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[Jonathan S. Fox]

For anyone who doesn't know, I've been the de facto lead developer for Liberal Crime Squad for several years. This post is about what I've been working on recently, what I might work on in the future, and what the current considerations are. I'm interested in writing this post both to help me think about it, and to invite comment, since future development obviously impacts players as much as it impacts me, and I'm interested in what players want. LCS has always had a very community-driven development in my mind, and it's inspired me greatly throughout my education, and I value your input greatly. For a bit of background, while working on Liberal Crime Squad, I was getting a degree in Game Design; I now have that degree, graduating with honors as valedictorian of my degree program, and turned down a job offer and multiple leads to strike out on my own and do independent development, since I crave the creative freedom that this grants.

Right now I'm working on a couple of smaller Flash projects to pay the bills (I'll provide links when they come out), but I have done some Zombie Survival Squad development since my last post in the "Zombocalypse" thread. I replaced the engine and it now has some nice tile-based lighting that adds a lot of atmosphere, and the new engine smooths movement so that you have real-time seamless movement between tiles, rather than popping from tile to tile and consuming your action bar. It's a better iteration has the seeds of being pretty fun, and the lighting is simple but really effective. Despite this, I still have to re-implement a couple of the features. My current plan for it involves spinning the combat/dungeon crawl aspect off and building that as a standalone game, then expanding into the full strategic game after that. This is to allow better monetization; that is, it's to ensure I can make a more steady income while developing it, which is also a major factor motivating taking breaks for side projects. The combat game is pretty close to a closed demo playable state, though it's not much more than what's been seen in the videos.

Recently, I've been itching to work on something LCS style, with strategic gameplay and interesting character development and choices. For awhile I tossed around the idea of porting LCS directly to Flash, complete with the text-based interface; this would make it trivially cross-platform with no complex download or compile required on any system, since it could play in the browser, and would broaden the audience. I even have a working tech demo of it on my computer, proving I can emulate the console window accurately and get the game looking and feeling exactly correct. But ultimately I had to reconsider: The complexity of making LCS work with the Flash engine made its flow less intuitive to follow in code, and that means it'll be harder for other people to contribute to in open source. I'm also not sure how much money I could actually make for the amount of effort it would involve. I considered asking for donations, but realistically speaking, how much benefit does making LCS playable in your browser actually add to most players? It's not like it's a major gameplay or interface enhancement. It's a project that's entirely doable, but is probably more interesting to me than others.

An alternative but similar idea would abandon the idea of a straight console emulation, but still do an LCS port. Buttons would be click buttons, fonts would be appropriate to the screen (newspapery in newspapers), and so on. But it would still play as LCS, it'd just be less ASCII. We could have mouse over tooltips to help players learn better, things like that. Two things dissuade me: It's still a daunting amount of work, and I don't know how I'd make money from it. LCS being open source is what let me start working on it, and I think it's really valuable how much the game has received from others, but it's a major inhibitor from working full time on an LCS project. Closed source, even encrypted games are the only thing that keep the Flash market going, and obviously I can't sell LCS either -- I didn't invent it, and there are many other people who have contributed a lot to the game's development. The only way to do it would be through donations, as far as I can tell, and I'm not sure how far that goes.

Going a step further, an idea is to do a sort of spiritual sequel with a nice GUI that abandons the Liberal-Conservative joke (sacrificing the amusement for LCS's limited audience in favor of interesting a larger audience) but stays light-hearted and continues to model a sort of political criminal cell in a modern setting. Name it something obvious, like "Insurgency". I'd have the IP and could do things like charge a small amount for the game; probably not more than $5. With enough interest, it would still justify the effort put into it.

But how different is this concept from ZSS? Doesn't this just lead back to the whole zombie concept, of making a new game inspired by LCS? I guess I feel a bit bogged down with it. Part of it is the desire to really make a fun and robust experience while you explore buildings and such. Part of it is the way the game design feels torn between different concepts. I'm not sure if the target audience for ZSS is LCS fans or casual Flash players, and that ambiguity makes it harder to design. The added complexity of trying to make a nice GUI for the game slows down feature development as well, which is demotivating. The more ambitious the game, the less agile I feel developing it, and I'm a huge fan of agility.

