Pocket Heroes - D&D meets Words with Friends

Played some async multiplayer games with some nice people lately...this changed a lot my 'gaming perspective' to the point I prefer a game of Carcassonne or Uniwar over Skyrim or what else.
But my real dream is still an async mp D&D CO-OP fantasy game...so Pocket Heroes can't come soon enough for me and probably my 2 friends.

Some random things I think are mandatory nowadays for a nice async experience:

1) Gamecenter integration (obvious)
2) Possibly universal with iCloud save (to play seamlessly on the go on your iPhone and at home on the iPad).
3) Proper notification system (Carcassonne is probably the best right now).

I was delighted to read devs adding P&P elements other than a coop hack&slash dungeon crawl....I hope to read dialogues, have puzzle and so on (discussed within an in game chat with my companions).
It would be a dream come true...if done well I would pay for new monthly 'campaigns/quests' for a long time.

 

Will this be compatible with all or only some iDevices?
Here's another person really looking forward to this game!

 

The more I read about your game vision, the more I'm thrilled.
Take your time (do not play too much with Zelda!!! )...I really want to load your game the first time and sink without noticing hours in it, without worrying about crashes, reboots, notifications not pushing, glitches, 'lack of polish'...you get the idea...too many potentially great games are ruined by this, even if updates correct things (in the absurd AppStore economy, first impact is generally what declares the success or the failure of a project and I sure want your project to be an huge success with a great (paying) player base and long time commitment).

Just curious...I understand you've put some brain storming about not making the game 'just' a COOP skirmish dungeon crawl, but you inserted 'things' to bring the experience closer to the classic P&P one (I'm thinking about bits of story, dialogues, puzzles, things to discuss over with your companions probably with ingame chat...which has to be FAST then, loading and pushing).

First...as much as I LOVE (caps intended) this part, I hope you've considered about making all this streamlined (at least for the first quests/campaigns) ...maybe it's just me but I started to appreciate simplicity over complexity in async mp modes.
Since I basically left Univesrity and pratically got a life (you know...work, wife, children...) gaming time it's a VERY precious thing.
Being able to precess a turn in some minutes whenver I am is mandatory, expecially when on the other side there are people waiting for your turn.
I mean, if I have to recap everything about a turn I took hours or days ago (huge maps, many strategical components...you get the idea) it wouldn't flow so easily...this at least for first or less involved quests.

Second: without spilling the beans, how did you approached the 'closer to P&P' experience...pratically, what did you inserted in the game and how you handle it?
Example...let's say you insert some dialogue before a boss encounter.
I immagine dialogues are fixed (without multiple choices...it would be an 'online meeting' nightmare for the group to decide which answer to choose if it's a group thing...or instant ban of the poor soul that have to make the decision becouse it will be MATEMATICALLY wrong ...so....everyone blocks to read the dialogue?
Normal turns flow and everyone read the outcome in their turn?
Just an example, just curious....

Whatever, thanks to even think about doing a game like this...since I had my first iPhone I always wondered why nobody thought about it.

 

First of all I want to say I think it's great that this one should run on any idevice with game center (most have it) I consider this very important when you are dealing with a game like this. The more advices you support the bigger your player database could be,which is what people will want,more players they can start games with.

Now personally I think the most important issues that you guys should address is stability and polishing once you guys have added enough to the game to make it a playable game. If you are looking to add lots more stuff to the game I suggest doing so in updates instead of before release. It's important that the game gets out there as soon as it is stable,polished,and playable.

 

Well i might as well wait....
Anyway take your time and deliver the best!
One suggestion, add an in-game suggestion box so people can quickly drop some awesome ideas because this kind of game needs to build a strong fan base.If no one plays it online or you aren't connected, you should think of offline features
(I know its harsh but you never know...)

 

Please stop writing about the game
As I said, the more I read about it, the more I want it.
Like for yesterday.

Loving your vision.

