Game Development: Player Design Control

Today I wanted address some of our plans and ideas for including player input while maintaining prudence and suitability.  We firmly believe that player input as a whole is necessary to guiding design decisions; because as much as we are building a game that we love, we want the players to love it too.

However, being of sound mind and prudent judgment, we want to avoid a Boaty McBoatface or TayTweets scenarios where the internet trolls come out in force in order to trivialize populist initiatives such as this.  So, as you might imagine, we will not be giving players complete control of the direction of our game.

We have put a considerable amount of thought into this problem and presently have three major solution archetypes.

1. Structured Voting Application: Something akin to what Game2Gether at Amplitude Studios has done with their voting process, where the developers choose all of the voting choices and the players vote for it.

While this structure has promise and is a sure way to avoid issues, we also want to avoid creating an overly controlling referendum-type issue.

 (To any Russian readers, this is a gag meme and not reflective of reality.)

The structured voting application also fails to tap into the infinite creativity of players and leverage that to make new and innovative mechanics.  While I am confident in our team, there are only four of us and there will be thousands to millions of players.  The likelihood of a player having a brilliant idea is considerably higher than the likelihood of one of us having the same idea.

2. Voting Shares Experience Application: The second archetype that we came up with is a share-based voting system where everyone who has a verified email gets one vote, while people with accrued playtime will get additional votes.  This system could either be structured or unstructured as far as voting options are concerned.  This would allow more experienced and loyal players with seniority to have a greater say in the direction of the game, while still allowing new players to have input.  This system has more flexibility also in that we can reward people for reading the forums or blogging about FATES.  I hate to include Twitch in this list, but there are apparently Twitch chess channels.

3. Up-Down Voting Shares Application: The third paradigm that we considered is a Reddit- or StackOverflow-like system where you get both up-votes and down votes.  This system would be unstructured and allow anyone to input suggested developments, while still allowing for people to knock down silly ideas.   We would use a voting share system with this one also, likely in order to give active, long-time players more say into the direction of the game that they love.

We will probably end up using all three of these voting systems at various times during development, starting with the Structured Voting Application in alpha phases where to ambiguity of on the part of players is high and slowly migrating to an Up-Down Voting Share application when we are fully established and have a player base.

All of this will be subject to testing and development as we move forward though, but these are some of the ideas that we have been tossing around behind the scenes.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.

Pace of FATES

The pace of a game plays into a lot of factors, and today I wanted to briefly discuss the pacing of FATES.  The pace of the game describes how quickly or slowly the game plays out.  The pace determines how tense the game is or how much thought can be put into playing it.  Many games are very fast-paced and require reaction more than proactive thought and strategy and FATES will fall very much into the proactive thought and strategy category.

FATES should, if our design plays out appropriately, play like a very expansive, very convoluted version of chess.  Most of the major players will be federations each vying for territory and influence in the Galactic Council and economic arenas, however there will likely be a whole host of smaller federations and single players who will fill the gaps in between the large factions potentially even serving as strategic buffers between major powers or even as mediators.

From server initialisation until someone wins should take around 6 months to 1 year, although there are parameters in place that can be tweaked to modify the pacing of the game.  This should produce a pacing appropriate for both busy people who can only devote a few minutes a day to playing and the retired or other people with copious amounts of free time to play.  Players will have plenty of time to consider moves and counter-moves and the only wrinkle that is presently foreseen is the timezone issue, where you have players who can execute actions during night time for other timezones thus limiting the response times for certain players.  We have been tossing around ideas such as standing substitutes and war masters for federations, but nothing is decided yet on whether this issue needs to be addressed or how.

The goals of the alpha and betas tests will preclude a long duration game and thus the pacing will be modified such that alpha and beta games (except for open beta) develop much more quickly and reaction time will be significantly less due to testing constraints.

All of this will be subject to testing and user feedback however.

Later, I will be ready to discuss our plans for how we make use of user feedback and how we will collect it.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.

Startups and Passion

So, I am going to take a random dive off to left field this week, and discuss some of the challenges that our company has faced throughout its existence and thank the solid team that has forded ahead regardless.