Another struggle is that the genres I feel most energized by are strategy and RPG games. This sounds like a great fit for ZSS, but as I work to get the combat system fun and interesting, that's not as exciting for me. I'm less interested in the moment-to-moment experience than the minute-to-minute experience, though I know that the moment-to-moment experience is extremely important and can't be ignored. I'd rather think about interesting character growth and strategic decisions than inventory management and trying to figure out how to integrate parties into this form of gameplay.

Finally, for some actual ideas about LCS in its current form, I can make graphical editors for modding. That is, I can do such things as make a real point-and-click tile-based map editor program, or a window that opens up and gives tooltipped fields for editing items. I'm not sure if I'll do this or not, but it seems like an improvement on the current system, and it would allow easier conversion of things in the game to be data-driven (moddable), since it would remove the requirement that everything be in human-readable text files. I also want to add a rocket launcher to the game that is very expensive/hard to get and requires a reload after each shot, but can one-shot cars in chases and destroy tanks. I'm also interested in working with the interrogation system to respond to the many requests to add back water and food, but make the system more intuitive and communicative.

There's also a model for working on LCS for donations, perhaps even going all mercenary with the feature list, and allowing donations to be pledged to future features and conditional on their implementation. I'm not philosophically opposed to this kind of model, though there's a psychological barrier to asking for money; I also feel a bit strange about getting money for working on LCS if others who develop for it don't. But I guess this is all pretty normal for open source development. If you're wondering, I do have a very voluminous written list of ideas for the game, including many by Toady One and Threetoe, such as police pulling you over and administering beatings, protests and riots, mental illness, surveys tracked with graphs, ability to set an official LCS uniform and symbol, and many others.

[nenjin]

Personally, I think LCS's enduring strength is that it gets updated out of love and interest, not out of propriety, a business plan or anything else. While I wouldn't mind an LCS "Advanced" version in a new engine, supported by different code or w/e....I think it loses a lot when it stops being pure open source and starts making development contingent on anything other than interest and the willingness to work.

A derivative work, however, is something I'd be really interested in. We started something like this with Crimelike, but alas, it fell through. I'm ok with abandoning LCS's philosophical bent in a derivative work....but why light-hearted? Why make a game about insurgency and violent political action, then back away from it by insisting it needs to not be too intense? I'm not asking for hardcore, "make the player feel like a terrible person", but to me going light-hearted in a game of this nature is some what of a cop out. A fear of how it will be received. Personally, I think games can be funny and have light-hearted moments while NOT saying "it's a light-hearted game." So many things in LCS (suicide bombing for example) will never happen because of that same mindset. (While other things like psychological torture and naked wage slaves, some how, remain legit and within the scope of its vision.)

So yeah. Derivative work is cool. A derivative work that is afraid of the implications of its own genre seems like a waste of effort to me. It doesn't feel like it replaces the identity of LCS with something equally tangible. Granted, this is all generic propositions, but still.

As for current LCS, really the game can benefit from just expanding everything, like you said. Interrogation, interaction, events, site investment and customization, all of that stuff can grow.

I appreciate the need to monetize some of your output. I sort of thought that was the goal of ZSS. So I think i'd rather see you start a derivative work to perhaps monetize than starting trying to monetize anything you do with LCS, which I think leads it toward closed source development. Kind of has to be, right, to protect the time you invest in it and to give people a tangible reason to donate. If I had to choose between donation-driven LCS development and possibly no development other than what people feel like contributing, I'd go with the latter.

In truth though, you seem pretty consumed with a commercial future (and you turned down jobs as a VD so you probably should be.) So I think your effort is best spent developing something to give you a financial foundation from which you can experiment investing your time in different projects. In that sense, I think I'd prefer if you left LCS out of your plans for that.

As an idea about a derivative LCS work: What if you abandoned conventional and realistic political thinking, and the players were operatives of something like the Illuminati? What if you took the premise of the Illuminati card game (players represent different clandestine secret organizations that manipulate governments and other groups to attack each other) and wedded it to the LCS-style squad game play. I think that gets closer to your "minute-to-minute" than "moment-to-moment" interest in game play. And it frees you up from a lot of the assumptions (and prohibitions) of LCS.

