Quote:From the title how do you make a repetitive tedious task fun?
By eliminating them.
Or by making them really short and infrequent, a la World of Warcraft.
Also, getting more tangible rewards per craft helps a lot. It's better to have skill upgrades every few crafts, as opposed to, say, SWG where you have to craft for literally several hours straight to get any kind of upgrade. If necessary, so that skill 'levelups' occur less frequently, it could be preferable to increase the item requirements for the crafting (again, like World of Warcraft's late crafting stuff. Elemental leatherworking, where you have to collect multiple rare items for a craft, comes to mind)
you could make it like a typing tutor type of game, where an AK47 is 100 succesive letters chosen randomly. People would be typing as fast as possible to get the thing made so they can move on to the next, yet any mistakes they make will degrade the outcome's quality.
Ultimately what you are asking is how to provide a simulation of doing work so as to give a sense of fulfillment upon completion. For an AK47, why not just split the gun up into something like 10 pieces (which your player buys individually, better parts result in a better final product) Then just give them a view of the table top where they will build the gun and have them snap all the pieces together. I think it would be frustrating to have to perform a specific action perfectly to get the perfect gun; i would rather buy expensive parts knowing that if i put them together in the right order they will yield a superior product. Also, if you make the object have a lot of parts that are little and go together in a very specific manner, and you give the player a lot of control in their manipulation/orientation when putting them together, then it will be very much like building a model or putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Novices could get a manual; pro's could put together unique combinations that result in new and never before seen items.
It's a very hard project to undertake, and i wish you luck.
Check out EQ 2's crafting. It's fairly involved and less repetitive than most crafting. What's interesting about it is there is actually strategy to it. Depending on what skills you use during the crafting process, you could end up with a very high quality item that took a while to make, or a lot of items of low quality, etc.
I can't think of how I can measure in a percentage how much the player would have deviated from a line. I've decided on the drill type thing.
Quote:Original post by Kevinator Check out EQ 2's crafting. It's fairly involved and less repetitive than most crafting. What's interesting about it is there is actually strategy to it. Depending on what skills you use during the crafting process, you could end up with a very high quality item that took a while to make, or a lot of items of low quality, etc.
I tried EQ2's free trial. I find it hard to believe that the crafting would be involved and much less repetitive after trying the combat. I couldn't stand the game for more than an hour. I don't plan on going back to try crafting, so an explanation of it would be wonderful.
You make repetitive tasks fun by automating them or making them non-repetitive.
If you want to see a creative approach to crafting, check out Puzzle Pirates. Every "task" in the game (from sailing a ship or repairing its hull to firing cannons, swordfighting, and yes, making new ships, rum, and paint) is performed through a puzzle, different for each task. The carpentry puzzle, for example, requires you to place pentominos into a hole such that the hole is filled with minimal overlap. The swordfighting puzzle is very similar to Super Puzzle Fighter. And so on. The better you do at the puzzle, the better the results (making for a higher quality of labor in crafting puzzles).
Puzzle pirates also combines this with aggregating the labor of many players into "shops" where products are actually produced and sold (with the result that in general, no one pirate is solely responsible for the creation of a given product). You don't have to do that; you could simply make it so that the quality of labor performed determines the quality (or quantity, in the case of bulk goods) of the result.
This removes the repetitiveness to a large extent.
Shouldn't this be in Game Design?
Jetblade: an open-source 2D platforming game in the style of Metroid and Castlevania, with procedurally-generated levels
Quote:I just can't think of a way to take the repetition out of crafting, how to make it fun. Anyone got any ideas? Its for a modern city online rpg.
Crafting is supposed to be a way for players to create their own items and create a player based economy. But there is no way to make the same thing over and over without it being repetitive. There's no way around that. A guy who wants to make his on-line career selling shotguns and nothing else will just have to do repetitive tasks over and over. I really like the Puzzle Pirates approach to it, but now instead of click drag click over and over on the crafting screen, it's click drag click on the puzzle screen. There's no way to make it non-repetitive. The best you can hope for is a player base who likes to do mindless repetitive things. If it isn't repetitive, and some random task every time to make a shotgun, then there is no element of human player experience. He doesn't get to do trial and error to find best methods. Just click and hope you get a puzzle style you're good at.
Crafting can seem mindless and boring at first, but some games take crafting to a whole other level. For all the problems SWG had, I loved their crafting system. The complexity was insane, and allowed for profitable markets in tons of areas. Instead of selling droids, you could make a living selling just the droid chasis to other droid engineers, or just the add on parts. Or for weapons, you can make a living only selling rifle stocks. With rotating resources spread across the galaxy, it was quite a challenge to amass together the best resources to build top quality items. No more or less repetitive than combat.
To make item crafting less repetitive, make industrial sized crafting batches easy to make. For instance, to make 100 pair of shoes, all you need to do is amass the required materials, go into a craftsman shop, hire a crafting place and then allow the user to craft shoes, and specify a number.
That way, most of the crafting process, the player is busy with collecting/trading materials, and then walk into the shop to craft the items. Specify specialized crafting table types, so that tables with better tools(Allowing you to produce higher quality items) cost more. Also make crafting dependable on skills and have each item carry a crafting time. Industrial sized batches could also have time reduction at large batches(Because, if you craft an item a lot, you get faster at it), but in exchange, you lose some additional material due to errors.
Make sure items are spread out properly over the world, or it will get insanely simple to craft certain items, and easy money making for players. Make sure some materials only drop from monsters, or that the location in which specific materials can be found differ. For instance, if a map is often visited to chop down trees, decrease the tree population over time(Or, make trees grow/spawn slower), this way, players have to move from site-to-site.
Also, make the economy depandable on the number of items introduced to NPCs. If NPC X at location Y gets a lot of shoes, the price for which he buys them decreases. So at some point, the NPC has so many shoes, it will no longer buy them, making it less attractive for players to craft, forcing them to relocate, or craft a new item type. To accomadate novices in the game, you could have NPCs only buy certain items from low level players.
Aww, shame guys! Crafting can be fun! If you have a character you can choose from some amusing animation sequences based on the characters skill level and/or what they may have around them. EG Sweater knitter with low skill levels tying up own hands with thread while muttering "pearl two", sweater knitter of slightly higher skill poking self in eye while kitty unravels work. Industrial player with low budget and low negotiating skills getting the "leaning tower of Tijuana". C'mon just apply your sense of humor!