I have had people ask me, "How are you surviving?"  I work.  Connor works.  Adam works. Amy works.  This company is our passion.  We are all pouring time and energy into it on the side of our self-supporting careers.  So, that alone shows you the dedication of our team.

It has always been like this though.

Starting new companies is always a precarious endeavour.  We are always teetering on the precipice of going under and only by sheer force of will and magnitude of talent have we survived and continue to survive.

This is a tribute post to our development team, Amy, Connor, and Adam.

These individuals have made this project possible so far, and I wanted to stop for a moment in the developer's blog and say thanks.  Because without their dedication this game would not even be a shade of what it is already.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.

Determinism and Gaming

Determinism, or the belief that everything is calculable according to mathematics, is a prevailing viewpoint in modern Western humanist philosophy.  People like determinism because it is predictable.  It allows people to feel like they can control the universe.  This feeling of control makes them feel more confident of future outcomes and thus better able to deal with abstract circumstances.

Most games are deterministic, at least on some level.  Determinism in games implies that the use of pseudo-random number generators (PRNG) is minimal.  It means that when you attack the same problem with the same solution you will always get the same result.  This plays into players' expectations and behavior in that they will typically only move when they know they will win.  For some games this is a positive trait to breed into players, while in others it produces boredom and monotony.  In the case of an MMO, the inherent irrationality of players produces some randomness, regardless of whether the game itself is deterministic or not, so the need for non-determinism is less necessary.  For FATES, most of this game will be deterministic.  If you build a farm on a given planet multiple times, it will produce the same amount of food for a given employment and power level.  If you design a starship, it will cost the same amount of resources (excepting currency) to produce every single variant of that starship design.

However, determinism is boring.  It also doesn't allow us to experiment in the fields of artificial intelligence and statistical system control, and part of the reason for the existence of our company is to allow us to provide funds for our team to improve their knowledge of every area that interests them.  So, in FATES, there will be a number of non-deterministic pieces.  For alpha, there will be no non-deterministic features, because that makes debugging significantly harder, and we want to produce a bug-free game for trustworthy alpha testing.  However, by the beta phases, we will be introducing a non-deterministic engine into the combat mechanics.  This is the 'black swan' event generator that I described in the combat mechanics post earlier.  This event generator will fundamentally rely on a pseudo-random number generator with a low-probability, high-impact outcome to randomly modify the combat losses on both side to redetermine the outcome.  This will add some non-determinism to the game, and make it more interesting.

For now, the combat mechanic event generator is the only planned non-deterministic feature.  I expect that the markets and diplomacy will exhibit non-deterministic behavior simply because people and their choices are deeply involved, but these will not be possessed of non-deterministic design.

Hopefully, this improves your understanding of the role of fundamental philosophy in game design and allows you more insight into our design decisions going forward.

Until next time.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.

Culture, Sway, and Discord

The economics of FATES has already been addressed, but I wanted to address in more detail the non-combat mechanics for changing planetary ownership.  The three primary factors in determining civic planetary ownership are culture, sway, and discord.

Culture, in FATES, is an abstract representation for the racial properties of a given player's populace.  Racial properties such as individualistic, industriousness, taxonomy, and subterranean dictate what types of planets that player empires can colonise and how their populace grow and develop.  Since the culture is both a physical and abstract property, players will have the option of eventually ending up with mixed culture empires, or they can maintain the cultural purity of their own racial archetype.  Each option will present opportunities and challenges.  If the player pursues a multicultural strategy, they will suffer from increased discord on planets not in line with the dominant culture in the empire due to sheer cultural differences.  However, one also gains the benefits of additional culture's positive and negative attributes at those same planets.  Player's who retain cultural purity will have much less discord to deal with due to uniformity of thought and action, but they also lose access to any of the traits from foreign cultures.  As a physical property, players will also be able to trade planets or colony ships with your particular culture to other players in order to allow them to colonise non-optimal planet types in their region of space.