[Aerogen]

You know what I think would be really cool for LCS? To make it a game that is friendlier to the average Joe who is interested in modding the game, but doesn't know how to program. You know, like that thing you have made with the XML files. Why not extend the ability to mod the game' items without messing around with the source code to other aspects of the game like map creation, characters creation, storyline creation, setting creation, etc...?

I would be the first in line to try and create my own mods if that was as easy and simple as editing the XML files. 

[irmo]

You know what I think would be really cool for LCS? To make it a game that is friendlier to the average Joe who is interested in modding the game, but doesn't know how to program. You know, like that thing you have made with the XML files. Why not extend the ability to mod the game' items without messing around with the source code to other aspects of the game like map creation, characters creation, storyline creation, setting creation, etc...?

Modding items is easy because the items are just a big table. "Storyline creation" and other total-conversion modding requires teaching the game new behaviors, which requires writing code. There's no way around that.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Thank you for the in-depth and thoughtful response Nenjin, I really appreciate the time and consideration you put into it, and I value seeing things from another point of view like that. I can definitely appreciate the discomfort with making LCS development conditional on donations; I share some of that feeling. I can assure you that there's no way donations could lead to the game being anything less than open source, since any action to not release the source code would be a violation of the GNU GPL that the game's code is licensed under -- LCS's license is specifically designed to ensure it will never become closed source, and both GNU and Toady One are empowered to enforce that in court. Also, I want to point out that any donations wouldn't be a matter of making it so I want to work on the game, but making it so I can work on the game. I'm not worried about getting rich from making games, but I do need to make ends meet, and that prohibits me from spending a lot of time on LCS right now. I'm not saying this to invalidate your view on it, just to make sure that the motivations and consequences are clear.

With describing a potential derivative game as "light-hearted", I wasn't thinking of cartoony so much as an intentional effort to inject more humor and comic relief than I normally do. Instinctively, my games are not humorous at all, and I think Liberal Crime Squad benefits a lot from its satirical nature. I've only added a few goofy features to the game (though they're pretty notable), while darkening other areas. For example, I made interrogation more grim, but you can now play guitar in combat. I want to keep that balance in any derivative game, with a mixture of indulging in deep mechanics that are surprisingly dark and some parts that aren't taken too seriously. Grand Theft Auto has a similar approach, allowing you to be a terrible person, interspersed with humor.

Zombie Survival Squad is intended to be a way to make money from developing games, while still applying my interest in working on LCS. It gets around the fact that LCS is open source. It opens up more avenues for me to monetize my work while, in theory, avoiding too much "blind research" in trying to figure out how to make fun mechanics. In practice, I've been bogged down in the combat/on-site mechanics, which are more ambitious than those in LCS, and I feel that I've lost sight of some of the big picture. This has been exacerbated by the time spent working on other projects.

For alternative themes for an LCS derivative, I like the illuminati idea; I'm a big fan of the card game Illuminati myself. Lots of room for humor there, too. Another angle would be to turn the bad guys into an occupying foreign force, or a truly totalitarian dictatorship. Making the enemies Nazis or even aliens (and their human collaborators) gives a universality to the game's ethics while keeping the core conflict of government vs. scrappy band of criminals intact, and it allows the incorporation of options like torture and blowing up buildings as a sort of commentary on current events and the nature of good and evil. It also allows much more design freedom with the political space and public opinion dynamics, and justifies having the laws become more and more restrictive and abusive as you act, until finally there's fighting in the streets as the people revolt and throw off their oppressors.

Aerogen, with your suggestion for expanding the number of moddable things, it's hard to dredge up the motivation for it, since it's a lot of time spent and no immediate results in terms of improved gameplay. I did make the current map system, to enable map modding, but it seems to be too difficult to use; I think I'm the only one who has actually bothered to make really deeply customized maps with it, which is a good sign that it's not user friendly enough. The XML stuff was all by another guy, and I admire and appreciate his doing it. Maps could be made easier to use with a visual editor, or just reading in text files that visually lay out the map. In other areas, as irmo points out, a lot of mod ideas are for new behaviors in game. If you want a car that has a turbo, or an armor that buffs you in a skill, or secondary weapons that can be equipped at the same time, or any number of other interesting concepts, you'll need to do new code.

