clicky grind feel. (And the pacing works better for me than Deep Realms: sessions are short, but you can clear half a dungeon in one, and I’m happy to do without the combat.) And I like the goals that the technology tree gives you, figuring out how to manage your resources to get better tools to let you explore more effectively. And the mayor in the game is mildly amusing, and if you’re feeling creative, there’s even a pixel art tool that you can use to build objects to decorate your own town with!

Right now, it only has a tiny userbase; not sure if they’re not advertising at all or if it’s not to the taste of most of Facebook’s audience or what. Hmm, looking at the developer’s home page, they also did Terranova—I was rather into that one until the crop spoilage got to me. And they did the iPhone version of Today I Die? Clearly I should be paying more attention to these guys. And of the games mentioned here, my guess is that this one is most to the taste of readers of my blog: please do give it a try (and send me a neighbor request in game!), small developers that are doing something a bit different deserve our support!