The discord factor, mentioned briefly before, is a key game mechanic that allows planets to change allegiance between various player empires in the game.  Discord is a measurement of a planetary population's unhappiness with the current regime.  The discord exists to enable non-military options for transferring planetary ownership in lieu of raw military invasion and takeover.  The discord is tracked as a whole number ranging from zero to one hundred.  The discord matters most significantly when it exceeds 80, since that is when a planet will officially begin a revolt to divorce itself from the present owner.  When the discord on a given planet reaches 90, the planet will swap allegiance to the next highest sway player empire and significantly reduce the discord to give that player a chance to stabilize the political situation on their newly acquired planet.  The factors that get fed into the discord number include things like taxation rate, food rations, proximity to allied and friendly planets, presence of allied or friendly troops or fleets, presence of allied or friendly counter-intelligence officers, presence of subversion agents, sway divergences, economic prosperity, unemployment, and military conflicts taking place near or at the planet.  All of these factors will play into a planet's discord and thus into the ability of enemies to flip planets' allegiances.  The discord will also play into tax compliance, with the tax compliance decreasing as the discord exceeds 40.

The prime determining factor when a planet changes allegiance due to revolt is sway.  The sway is a measure of the relative cultural and political influence of a given player empire on a given planet.  The sway exists to incentivise territoriality by increasing the difficulty of maintaining far flung colonies away from a player's main territory.  The sway is calculated at every point in space and radiates out from each planet that a player owns decreasing exponentially with distance.  The sway values for each planet will overlap creating increased sway within a player's territory and making lone colonisation efforts difficult for enemies.  This should encourage player's to keep their territory as contiguous as possible and prevent enemies from dropping hostile colonies into the middle of any given player or federation's territory.  The sway divergence, as a factor in the discord, will eventually cause such a lone planet to revolt and join the dominant empire of the area, unless it is supported by significant military forces to enforce law and order of the enemy empire.  One of the properties of a federation, with regard to sway, is collectivised sway values that operate at a multiplier for all federation members.  The amplified federation sway will help to maintain order within a federation and disincentivise players, especially key members, from leaving a federation.  If a player is deep within a federation's territory and leaves the federation, their planets on the borders will suffer from increased discord, potentially revolting from them and joining the nearest federation member.

All of these factors should allow the non-military player to wield leverage over militaristic players, and help them to compete on par with the military play style paradigm players.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out

Play Style Paradigms

As with all 4x games, FATES: Carpe Moerae will support the orthodox military strategy of domination by raw force, however I want to address in more detail some of the other play style paradigms that FATES: Carpe Moerae will be designed to support.  In many 4x games , the non-military paradigms are often papered over and released with little strategic depth, and this is an area where FATES: Carpe Moerae is being designed to shine.

The first paradigm that FATES will be designed to support is the economic powerhouse player.

This empire will be the financier of the galaxy and will be first and foremost marked by excellent management of their fiat currency to be the most valuable fiat currency in the galaxy.  A single unit of this player's currency will buy hundreds to thousands of other player's money, allowing them to finance wars and buy and sell favors for pennies on the dollar.  This paradigm will also be marked by extensive trading of resources and other player's sovereign bonds in order to create and retain leverage over every other major power player in the galaxy.  The support of this player will mean a sure path to victory for their allies or minions and ample resources for waging galaxy spanning wars.  However, following a purely economic power broker paradigm will force reliance on others for raw security where economic leverage alone fails.  This paradigm will be well integrated into the galactic system, possessed of immense resource storage and shipping capacity, and well-ingrained into the political wrangling in the galaxy.  These players will be the Rothschild family of the galaxy, always in the backdrop pulling strings and financing allies and enemies alike to achieve their own or their federation's ends.

The next paradigm that FATES will be designed to support is the Mr. Universe player.

