How Town of Salem made a mechanic interesting

Town of Salem is a cool game. I just wanted to get it out of the way right now. It's free in browser, give it a shot, you'll have a good time. If you're at all interested in what I'm talking about here, I'm sure you'll have a good time.

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But it's also really interesting to look at what makes this seemingly simple game tick, and how something as simple as being immune to death at night adds layers upon layers of complexity. If you've ever played mafia, ToS is basically like that, but a bit more complex, taking advantage of it being digital, and having more roles.

Now, being night immune is a trait shared by several roles in the game, such as the serial killer and the godfather. If you haven't played or if your memory is fuzzy, it means you can't be killed at night through conventional means. That means no mafia killing you, no serial killer, and no vigilante. Let's take a closer look at what this means for the game as a whole:

It increases the value of certain roles

There are specific roles that can kill through night immunity. The Jailor, Veteran, Werewolf, and Arsonist all have the ability to ignore this attribute and just kill anyone they want at night. Obviously that's a powerful tool for whatever role has it, but it's not without downsides. The jailor is obscenely powerful, but to compensate they're always in the game and are the number one target for pretty much every killing role. The veteran can't actively kill, and can only react to other night immune roles coming to visit them. And of course the arsonist and werewolf are alone, and can't risk being found out or killed or else they lose.

When you give a role such a powerful tool, you're forced to give them downsides, and in doing so each role is just really interesting. You need to play more carefully as a jailor. It's common to try to bait people to visit you as veteran. This mechanic changes every role it applies to, and it makes the game much more interesting as a result.

It's a key strength AND weakness

Night immunity just sounds like a straight strength, no? It certainly is a necessary one for many of the independent roles. The neutral killing roles, for one, are a target of literally every other player in the game, and your "team" is made up of only yourself in this case. It'd be far too easy for you to automatically lose by a random killing if you didn't have night immunity in this case. The town can rely on their numbers, the mafia can afford a loss, vampires can make more of themselves, and so on. Every role has some sort of failsafe, and in the case of these solo roles their failsafe is just flat out being unable to be normally killed.

However, this isn't just a flat buff in these evil roles. Again, it makes the game more interesting, because the party that tried to attack you will know you're night immune. And that's pretty much always a bad thing. If you're neutral killing, mafia and town both want your blood and will out you the next day or in a death note. If you're the godfather, everyone but mafia wants you gone. In these cases, it means you've been put at a disadvantage but still have several options to get out of this mess, rather than just an instant failsafe.

And it's not as simple as "lynch the immune" for the town roles, either. The survivor and bodyguard both have the ability to assume temporary night immunity, so they can't just go about lynching everyone like this.

This is really, really good multiplayer design. I often see a lot of games stumble in providing interesting options on all sides. Take a sniper rifle in any FPS. Typically your options boil down to "get out of sight or die" and the sniper's options are "keep at range or die". It's just not as interesting when each weapon or mechanic gives a very binary state: play this way or fail. Town of Salem keeps it open, even when something bad or good happens to you. Getting found out as night immune isn't an immediate failure, and finding a night immune isn't an instant success. As a result of this it's also not a straight, boring buff to a class to help it work. It's a dynamic mechanic that helps them do their jobs.

It also works as an unknown

Night immunity is always going to be present in a typical game of ranked. The godfather and a neutral killing role will always be in there, so the killing roles will always have this mechanic to work with. That uncertainty means that night immunity is something every role will want to know about for different reasons.

The mafia will usually want to know who's immune so as to not waste nights to kill, and seeing as they're the only factions guaranteed to have someone able to confirm of someone is immune, it's often in their best interests to reveal who's immune through indirect means. It's a question of risk vs reward, typically. Is it in the mafia's best interest to leave roles that can usually kill them alive to see if they'll get the town first. That question doesn't have a clear answer and must be answered per game, and that's great.

On the other hand, every role with permanent night immunity is an enemy of the town, and a massive red flag that this is likely a bad person. It becomes a goal of leveraging every piece of info you get and then putting it into action, as town usually takes control of the lynchings. If it's not coming from the mouth of an investigative role or vigilante, however, it's typically suspect. This turns the simple act of trying to find the evils into a mad scramble to see who can be trusted and what info is good and it's just great.