And...loving your signature

 

Kudos to you guys for coming up with a fantastic idea and really sticking with it. I'll be getting this on day 1.

One thing I haven't seen discussed in the thread is the issue of what happens when one of your fellow party members just doesn't take their turn. You don't want three people to have to hang up a whole game because I ended up binge-drinking all weekend and gave my phone to the great Jovian platypus.


You should incorporate some mechanism to handle cases where players don't take their turns, and I have a few ideas for you.

First, you need some sort of turn time limit, which you could make variable by game (four players sign up and decide on a turn limit of 24 or 48 hours, or if my friends are ready to coordinate a quick play session it could be as low as 5 minutes.).

After someone hasn't taken their turn past the turn limit time, you have them take their turn in one of the following ways (whichever you guys feel is worth the programming effort).

1. AI. You've got to write AI for the monsters anyway, so have the AI handle the character's turn. Optionally, if you write some different AI behaviors (tactically, a Mage and a Minotaur probably want to do different things), you could have players set their preferred AI behavior for their characters so they don't just blindly charge into a fight if they miss their turn.

2. Delayed player control. If I fail to submit my turn by the turn limit, then any other player in my game can login and submit my turn for me instead (or I can still do it myself if nobody gets there before me). This keeps the game moving and is probably easier than trying to incorporate Hero actions into the AI.

3. Turn stacking. Similar to #2, but it may be easier to program depending on how your turn structure is currently built. If player 2 fails to take his turn, then we send his turn on to player 3, who then must take player 2's turn and then his own turn. Turns can stack all the way up to the last player in line (so player 1 might end up taking player 2, 3, 4, and his own turn if they all missed it.) If player 1 misses it at that point, then player 2 gets his turn back and would just take his own turn.

4. Player suggestions. When I take my turn, I can also submit suggestions for the turns of other players (essentially mock-taking their turn for them). If their turn time expires, they just follow the last suggestion that was given to them, or do nothing if there were no suggestions. This is a bit harder to program than #2 or 3, but the benefit here is that you could communicate those turns suggestions to me when it's my turn, so I get some notion of what the other players want me to do (of course, that may be a bad thing - it's my character and I ought to decide on my own what to do, especially if you're incorporating cool stuff like preventing me from seeing enemies around a corner that my fellow party member can see).

5. Do nothing. This is the easiest to program, and you should include at least this if nothing else in order to keep games running if a player stops submitting turns. This is also a fine option to do at first, and then change in a later update.






Incidentally, what's the communications structure like? Is my phone holding it's own saved game and sending my turn data to other phones with their saved games, or do we have our saved game on a central hub server that we're all pulling data from, or what?


Also, how are you handling player death?

 

Building on this idea.........If information is being stored about each player's "status", could this information be used to "configure" the AI to play the turn "as if" the player were playing the turn, based on what could be expected from the previous history of the players moves to that point?.......(more to do....right?....lol)


PS..this is my first post on this site, and I am waiting patiently.....(well....sort of.........lol)

 

Welcome to TouchArcade! It's a great site - it's gotten me some quality games over the years.

As for the idea of an AI that remembers your playstyle, it's a neat idea, but it would be difficult to code in a reasonable manner. Remembering the player's history for something like this is annoying, and then building an algorithm to attempt to analyze that history and extrapolate a move set for the current situation would be difficult and time consuming, especially when you consider the range of possible situations you could be in.

It's much easier to program a set of basic AI objectives like 'get close and attack', 'stay far and attack', 'stay protected and help party members', and then have the AI analyze the current situation and choose actions that fit those objectives (which is still not trivial to do, but it'll be necessary to some degree for the monsters, so elements of that code will already exist). Doing it that way means you don't have to store any history to try and remember and learn from, you just need to be able to analyze the board and choose actions to take on it.