This paradigm will be marked by extensive intelligence capabilities allowing this player to be the closest thing to omniscience that will exist in the galaxy.  This player will know everything that goes on.  All of the backroom deals, troop deployments, fleet movements, dossiers on every governor, admiral, and player in the galaxy, and a myriad of other useful and salable information.  The juiciest bits and bytes of galactic gossip will be available for the right price.  However, this paradigm will go well beyond simply information.  Need an admiral assassinated just prior to a crucial battle?  A somnambulant public awoken to rebel against the newly minted tyrannical image?  Sabotaging that pesky hypergate ferrying your enemy's armadas to your front door?  The legion of agents at this player's disposal will make all of these actions possible to well-financed buyers.  The line between shadow and truth will be adroitly walked and yield profitable returns for elegant and silent solutions to pesky problems.  This player can either run completely independent of any federation, working for the highest bidder, or operate as the intelligence arm of a galaxy-spanning federation.

The third paradigm that FATES is being designed to support is the cultural power player.

This player will be focused on enhancing cultural influence in the galaxy by means of political sway with nearby star systems.  The culture player will be hallmarked by cultural relics and treasures that are the envy of the galaxy's civilized population.  When other empire's fail to meet their populace' expectation of leadership, this player is ready to fill the lives of those lost souls with cultural meaning and galactic significance.  The cultural power player will acquire new planets by leveraging the discord of nearby enemies and allies systems; and when secessionist movements arise, they are the next most significant influential empire and welcome the new people with open arms and competent political leadership.  The culture player will still need to focus on self defense, or rely on a federation for defense, but they will remain mostly neutral in nearby wars, seeking only to pickup the pieces left after conflicts.  This player can either be a solo pacifist, seeking only to make their own way in the galaxy or a member of a federation serving as a buffer zone to acquire malcontent enemy worlds that secede due to nearby federation conflicts.

The final play style paradigm that FATES will support is the technological player.

This style of play will revolve around copious numbers of research facilities and personnel.  The technological player will advance in the sciences quickly, creating new ways to leverage high technology solutions to social problems and galactic conflicts.  The technological player will seek to be years ahead of competition technically, both in civic and warfare technologies.  Presently, technology transfer is going to be limited, but the technology player will be able to trade away already produced advanced ships and planets for use by allies.  This will allow the technology player to maintain technical dominance and still supply advanced technology to friends, allies, and minions in order to maintain technical leverage to affect outcomes in their or their federation's favor.

In all likelihood though, players will not cleanly fall into one category or another but the paradigms that are described here are extreme cases that FATES is being designed to support.  Players will very likely employ a wide variety of paradigms with several more focused than others.  There have been other paradigms tossed around in various discussions, but these four are the primary ones that are clearly defined right now.

Hopefully, you can see yourself in one or more of these paradigms and think in relation to the others, as each of these paradigms will be necessary for a federation to succeed in FATES: Carpe Moerae.

Until next time.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out

Economics : Part II

This post is going to introduce some basics of what a fiat currency is, how it works, and why it is important enough to be included in this game.  This article will be a bit dense, but I will try to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible.

Fiat currencies (or fiat money) are imaginary units of value created and issued by a government which derives its value by the faith of a people in the competency and stability of said government.

In other words, it is funny money that gets value from you and I using it.  It's like Monopoly, only on a far grander scale.

The fiat currency works by a dizzying array of complicated mechanisms only a handful of which will be modeled in the alpha and beta versions of this game, namely the exchange markets and the sovereign debt markets.  These two, in simplified forms, will be sufficient to give players of FATES: Carpe Moerae the experience that only central bankers (like those at the U.S. Federal Reserve or Bank of England, etc.) receive.

The exchange markets operate by allowing individuals the capacity to turn one unit of currency from a nation into a set number of another currency from another country.  Most of this exchange will be done behind the scenes in FATES: Carpe Moerae using a linear multiplier to compare all player currencies to one.  From there, the computer will simply divide and multiply to display all pricing data in your currency in game, so the complexity should be minimal, at least on the surface.  What you will notice, however, is the fluctuation -- sometimes extreme -- of prices as both your own currency and those of every other player on your server change in value.