The point I'm getting at here is that Town of Salem weaves this one gameplay mechanic through the entire game very well. So many multiplayer games keep mechanics isolated and single use. You can only use the grappling hook for mobility. This shotgun only has one use: close range combat. The mechanic of night immunity is not a one and done mechanic only applying to certain scenarios. It's used across the entire game and has repercussions far more than it appears at first. Not every game needs to do something like this, but it's certainly a valuable tool to keep in mind.

How to manage a community

So, typically I want to avoid this sort of stuff. Generally blog posts that are rants/examinations don't fit an all purpose area like this, and I have no intention as to delve into either of those fully. Today, we're going to be taking a good, hard look at how Blizzard fucked up in their latest Overwatch patch, and examining what this can tell us about how to handle a multiplayer game in general. If you don't play Overwatch, I'm gonna try to keep it understandable, but no promises.

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So patch 1.8 came out a while ago, and take one look at the forums at the time... oof. People were not happy with this update, and I'm honestly fully in their court here. I'm not here to rant or get mad, though. Let's take a calm look at the individual aspects of what mess the two weeks leading up to the update were. Obviously the response from Blizzard to fix this stuff has been swift and responsible, but I still feel it's a good idea to examine what not to do.

So let's start with the elephant in the room, or in this case, omnic: Bastion. The general community consensus was definitely that he was at least a tad overpowered before a hotfix brought him down a notch. While this might seem to be just a simple bad balancing issue, I don't think that's what you should be taking from this alone. Bad balancing happens all the time in every game, and the real issue lies elsewhere, I feel.

This is a prime example of a negative player behavior loop, one that is plain to see because the test server completely failed to catch this. The root cause is a lot more general and I will get to that, but right now let's look at why offering a direct incentive is a lot more important.

So when it comes to what is beta testing, in essence, there needs to be a big incentive for players to get in on it. Remember that it can be a big ask to get players to even load up the PTR in the first place. An entire 2^nd copy of the game needs downloading, plus any and all time you spend on it won't affect your progress in the actual game. Not to mention that it can be buggy, and a low player count means worse matches, and so on. It's a big barrier to entry for many, and what rewards do they get? The satisfaction of helping the game maybe?

What we're looking at here is what would be instantly identified as a poor rewards system inside any actual game. When all you have to offer is the vague satisfaction of maybe helping, that's going to be a nonexistent incentive for anyone not caring about high level play, for one. It's easy to forget that people will still follow said systems outside of the direct game, but this is a great example of this in action.

So, what about Bastion himself? The main issue that sprung from him was ultimately swinging the balance hammer too hard, too silently. Balance is already a tricky thing to do, but what I think a lot of people forget is that the developers have to take into account the community reaction when implementing or even suggesting changes.

Now, the community is often wrong when it comes to what they think is right for balance. Rightfully so, as we're not game designers, nor do we get paid to do this. However, that fact is a tricky one indeed to balance with what's right for the game. What's right is not always what will be percieved as right, and outrage among the playerbase can run rampant, making forums a mess and from an outsiders perspective making your game and playerbase look a lot worse.

Now in this case specifically, the community turned out to be very correct in their assumptions, and Bastion did swiftly receive nerfs a mere days after his buffs went live. So why the outrage? Point number 2: communication.

See, generally Blizzard are pretty good with communication, providing regular updates and posts for the community. However, developer updates and the like can be a bit sporatic, which makes sense. However, get a change the community doesn't like and have it line up with an unfortunate 2 week radio silence on it, and, well...

It was like a weird microcosm of a really resentful community for 2 weeks, let me tell you. Players got frustrated at the changes, frustrated at the lack of communication, and frustrated at how vague everything felt. It went from a pleasant relationship to a one sided shouting match.

That is lesson number two from this whole mess. Communication, however small, matters. You cannot rely on your community to moderate their feelings nor can you assume the best. If you set a standard of communication, stick to it. Doubly so when you're introducing huge change. Those are the times when the community is at the most volatile, when it's at its worst and most emotional. That's when the real legwork by community managers needs to be put in, and that's when you can make your game and community truly great.

And to cap this all off, the community outrage seemed to disappear in one simple dev post. That's all it took. Players are not anger machines. It is possible to control them and their emotions, odd as that sounds. With the right updates and openness, anything is really possible when you're making a multiplayer game in the community.

Short and shallow post this time, been busy, sorry bout' that! Hope you enjoyed anyway.

Atlas Reactor: Sheer Brilliance

If there's one game you need to be looking at right now, it's Atlas Reactor.