All that said, writing good AI is very difficult, not just from a coding perspective, but from a design perspective. The AI combines with the combat system and monster stats to determine how difficult battles generally are. If you're using hitpoints, an AI that focuses exclusively on hitting your weakest character or is smart enough to always hit, say, your elemental weaknesses, is going to result in more difficult combats than an AI that spreads out the damage a bit or chooses random attacks from its attack set.


Even when it comes to AI problems that we've worked on for decades, the AI isn't perfect. Even a game like chess, which is far simpler to write a 'perfect' AI for than a game like this, still hasn't been solved (that is, we haven't written a perfect AI for it). We've gotten good enough and computers have beaten every human grand master, but the perfect game still eludes us.

 

Hey guys, I really think that this AI/ player leave part is important, so I'll give my suggestion. I believe that you should do different sets of AI mimicking the player's game style ( I know its not the easiest way but you said you wanted to do a great game).
As for the dugeon creator idea, I think you WILL have to add it sooner or later
Just let the player obtain it at a certain level or having completed a certain dungeon.
Finally if you add a DM option you will have to think about his fun too so....

 

An AI that learns your playstyle just isn't feasible. Even big-budget studio RPGs with AI control for NPCs don't have an option for AI-controlled characters to remember the player's playstyle - you usually have a set of AI options to choose from (aggressive, defensive, etc), and occasionally you get some control over what abilities they should use in combat, but that's it - and even that would be over-the-top amazing for a game like this.

Their developers don't have unlimited time to work on the game if they ever want it to release, so ultimately you're working with a finite set of time. Remember that the feature we're talking about is a fallback in case of failure - that is, the player's failure to take their turn. I feel like it's an important failure to handle because waiting infinitely for a a player to take a turn that they will never take will simply halt the whole game, and that would be horrible, but the main idea of the game is that players control the characters.

That means that in an ideal game where everyone is taking their turn, this feature will never be used. In real-world games where a player here and there misses one or two turns, this feature is used very rarely. That means it's not worth going crazy on when there's so much more of the game to work on.

I'd rather see the team choose one of the simpler options for handling that failure - including 'do nothing and pass the turn on' - and devote the bulk of their time towards the combat system, levels, characters, abilities, dungeons, a GM feature, and so on - all of which are core parts of the system, and not just human error handling.

 

While I definitively agree that such a feature would be overkill for a game such as this, as well as redundant, and unfeasible, and many other things suggesting it will and should never happen , this above claim simply isn't true. It has been done to varying extents and degrees of success for the last 20 years in gaming. I even remember a player-made bot for Quake 1 back in the 90s relying on a rough implementation of such a system. Darkwind Online, one of the most progressive MMORPGs, currently uses such a feature in conjunction with pheromone trails to produce some very interesting and occasionally surprisingly human-like behavioural patterns in AI opponents.

And these two, almost two decades apart, are just some of the very few examples among many. Hell, even students of AI game design, AI design in general, and robotics with AI focus (the last a group to which two of my closest friends belong, hence my first-hand knowledge) sometimes produce such prototype code and implement it in simple games as part of their bachelor or master's degrees.

The reason most big-budget studios do not use similar systems (when they do not, for they sometimes do) is that it doesn't contribute much to most gameplay experiences, and steals focus from other aspects of game development. And yeah, just like you say, for Pocket RPG, it would not only be redundant, but also take time away from that which we most would like to see.

 

That's cool man - thanks for the info! I stand corrected.

 

Dealing with the puzzles and other non-combat aspects may be more amenable to a solution where you're passing control to another player, and at that point humans can handle whatever the game is throwing at them.

I had a neat idea for player death (possibly for a 'hardcore' character mode). If you die you have a few in-game abilities that revive dead people, but if you die and don't get revived by your party or carried back out of the dungeon (maybe you were the cleric, or the party died), then you stay dead - and your body appears in random dungeons where other adventurers can revive you or carry your body out with them to get it revived later.