The currency model, currently, is very simplistic, and will be expanded to more closely model real global finance as we go forward.  At present, it operates on a simple algorithm.  You can print money and you can spend it.   When you spend it, the value of your currency goes down, meaning that one unit of your currency will buy fewer goods and resources.  When you tax, trade, and invest, the value of your currency will go up by a set amount.  In managing the process of spending and producing, you will be able to have control over the value of your currency.  Will you choose to keep a highly valued currency and be able to purchase lots of resources for very little, or will you devalue your currency and be able to undercut market prices easily because of currency exchange rates?  These are choices that you will need to consider in the long run if you want to be successful in FATES: Carpe Moerae.

The sovereign debt markets will be a bit more complicated and are not fully designed or implemented yet.  The idea of sovereign debt markets is the players will be able to invest in their friends (or enemies) in order to facilitate growth or to create dependence scenarios to create leverage.  The bonds will be redeemable at expiration for the base amount plus the interest rate on a given player's debt.  The debt can be used in lieu of printing currency and can be demanded back at any point in time by the player lending the money.  This will create a wide range of geopolitical scenarios and a means of producing, maintaining, and exerting leverage on other players in FATES.

We have tossed around other ideas in expansion to these two primary features, such as allowing federations to issue currency and subsume the responsibilities from individual players to the federation leaders, much like how the European Monetary Union works.

Ultimately, though, this will be a grand experiment to see how each player manages their economy and finances and see how these elements play out in the player psychology and interactions between players.  In learning to identify and manage their own currency value, players will get a good feel for how fiat currency works in the real world, and hopefully become more prudent about voting with regards to the dangers that fiat money presents to a society.

It will be interesting, for sure.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out

Some Thoughts on Combat Mechanics

I have had several gamers ask me how the combat in FATES: Carpe Moerae works.  Presently, it doesn't.  The combat is not slated to be in the game until the Alpha 2 which is a long ways out still.

As far as attack and defense mechanics, the current plan -- which is subject to change -- is to implement a rock-paper-scissors damage model using four offensive types: beam, photonic (laser), missile, and kinetic and four defensive types: armor, shields, counter-weaponry, and velocity.  The are three other additional mechanic statistics that will play into combat being: structure, CETU attack, and CETU defense.  CETU attack and defense are special damage and defense types that trump all others.  It is these damage types that give our "all-powerful" AI civilization in the center of the galaxy it's potency.  More on CETU later though.

The combat mechanics will probably boil down to a summation of all allied attack types and allied defense types received by the server during a given second to determine the winner and loser of each second's battle with a black swan-style outcome randomization process.  This means that all of the allied attacking ships that arrive in a specific thousand millisecond time period will be lumped together into one "attack" and will be pitted against all summed allied defensive stats.  It is more-or-less an instantaneous determination based on overarching attack and defense stats.

The "black swan-style" event generator will occasionally (presently roughly one in one hundred thousand) create a loss multiplier on the units lost on each side creating extremely rare and highly unpredictable results, such as a very tiny fleet defeating a vast armada.  Under most normal circumstances (the other 99,999 times) the battle will go more or less as expected, e.g. the armada crushing the tiny fleet.  The statistical models dictating these events scale the intensity of the change with the probability, so a low intensity event will have a much higher probability than a high intensity event.  The highest intensity event that we are presently considering is around a 10,000x loss multiplier.  This will prevent people from creating reliable combat mechanic predictors and also make for some extremely epic tales of unbelievable victories (or losses).

There are a number of other mechanics that are presently planned that will significantly influence combat.

First are the fleet admirals.  The fleet admirals will be automatically created when a new fleet is created with a set of randomly generated statistics taken from the statistic pool for admirals.  The admirals will be transferable between various fleets if you want to boost a particular fleet's combat performance.  The admirals will level up based on their actions in game.  In other words, if your admiral is in charge of a large fleet of frigates, then his combat performance with frigates will improve, thereby increasing the overarching performance of any frigates in the fleet.  The fleet admirals will likely peak at around +20% bonus to combat statistics for ships, so that a very experienced fleet admiral has the possibility of making the difference between victory and defeat.  However, the fleet admirals will be able to be killed or captured.  If captured, depending on their loyalty, they will either resist -- making them unusable to your enemy, break -- making them yield information about your empire to your enemy, or turn -- making them join your opponent's military forces.  So there is a risk and reward consideration when sending experienced admirals into battle.  The admirals have one final way of being removed, which is through assassination.  Your spies can assassinate enemy admirals and vice versa.  When a fleet admiral is assassinated, a new admiral will be automatically created to replace him with the basic statistics.

