Istvan
SDxWiki

Contact info

Real name: Steve Hartmeyer

Location: Lafayette, CO (Timezone: GMT -7)

[istvan@netdevil.com] or [sjh17@indra.com] (preferred)

ICQ: 148067425 (used rarely)

What's Istvan up to?

Links

Who Is Istvan? Bio now included.

[MMORPG Design Manifesto] (work in progress) This was a document I started building to organize a ton of notes into a more polished format. I genericized it for applicability to all sorts of MMORPGs, though my core ideas originated observing problems with the space-based games JumpGate and Mankind. I've also gathered info on Ultima Online, EverCrack, and Dark Age of Camelot both for simple comparative purposes and to better grasp some of the evolution of MMORPG designs in the industry. (5/20/02) Also pulling thoughts from current investigations of Earth And Beyond and Project Entropia.

Received email stating that [Project Entropia] is doing an open commercial test, with client available for download after 5/20/02. This game has some very interesting economic ideas (like, linking the real-world economy by letting you buy capabilities with real money, and being able to "cash out" with an exchange rate between game currency and real money). It is theoretically possible, though I think unlikely, to make money by playing this game. I read a short story about a game like this in Dragon magazine in the mid-1980's. Now they are real.

May try investigating Project Entropia as part of on-the-job research. (1/28/03) Did try. It crashed badly. Addendum (7/15/03) - This game is no longer in beta, it's live. It no longer crashes and the game is graphically very nice. I haven't sunk any money into my account, so all I can do is walk around and talk to people, can't buy anything. No real time to mess around in there anyway. Maybe in the near future I'll have time to really look closely.

[Here]'s a sobering link with a list of known MMOG projects out there. I don't think it's complete (PaleStar's effort is missing, for example).

Ecliptic A brief description of a MMORPG some friends of mine and I will likely never have the chance to build (thus I'm fine with sharing concepts here). The description is qualitative and simply meant to illustrate some design decisions, with the hope it will catalyze thought. (2/4/03) Having seen the nonsensical way Netdevil operates, and the total lack of organization in the way Jumpgate evolved, I cannot help but think a small professional team would have an easy time taking any sort of sensible design plan into retail and be more successful than Jumpgate presently is. Due to the lack of updates to Jumpgate since last July, I understand that one third of the preexisting user base has cancelled their accounts within the last month or so. Regular updates, and listening to the player community are very important, and Netdevil is doing neither anymore.

AutoDuel Another whitepaper description of an MMORPG design, derived from a discussion with a friend involved with Ecliptic after it was recognized that driving games are a shockingly large part of the single-player and online multiplayer games market. What if somebody built a MMOG driving game based on the famous [Car Wars] universe (or a variant, if buy-in from SJgames is not to be had)? This may possess more marketing potential than another space-based game (which personally frustrates me rather a lot).

(4/30/03) Well, well. Netdevil just this week began to get all their new employees under a formal NDA. On my form, I disclosed prior inventions that Netdevil is not to consider theirs: being some essay material on game design, Ecliptic Project, and the car game whitepaper I've shared in part here. I've not yet learned all the ins and outs of where these legalities will take me, but I intend to make the full whitepaper on the car game fully available to the SDx group. Netdevil wouldn't want it, since its design concepts are rather foreign to what I've seen of their style, though they appear to have their panties rather in a bunch about it. We'll see what happens. Hopefully I can sign something that says I can both keep my job and potentially develop these ideas sometime in the future if Netdevil doesn't want to use them (hah).

FYI - The whitepaper above looks not a thing like the NetDevil project, about which I shall provide no other details. if someone were to flesh AutoDuel into a game from that starting point, it would be a totally different animal from "Wreckage". I have learned that NCSoft did try negotiating with Steve Jackson games to use the Car Wars brand. This failed due to money. This may also be a reason the game coming out of NetDevil also looks to me nothing like Car Wars.

Earth and Beyond I got a stress test account (5/14/02), and have begun building a critique. We will have to do better than E&B to make SDx remotely successful, and that will require understanding of what it's got that works and what it's got that doesn't.

Lessons Learned Oh, yes, I'm learning a LOT at Netdevil. Read all about it here. Please keep this material confidential. I needed to vent, and this is one of the few places I could think of where I could order my thoughts.

Comment

I'm honored to have been invited to look at this site by Dan Muller. In early 2001, two of my closest friends and I looked at the prospect of getting involved in MMORPG design, but backed off after we built a business plan and recognized we had none of the wherewithal to execute it. Our primary problem was that we had no way to gather funds to hire programming talent: we had art, design, and business components for the team, but it should be inherently obvious to everyone that without competent programmers the rest is irrelevant.

Although I have a scientific and technical background, I know I don't currently have the programming talent to directly contribute code to any development effort. I dabble in Perl and some C++, and could probably educate myself to be useful doing code maintenance if the need arises, once I grasp what toolset is in use. Skills of mine that could prove more directly useful are holistic design and technical writing, as well as some creative contributions to environment-building. My education involved physics, astronomy, history, anthropology, and linguistics, any of which can be brought to bear. I've also been an RPG gamemaster for a good 15 years, which may help me contribute some insight on game mechanics, playability, and possible environment/storyline issues.

Guidance from senior team members about specific areas where I can be most useful will be welcome. Dan has some familiarity with my thought processes from the NetDevil/JG beta and post-beta boards, but I'll take direction from anyone.

I'm very comfortable as "Istvan", since that's the Net handle under which I've written all the game design comments and ideas I've ever had. But I'll cheerfully answer to "Steve" as well.

Muscles I'd like to Exercise