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Have you ever played any turn based strategy game and wondered “What if it were multiplayer?” Your time, good friend, has come. Atlas Reactor is what you would get if everybody moved at the same time in Fire Emblem, what you would get from a 4v4 Advance Wars. I've even heard it described as insane 4v4 chess. It's the most unique, special, and innovative game released in 2016 so far, and it backs up that uniqueness with quality. You don't get games like this often, folks.

So, what exactly is Atlas Reactor? It's a multiplayer team game that fuses elements of real time strategy and turn based strategy. Each team makes their choices at the same time, each having only 20 seconds to chose what to do, and afterwards they all resolve simultaneously. So, for example, you and an enemy could choose to shoot each other, and each would deal the damage during the resolution.

It's a lot more complicated than that, however. Atlas Reactor has one last genius trick up its sleeve: the 3 phase resolution. The game has 3 distinct phases you can chose to take actions in. Phase 1 is the prep phase, where players heal others, throw shields up, and set traps. Phase 2 is dash, where players use mobility abilities to move before attacks. Phase 3 is blast, where most damaging attacks reside.

Are you seeing how brilliant this is yet? I'll spell out a scenario. Say you're playing Lockwood against an Elle, and you're both facing each other. You could just shoot her, but you risk taking damage back. You could shoot her, but she could dash away and she would shoot you back. However, her dash is short, so you may want to use Lockwood's arc fire to predict where she'll move. Alternatively, if you think she'll dash, you could set a trap beforehand to ensure she'll dash through it.

She could also be just trying to shoot you, and you could use Lockwood's dash to run away before she takes damage. If you think she'll use her dash attack, you could dash away yourself, making her waste an attack and forcing it on cooldown. And this isn't even accounting for ultimate abilities, which charge up over the course of the match. If she has her ult, you definitely want to dash out of the way if you think she'll use it. However, you could also use Lockwood's ult if you have it, dashing behind her, doing damage, and making her miss her ult.

And finally, you need to account for your enemy predicting what you'll do. Elle could predict you dashing, say, and use her prep ability to increase her next attack's damage. She could shoot where she thinks you'll dash. She could psyche you out, making you think she'll ult, making you dash, and next turn you're vulnerable.

By the way, the last 3 paragraphs were all describing one scenario. One single turn. Against a single opponent, when usually you have 4 enemies and 3 allies. Oh, and may I remind you you only have 20 seconds to make your choice.

This is the sheer brilliance of Atlas Reactor, the incredible brilliance of the possibility space for each individual turn. Every move begets the possibility of a counter. Every time you move, you have to wonder if an enemy is going to set a trap. Every time you use an ultimate, you need to ensure the enemy can't dash away. Every time you shield, you need to be absolutely sure the enemy will attack you.

The game makes this complex presence easy to digest and understand as well. The game has clear indicators about what is going to happen, you can hit a single button to check the cooldowns on enemy attacks, and you can see what allies will do as you make your choice. It sounds like a lot of confusing information, but the game lays it all out in front of you, and simply asks you to use your own discretion about what to do next.

So Atlas Reactor sure brings the thunder in gameplay, but does it satisfy in other areas? I think you know what I'm gonna say. It has a robust cast of unique characters, from a sentient fish with legs to a robotic dog. They're all very fun to listen to, and even better, the game lets you use them to taunt your enemies as well. You're able to choose to taunt before an attack if you feel it's going to be particularly impressive. It's a lot of fun to rub it in your opponent's face how awesome you are as you take them down.

As for the visuals, it's got a nice style, but more importantly it's clean and easy to understand. Lines are distinct, characters are different enough at a glance, and the visual design of what your attack will do is clear. It's not earth shaking, but it's very well done.

Meanwhile, the soundtrack is just... mmmmmmm.

So Atlas Reactor is a unique, innovative game that rides on it's excellent character design, personality, and tight game design. It's got an active Discord server where the devs are constantly communicating, satisfying progression systems that reward you for playing a freelancer a lot, and to top it all off, it's not free to play, a refreshing move in this current market. If any of this sounds interesting to you, they've even got a free mode where you can try before you buy, a consumer friendly practice that few games chose to try now.

While this is a close to a review as I think I'll ever get, nor do I ever want to be a reviewer, I feel the need to get the word out on this game. I only heard about it through a single friend, and it's sorely underrepresented outside of it's very dedicated community. This is a game that deserves to be shouted about, a game that deserves to be considered as one of the best of 2016, a game that deserves to be shared. So happy launch, Atlas Reactor. Here's to you, one of the best games I've played in quite a while.