The second set of mechanics that will influence combat is the technologies.  Ships with more advanced technologies will be more destructive and durable then lower technology ships.  So a smaller fleet of higher technology ships will be capable of defeating a much larger fleet of weaker ships.  The technologies on the ships will be fully customizable based on a space and energy limited system.  Each ship will be capable of housing any number of any type of weaponry or defenses, making player designed ships very important in FATES: Carpe Moerae, especially when used in conjunction with fleet formations.

The third piece of the combat puzzle is the fleet formations.  Fleet formations will dictate combat bonuses for the fleet as well as the loss structure.  The idea behind fleet formations is that you give attack bonuses to the ship types designated as the rear guard and defense detriments to the ship types designated as the vanguard.  Some of the attack fleet formations under consideration are: Fighter Screen, Frigate Line, and Capital Phalanx.  So, if you are running a Fighter Screen in a fleet with both strike craft, capital and super-capital ships, your fighter craft will be dealing less damage and taking more, while your capital and super-capital will be dealing more damage and taking less.  We have no solid numbers for these bonuses at the moment, but it will fall somewhere in the +/- 5-30% range.  The fleet formations will be a combat specific event, such that every time you order your fleet to attack, you can order a different formation.  We also plan on making a rock-paper-scissors type bonus/detriment multipliers between formations, such that the formation chosen for the attack or defense will influence the outcome significantly.  This will do two things.  First, it will allow more variability in the combat outcomes based on the formation that each player sends their fleets into battle in, and it will allow fleet and military intelligence to play a hugely significant role.  For example, if your spies discover what formation an incoming attack fleet is in prior to the attack, you can have your ships waiting in the appropriate defensive fleet formation to counter their attack formation.

All in all, the combat will ideally be mostly fair -- excepting black-swan events -- given that your fleet's admiral, technology, and formation are appropriately arrayed and equipped.

There has been some talk about us trying to do a turn-based, two-dimensional, ship-based, combat system, similar to what the classic game Master of Orion II did, but the issue that I have not fully figured out how to work around is the time element.  Being a Massive Multiplayer Online game, each player involved in combat may or may not be logged into the game when the attack occurs.  We could delay the attack until both attackers are present, but this yields additional strategic issues related to holding battle outcomes and potential abuse of such a system.  So, long story short, we will be pressing into alpha and probably beta using the instantaneously calculated battle outcomes until I can find a balanced and fair workaround for a more interactive combat scenario.

One final note.  There will be planetary combat, both orbital and ground-based, but these two concepts will take more space than I want to spend this week.  So, next week.

This gives you an idea of what we presently have planned for combat in FATES: Carpe Moerae, but these are very rough ideas and subject to change as we move into development of combat models.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.

Monetisation: How we plan on monetising FATES: Carpe Moerae

Another question that I have received frequently that I would like to address here is: "How are you going to monetise your game?"

Our current monetisation model is "free to win", implying that if you are willing to spend adequate amounts of time playing this game, then you will be able to win this game without paying any money.

The fundamental idea behind this model is that gamers, and really people in general, have only one of two resources available to them to spend: time or money.  It has been an overriding design goal in FATES to maintain a healthy balance between people who have abundant time to spend and people who have abundant money to spend in order to prevent one type from gaining an unfair advantage over the other in our game.

Our present plan, which is currently unimplemented, is to have "Archons" available for purchase, which are little more than advanced artificial intelligences that will allow you to orchestrate your empire with a significantly smaller time investment of actual playtime.  The types of Archons that are presently planned to be available for purchase in the final game include: Military, Defense, Trade, Finance, Logistics, Intelligence, Diplomatic, Expansion, and Federation.  We may very well add other Archons or subdivide some of these into more precise tasks, but this is a starter list.  Each of the Archons is presently planned to cost anywhere from three to ten US dollars per month, and you will be able to purchase as many or as few as you want.