It is possible to make editors for behavior, but that's a huge project. The RPGMaker series makes simple scripting behaviors with no scripting knowledge possible, but they put a huge amount of effort into doing it. Most editors just end up putting a box to write code in for when you want complex behavior associated with an object. Even that though is a lot more than I'd feel motivated to do. I love having editors because they make actual design work easy, but I'm bored to tears when making them, especially if I won't be using them myself. I enjoy working on gameplay much more than tools.

Edit: By the way, I'd never seen Crimelike. I may want to steal some of the ideas for heat back into LCS.

Also, some totally off-topic incomplete LCS fan art:



The graffiti is a weak imitation this guy's style. Sorry whoever this guy is.

[nenjin]

By the way, I'd never seen Crimelike. I may want to steal some of the ideas for heat back into LCS.

Heh, whoo boy. There are plenty to steal. You'll have to ask Lap about it though via PM; the board has been locked down since a massive spam attack and he's gone off the radar. All of our collective brain juices (a large portion of them mine) are stored there. It never made it beyond a rough implementation in the TOME engine.

I can assure you that there's no way donations could lead to the game being anything less than open source...

I speak from a very incomplete knowledge of licensing, and I assumed you knew what was legit within the license Toady set up and what wasn't. Just from the perspective of hoping to turn a profit from something one day (read as: living profit not Mercedes profit), *I'd* want to avoid anything open source. It's just not a reliable format to me to make any money short of slim donations...someone can always come along, deconstruct what you've done, do it better, ect.....these are not the reasons people pay others to dev games.

ZSS...This has been exacerbated by the time spent working on other projects.

At the risk of telling you your business, I really think just from your position you need to buckle down on that project and get through it so you have a tangible product. I'd love to see more LCS development or another spin off...but projects become Hydras that kill you eventually unless you decide to address one head at a time. If you've lost the thread of ZSS I appreciate that may be a fatal thing to development; you have to see the game in your head to commit to making it. I just kind of worry, ya know, totally needlessly for your sake, that trying to redirect your energy into LCS isn't going to get you where you want to go. You could spend years developing LCS and not end up any closer to a game you actually own, ya know? Cause it's read to me over the last few months that's where you want to go. LCS isn't going to get you there in my opinion.

Making the enemies Nazis or even aliens (and their human collaborators) gives a universality to the game's ethics while keeping the core conflict of government vs. scrappy band of criminals intact, and it allows the incorporation of options like torture and blowing up buildings as a sort of commentary on current events and the nature of good and evil. It also allows much more design freedom with the political space and public opinion dynamics, and justifies having the laws become more and more restrictive and abusive as you act, until finally there's fighting in the streets as the people revolt and throw off their oppressors.

Exactly. In developing ideas for CL, we had a lot of discussions about the nature of our template: LCS. What expectations it creates and what things we automatically carry over from it. For example, Toady's particular brand of humor (and by extension, your's and every other contributors) really stood out as a boundary for what we wouldn't do in a crime simulation. The kinds of drugs the player was going to be allowed to manufacture, whether sex was going to be addressed at all, and even some particular aspects of the serial killer angle made a lot of people uncomfortable, because ultimately everyone wanted the world and the outlook LCS provided.

When we stepped back from LCS as a guiding source of ideas...we started to find a different thread to support the game. (A Mafioso/Threat to National Security kind of thing. Ultimately it was lost anyways but that's life.)

LCS development seems to have fallen into a trap where deviation from what Toady originally intended comes loaded with concerns that honestly have nothing to do with fun, atmosphere or anything. It's all about how it hits people in the gut, and a lot of interesting ideas don't make it any farther than the paper stage because of it. For example in CL we kept running into issues of people wanted goofy items, descriptions, ect....while others like me wanted a much more straight delivery without as much schtick.

