Massive multiplayer puzzle

Game Play & Game Design
#1

I got an idea when I was sleeping today. Maybe it is Minecraft-inspired… I dunno. At least, it lets players help create stuff online.

I’m sure you have played the various light puzzles found in cell phones and on the Internet (with mirrors and prismas you should guide a laser beam through all lamps). But when you have solved all 25 puzzles, you are done.

How about expanding this concept with user created content? But I am not thinking about a simple repository with puzzles. No, it should also keep track of who played (and solved) who’s puzzles and if they liked it. Of course, an automatic system for tracking easy<->hard puzzles should be online. If a puzzle makers creations are liked by lots of people, his puzzles will be easy to find (and that will give him satisfaction). By tracking who liked what puzzles, you can get recommendations of what puzzle to solve next. You can ask for something slightly harder or easier.

How about this? (does it exist already?)

The second step in this evolution would be to move away from pure puzzles. Say you have an rpg with a mapmaker module easy accessible. Half of the game is about crushing the other players dungeons and advance your character. The other half is about expanding your own dungeon, kind of like Dungeon keeper. You earn money for expanding your dungeon by raiding other dungeons. After you have earned enough, you can go into your own dungeon and add that trap or guard that you really needed. Guards that are killed respawn and traps rearm. Of course, you will see logs of what other people did in your dungeons. Each dungeon can only be accessed once each five hours, this helps against building an easy dungeon for your friends to earn money in. An even more advanced version lets you defend your own dungeon when an opponent enters.

How about this? (does it exist already?)

#2

From another angle: how would you do the marketing? How to convince people this is something different?

#3

Offering people modding power is easy, having the critical mass of users to actually make it become a phenomenon is the magic trick.

#4

One of the challenges is that people may not be inclined to type reviews or “score” the puzzles they’ve solved.
An automatic rating system could be a solution here. You could have an amazon-like prompt saying “people who solved this puzzle also solved that other puzzle” …

Possible metrics could be: time to solve, number of retries, number of pieces used on the set, …

#5

The idea you describe is used in a pair of PS3 games, Little Big Planet (plataformer) and Mod Nation Racers(racer), the slogan for LBP was “Play, Create, Share”.

The solution for the ranking/review used in LBP is first chosing from 1 to 5 stars and then select 3 of a group of predefined tags like “BIG”, “EASY”, “WEIRD”, etc.

As Riven said, the problem here is marketing, you need users willing to create content for your game.

#6

There was discussion in one company I worked in about adding this for our puzzle games; the issue was immature players and parents who were likely to cancel their children’s subscriptions when they saw the four-letter words in the custom content. The one thing you do have to enforce is that the level designer must play through the level to prove that it’s possible. You could also use their performance to set par.

[quote]The second step in this evolution would be to move away from pure puzzles. Say you have an rpg with a mapmaker module easy accessible. Half of the game is about crushing the other players dungeons and advance your character. The other half is about expanding your own dungeon, kind of like Dungeon keeper. You earn money for expanding your dungeon by raiding other dungeons. After you have earned enough, you can go into your own dungeon and add that trap or guard that you really needed. Guards that are killed respawn and traps rearm. Of course, you will see logs of what other people did in your dungeons. Each dungeon can only be accessed once each five hours, this helps against building an easy dungeon for your friends to earn money in. An even more advanced version lets you defend your own dungeon when an opponent enters.

How about this? (does it exist already?)
[/quote]
It’s not identical, but it sounds rather similar to http://www.funorb.com/dungeonassault/play.ws