The (Continued) Evolution of Catan World
Massively Fun The (Continued) Evolution of Catan World The (Continued) Evolution of Catan World August 17th, 2012 Today was a very special day. Goko (a hot new company with big dreams) launched their HTML5 game platform today with games like Dominion and Ranier Knezia’s Forbidden City , as well as a preview of Catan World , a massively-multiplayer take on the classic board game.
Check out the articles by VentureBeat and GeekWire for screenshots of Catan World. So far, everything has been positive and people seem pretty excited. (Other mentions: Gamespot , Games.com , Shacknews , TechCrunch , All Things Digital , GigaOM , redOrbit .) Massively Fun (that’s us!) developed Catan World for Goko and Catan GmbH (the original creators of Catan). With the preview now public, we’re finally at liberty to talk about it in the open.
The Evolution The HTML5 gaming space is still very young – just like the platform itself. Dean and I (the two primary engineers on the project) have had a blast building tools to help us get this game out the door. I’ve been recording screenshots of the game at various stages of development.
I had no clear purpose in mind, but it’s really fun to see how the game has advanced. First Tiles Canvas is awesome. It has a very simple drawing API. Combine it with hardware accelerated rendering and a speedy JavaScript runtime, and you have the basic tools for creating an interactive game without the need for plugins.
But the basic tools are just that. Basic. Basic . It’s pretty easy to get your first image on the screen. It’s relatively easy to animate that image.
The simplicity stops there. Graphics in the HTML5 canvas are drawn in immediate-mode , meaning once the shape is drawn, the canvas has no notion of what it was. That, in turn, means you have to do things like entity management on your own. In order to do something more complex than a single animated image, you really need to create an abstraction around game entities and their rendering primitives.
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And so Dean did that, in, I dunno, a day or something crazy like that. He then went on to write the initial pass at what would become the guts of our game – the map view.
The above video shows Dean’s first animated tiles. (For the curious, Dean did a talk at Cascadia Ruby which goes more in-depth on the subjects of the canvas API and entity management.) A new HUD You’ll notice throughout the videos that the game’s HUD continually evolves. Most of us at Massively Fun come from a background of consumer product development, where tight iteration is the name of the game. I think that’s well-reflected here.
Infinite Map Massively Fun’s other game, WordSquared , is famous for its sprawling board surface. We wanted to re-create that experience in Catan World. That meant our map view needed to know where it was in relation to the rest of the world, request data for that segment, and draw it.
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The above video shows just that. Networked Map In Catan World, everyone is playing on one giant plane, made up of multiple boards. Rather than keep a “level” or “board” in memory, instanced just for the players island island, we need to be able to pan to any section of the world and see their gameplay instantly.
New Art and Game Mechanics Iteration continued, and the art team gave us beautiful new versions of the previous roughs. There was much rejoicing – this thing is starting to look like a game!
Fog of War was also introduced. Its intent is to give players a sense of which parts of the world have been explored. Catan is fundamentally different than WordSquared in one major aspect: in WordSquared, players create the world by placing tiles; in Catan, the world exists for players to play on and explore. In order to convey that same sense of user-generated presence, we needed a mechanic closely tied to player activity.
Clouds do a good job. Alpha. User-Local Resource Visibilility, World Discovery This was a big moment for us. For the first time, we were all able to sit down at our computers and share a game of Catan.
Several interesting mechanics were introduced for this milestone. Ships were introduced as a mechanism to cut fog and travel between islands. This opens up some metagame doors which we continue to explore. While ships reveal fog around islands, they do not reveal resource numbers.
This lets you gain a sense of the island’s layout before committing to play there while still leaving an element of risk. That Wood and Brick may look good, but if they’re 2′s and 12′s, you may want to scout. Scouts were introduced to reveal resource numbers (and more fog).
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The fun part: resource numbers reveal on a per-user basis. During play, you might see other players place settlements around a particular resource, but have no idea what the resource number is. You can find out by building in that direction, or launching your own scouts.
Audio, Development Cards What’s a game without sound? This was our first pass at it – no music, but a couple of key effects. The Progress Card mechanic was also added to the game, greatly changing gameplay.
It was also around this time we landed on basic robber functionality, which I won’t go into here. I will say that it added much more pressure to the game. New HUD Iteration, Settler Mechanic, Action Points Action Points (AP) were added to the game at this point. Cutting through fog costs action points.
Moving a Settler costs a variable number of AP, depending on if it’s moving over a road, and who owns that road. Scouts were ditched in favor of settlers. In order to accomodate the asynchronous nature of the game, it became necessary to re-examine the initial play conditions.
Each ship (there are many) has a certain number of settlers, and each settler can be converted into a settlement and a road. Limiting initial settlement placement to the settler’s location increased pressure during the initial landgrab that occurs during early play. Settlers are free to move around the board, but doing so decreases Action Points, necessary for rolling.
So while there may be a better tile across the map, you may opt to settle early in order to have the advantage of more rolls. The introduction of AP to game gives us a lot of room to tune gameplay purely by adjusting the action economy, rather than having to modify more game mechanics, which is nice. Catan World Lands on the iPad We’re huge advocates of HTML5 and JavaScript at Massively Fun, going so far as to run our own Meetup on the subject.
One huge benefit of making games on open technologies is the possibility of ubiquity. Any platform that adopts these technologies is a potential target platform for the game. That means Catan already runs on Windows and Mac OS X in multiple browsers.
Grant (our fearless leader) was able to take our game and get it running on an
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