• The Military Archon will manage offensive campaigns, scheduled attacks, retaliatory strikes, and other aggressive military actions.
• The Defense Archon will manage defense fleet shuffling, attack response, construction and maintenance of planetary or orbital defensive facilities.
• The Trade Archon will  manage buying and selling of resources on the Galactic Exchange, making every effort to buy low and sell high.
• The Finance Archon will manage imperial finances including creation of currency, issuance of sovereign debt, as well as interest and repayments.
• The Logistics Archon will manage constructions and development of existing colonies according to player-defined templates.
• The Intelligence Archon will manage espionage, sabotage, subversion, assassination, and defensive special agents.
• The Diplomatic Archon will help manage relations with other players and with the Galactic Council.
• The Expansion Archon will manage scouting, discovery, deployment, and colonisation of new colonies to expand your empire.
• The Federation Archon will be specifically tuned for Federation leaders and officers with tools such as attack coordination, federation-wide resource management, Moira construction and deployment, and other federation tasks.

We are hoping that this model will allow you to purchase services that will save you from having to spend actual playtime and allow you to take a more hands-off approach to managing your empire.

We will not be adding the Archons until the Closed Beta testing phase, and they will all be available freely to closed beta testers, so there is a lot of time to fully flesh out the free to win model further.

At least this gives you some idea of our currently planned monetisation scheme and a glimpse into the philosophy behind our design decisions.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.

Vision and Mission Behind FATES: Carpe Moerae

Greetings, I am Andrew VanLoo, lead developer on the massively multiplayer online (MMO) real time strategy game (RTS) currently titled "FATES: Carpe Moerae," and I would like to communicate in this inaugural post the vision and mission that Adam and I have in creating this game.

First allow me to share a bit of history, as it should help to clarify how we got to this point and where we are going.  Adam and I met many years ago on another MMORTS named "Lord of Ultima" (LoU) developed by Electronic Arts (EA) Phenomic and published by EA global.  The fundamental idea behind LoU was solid as was a good bit of their implementation.  However, the lead designer and mind behind LOU left EA, and the game began to lose its spark.  From that point the remaining people had difficulty keeping the game afloat, and it was eventually shut down.

Adam and I had both grown to love the game, but while playing through it for the second time, we both came to the mutual realisation that we could do it better.

Thus, in early 2013 the project that became FATES: Carpe Moerae was born. We began by researching various other RTS-style games and looking for a variety of mechanics that we found interesting, then took them and re-engineered them to give them new life within our game. After the selection of the science fiction theme, we began designing the technical aspects of the game in earnest in order enhance the graphics, designs and game mechanics seen in older games in the RTS genre. Our goal is for our game to be a pinnacle in both quality and quantity for years to come.

The vision of FATES: Carpe Moerae was further fleshed out by our gradual understanding that true information is becoming harder to reach and of lesser value to the general populace. We believe that games are the way of the future for transferring such knowledge and hope that gamers will enjoy the work we have put into researching and developing our scientific concepts within the game.  As such, we're incentivising players to research the various mechanics, resulting in the design decision to implement the advanced economic knowledge that I have been accumulating after 2008 to work making an economic model as close to reality as possible, including such advanced topics as fiat currencies and sovereign debt markets.

The mission of FATES: Carpe Moerae is to entertain, challenge, and educate players who engage with us in this venture.  The game will definitely incentivise you to learn about economics, as this aspect will be key, as one would expect from a strategy game.

In the spirit of education and broader societal value, we have also recently begun forging a relationship with the guys at Massively Multiplayer Science who are working to integrate science and gaming, in the hopes that we can make use of their scientific contacts to increase the fidelity and simulation value of our game, while still keeping it simple and stupidly easy to learn initially.

With time, luck, and a lot of hard work, we are hoping to bring to market a game which both entertains and educates people, retaking the ground that humanity in general has lost with regards to valuing knowledge.

We hope that you enjoy our final product and look forward to finishing it.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.