Three hundred multicoloured oaks have been scattered around the Germination X world. These trees are all that remains of an ancient forest and require multiple players to find and sow plants around them in order to rejuvenate them into their former glory. This provides a simple additional community activity as well a first attempt at populating the wide expanses of the Germination X planet with landmarks – something that has been brought up in the focus group studies. There is also now an “oak score” to record the players who contribute bringing them back to life.

Also new today, a tutorial explaining how to do the basic picking and planting as well as some of the more advanced things (which are not so obvious and badly needing explanation) like sending seeds and fruit to other players and using butterflies to find out who planted things.

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Another Germination X server update happened yesterday, concentrating on the plant spirits.

We needed to log the emotional state of the spirits, so I thought twitter could be used for this, similar to the Naked on Pluto cleaner bot. In this case though, all three plant spirits have accounts, so they can have little conversations with each other – the wording is the same as the in game messages, and is chosen based on their current emotional state.

For the first time the plant spirit characters are programmed with different “personalities”, or settings for their FAtiMA roles, so we should see some different behaviours from them.

The last update broke the FAtiMA rules for diagnosis of ill plants and asking players for help, which is now fixed. The spirits now prioritise asking for help from players who have logged in recently, making it much more likely that currently active players see requests. The spirits are now also ‘summoned’ to ill plants throughout the entire world, meaning more activity generally – previously they were attracted to different locations by player activity only, and so would stay in the last area used (and could only “see” plants there) until new players came along.

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Along with setting up interactive installations, the last week has been a fairly intense code sprint on Germination X, based on feedback from the second focus study by SICS/mobile life in Stockholm.

In order to get a more interesting world, and shake things up a little, soil conditions now vary quite dramatically. Some areas are friendlier to plants, and some very much harder to grow in than before. We’ve talked a lot in the design process about having different types of plants for different soil types or whole regions, this is a step in that direction.

The feedback from both the focus groups in Stockholm agreed that the little star sprites used to signify plants you’d planted were confusing as they looked like flowers. I’ve removed them and added a little glow around the plants instead.

The biggest change this time is probably with the plant spirits. The FAtiMA AI system has been upgraded and as well as a bunch of fixes on my end to improve responsiveness and message wording, I’ve focused on a whole range of emotions called “fortune of others”. The OCC-model (Ortony et al., 1988) defines them like this:

I’ve attached actions to each of these four emotions which cause the spirits to react with empathy to events in the world that don’t concern them directly, depending on how much they like each other, or if the events are good or bad for the plant spirit in question. This starts to more effectively exhibit interesting properties of the FAtiMA system.

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In late December the Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm ran the first focus test for Germination X, and last week I met up with them to get the feedback in detail. Even for a small study of 5 players, this was very detailed – but the broad conclusions were that the underlying ‘ecological model’ of permaculture is being communicated very effectively via the game – the players got the idea of this quickly through playing, without it being explicitly communicated in a didactic manner.

On the downside, the role of the spirits were not clear to players at all – confusion from the quantity of messages, players constantly logging out to see what was going on from the public message timeline, and both the characters emotional state and connections between them and the permaculture plant layers were completely lost in the noise. Added to this, with the short duration of the study (1.5 hours) the pick power restriction was a massive problem, leaving players with nothing to do for long periods of time.

With more focus studies planned I’ve updated the game to deal with some of these issues as best I can:

Pick power is now recharged much faster. To balance this out, and add to the challenge of foraging for seeds and fruit they now regrow much slower and are harder to find in the world.

The way spirit messages are dealt with is now completely overhauled. All messages they send are viewable by all players all the time. They are displayed as speech bubbles by the spirits, making it clearer that they are responsible for them. They are now filtered out of players timeline messages to avoid problems with spamming too many messages.

There are also a bunch of updates to improve responsiveness of the world and make reactions to player’s activity faster to experience. Plant no longer gain health from nearby plants which are ill, which means reactions to new plants happen faster. The season length is shorter again (10 minutes for a full year cycle). Some optimisation of the mongodb code dealing with message dispatching means I’ve been able to double the refresh rate of the game (number of world tiles updated per second) while also reducing overall server CPU usage.

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Over the last couple of weeks Germination X has managed to attract 70 players picking and planting in a permaculture world, with plants now covering 92 5×5 tiles – watch out Zynga :) This week has seen some more additions, firstly giving gifts to spirits has a large effect on their emotions positive and negative, and while it needs a bit more work – the wording of messages is modified according to the spirit’s emotional state at the time they send them.

The other big change is a new activity for when you are out of picking power which can give you more information about the other player’s plants – the butterflies can be drag-dropped over plants to find out who planted them.

Having this kind of information available makes some open ended meta games possible, such as a group of players getting together to take over part of the world. The role of the spiders remains mysterious, but I’m trying to figure it out…

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Balancing is where you tweak games to get the right level of difficulty – doing this on a single player game is hard enough, but on a live game with active players its quite tricky. Germination X is currently too easy, which results in plants happily growing packed closely together (blocking subsequent players from planting) so I made some slight changes, which had the effect of causing an environmental collapse which lasted several hours, completely sending the plant spirits into depths of simulated emotional turmoil.

I’ve also noticed that players are not tending to send each other gifts, which is probably for many reasons – the most obvious being that they don’t know it’s possible. Part of a fix for this is to add some general help when players start – this seems a common practice with social games.

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The current focus for Germination X is encouraging collaboration between players, with the subjects of pemaculture and companion planting deeply interwoven into the gameplay. It’s important to avoid the normal problems with “educational games” where the subject matter is bolted onto some existing game. This is rarely a successful strategy.

Firstly players now are grouped into different roles based on the permaculture layers represented in the game:

As players progress they get a chance to take on different roles as they can only pick fruit from plants from the layer they belong to. This means that even experienced players require the help of new players to provide nutrients for their plants.

Another big decision was to separate the “social elements” of the design from the things you need in order to progress through the game. Part of the idea is to remove situations like this:

I forget which game the screenshot was originally from (I think a city building facebook game), but it had absolutely no connection with the themes of the game. Relationships seem generally to be treated like resources in most of these games – the main motivation being to increase virality. I’d like to leave things a little more open to interpretation (partly so we can explore further possibilities a little more).

There are quite a few things classified as “social activity” in the game, but none of them are a direct requirement to progress, no meanings are “hardwired” with rewards or punishments – e.g. the meaning of passing different fruits to other players, or the ability to plant detrimental as well as beneficial plants. The idea is to create a situation where collaboration is important but not formulaic – the game provides a basic need for people to help each other, a couple of ways to do it and some ways for them to initially connect with each other – mainly though the plant spirits:

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Slowly Germination X gets less like a prototype and more like a full game, lots of new stuff this week – as this is the first online release of the work done over the past month.

Players can now pass items of fruit to each other or spirits as gifts (by dragging fruit over messages and dropping them). There is some limited player development with some small surprises to prolong the gameplay a bit (spot the new plants). There is now a new mechanism to introduce players to the game and get feedback from them and also navigation to quickly locate plants – click on a message to teleport to the plant it concerns.

Still lots of rough edges, hopefully I will be able to smooth some of them out next week at the Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm. We have also now moved the game to it’s own dedicated server, and completed the transition to mongodb.

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