To make it more programmable (because there are issues you must surmount when having a random player join a game), you could just have a decayed body item that can't be revived by in-game abilities that would revive dead characters, but when players in one game bring it out of the dungeon then a random dead character belonging to someone else gets revived (the game decides after the fact who it was), and the players who brought you out get some sort of reward (10% of the cash you were carrying, maybe).

This is of course more feasible if there's some sort of central server storing information about characters, and I don't know what your communications structure is like.

 

I'll just keep on giving thoughts for GM mode....
I think the dev should give NPC sprites to the GM so he could place them on a dungeon Home-made (or premade and even maybe created randomly...).
He should be able to implement dialogues for the players enjoyment.
Also the reward system should be different for players in the same game, depending on their actions.

 

Please, stop thinking along such lines Having the DM interface on the iPhone makes a LOT of sense for those of us who either do not have an iPad, or who prefer a device that fits into our pockets. (I've six friends waiting for Pocket Heroes with me. None of us owns an iPad, or wants one. We all lead lives where an iPhone is the largest device we will ever want to carry on our persons, and the only device we will ever need. Unless devs start to reason along the same lines as yourselves Being able to DM on the go, and manage an adventure for my friends directly on my iPhone, has been a personal nostalgic wet dream ever since I first read about the possibility.)

I've had this discussion with many different devs, over many different products. An my points always remains the same: unless it is an issue of development time or money, give us iPhone users the same functionality as the iPad, even in a cramped, less than optimal interface, and let us decide just how comfortable we are using it. Luckily, even if you yourselves might not be having much fun using the iPad-optimized features of your product on an iPhone, many of us will

(And thus, even if it IS an issue of funds and funding, bestowing the same features upon the iPhone build might in the end net you a profit. A friend of mine and I tried to impress this last point upon the creator of Textastic: that even if HE might not be comfortable coding HTML on an iPhone (his reason for not making it universal), many of us are. Enough that he could still turn a profit if he ported the durned app, since there is currently no full-featured (syntax colouring, UTf support, etc) text editor for the iPhone. Luckily, after more than a year, he saw reason...)

Hell, I've written several full articles on my iPhone, I watch movies regularly, I compose music in an iPhone DAW environment, and I'd pay blood and other unmentionable bodily fluids to play an asynchronous version of CIV IV on my iPhone, the relative impossibility of squeezing the interface onto a phone be damned! All those things are activities that many desktop of or tablet users believe impossible to perform with any success or enjoyment on such a small screen, but yet, many of us have long since shed the need for anything more than 3'5 inches of viewing space. I've actually replaced my MacBook Pro in most regards, only sitting down in front of it for some serious, heavy-duty music composing and mixing, DTP work, and for software that has not (yet) been ported to iOS, or has no equivalents. That is why iPad-exclusive apps and games are such an annoyance: having finally shed the need to carry a laptop with me when I travel, having replaced damn near EVERY function with iPhone equivalents, I instead find myself locked out of a portion of the software for this new platform, because developers either believe that their product should not be enjoyed on the iPhone, or are unable to optimize the interface well enough for a smaller screen.

Here's my firm belief : ANY interface, for ANY game, can be downsized for the iPhone, as long as the GUI work is clever enough. Durn it, we have everything from complex 4X multiplayer games, online beat-em ups games, online RTS games, realtime MMOs, competitive multiplayer fps games, titles with extremely complex interfaces (the First Wave version of Dungeon Defenders), and for similarly sized Android screens there is even a twitch-based realtime space MMO. These are all genres at some point deemed not fit for mobile devices, with the interface and lack of screen real estate as the primary barrier, but now doing so very well on those very platforms. We are well past the "can't adapt interface/gameplay to small screen" argument

And even if not, in the end, we (the iPhone users) will damn near always (perhaps even unconditionally) take a squished, terrible DM interface and cramped DM screen on our iPhones, over no DM mode at all. Just like we'd rather have a suboptimal Aquaria, Small World, a full-featured HTML editor, rather than none of those products.