Starting fresh on just the basic philosophy of LCS can lead to a lot of different places the original game wouldn't have let you go. Consider also that LCS is mostly a simulation with game trappings. Illuminati, on the other hand, is a game with simulation trappings. Taking the Illuminati Card game into the realm of simulation doesn't necessarily mean it has to end up less gamey. I think around this board we're all in love with simulations....but as CL clearly showed me, it leads to a TON of minutiae and stuff that keeps programmers awake at night.

I remember some discussions of how people wanted melee combat to work in CL (forget gunplay entirely for a second)...and it made me want to /wrist right there. And I knew even less about programming than I do now. It's funny you mention writing your combat system for ZSS sapping your desire for the game entirely.....staring into the black hole of other people's expectations in CL did the same to me, and I expect partly at least, Lap too.

[Tilla]

Charging money for an LCS game sounds awfully like an arch-conservative plot.

[Montague]

Might also want to consider the scope of game-play what an LCS successor might entail. LCS models more of a terrorist cell then a full-fledged insurgency, anything more then 60~ liberals becomes very difficult to manage and mostly unnecessary to beat the game. Its difficult to keep them organized and even typing through to equip large numbers of liberals is a major task. Should it be more individual-to-squad level or more strategic in scope?
X-com has a similar premise to LCS, but it also managed to balance having a large number of individuals while still allowing micromanagement of particularly talented ones. I guess it manages to accomplish this by making the soldiers very similar, with all of them having identical skill sets just in varied degrees of proficiency, while playing LCS you tend to rely heavily on a small handful of valuable liberals to accomplish most of the raiding, recruiting, ect while the rest are not useful for much other then sitting around selling t-shirts and fighting off sieges.

Maybe break it down to where you have a few squads of leaders/ important characters for more detailed or small scale actions and a separate category with more generic characters with simplified management and doing more broad-scale actions, like large-scale assaults, money making and whatnot. Basically a way to incorporate a large scale strategy with small squad level gameplay.

Another idea for LCS, like in many real-world insurgencies there is often clandestine support from foreign governments, that provide rebels with weapons and money and training. What the Special Forces does for the USA. Maybe a liberal foreign spy type characters could be recruited or contacted as a sort of sleeper, who might drop off rocket launchers, difficult-to-obtain equipment and money to a safe-house every month. They might have high weapon/ security and teaching skills to be directly used to train your liberals or perhaps participate in raids. There should be some special repercussions to accepting their help, and there could be special requirements to contacting them in the first place, so it could be a risk or trade-off.

[mainiac]

I really like the idea of a rebellion game in the LCS mold.  It could have less legal issues complexity but could still have complex public opinion.  You don't just need to make people dislike the occupation, but need to counteract their intimidation and anti rebel propoganda as well.  And it would be really cool to have your cell be part of a growing nationwide organization.  Your cell wouldn't ever grow in size, but the nationwide rebellion would, meaning that you would have access to more resources and better replacements for casualties.

I suggest the name: "Canada will rise again, eh!"

[Funk]

i like that fan art fox,

the idea of a rebellion/Crimelike/illuminati game in the LCS mold of humour,
the humour of lcs helps a lot in conter acting the grim parts even if it make the game a bit bipoler at times.

[nenjin]

In thinking more about your derivative idea Johnathan, I remembered this. I think if you need a source of inspiration, it's the perfect place to start. If you have no idea what you're watching, click here. (Although I imagine you're plenty old enough to remember this movie.)

(Also, man, that line is delivered in such a bad ass way, it makes its use afterward by everyone else seem trite.)

[Bdthemag]

I personally want a type of ga,e like LCS (Or just add the feature into LCS) that expands more on computers. I mean, big groups like anonymous cause a lot of trouble by just using computers. You could do something as simple as blogging about a protest meeting, or hacking into the US defence systems.

[Neonivek]

I am starting to feel guilty that I am incapable of really supporting any of the really great webcomics or games I enjoy with cash. Especially when I know where the money goes to (with few unfortunate non-exceptions...)

[EuchreJack]

If you're itching to design something with LCS strategy, perhaps now is time to work on that aspect of the ZSS.  After getting the ZSS strategic framework built, you can either further develop the combat mechanics, or convert them to a finished version, depending on interest.  Shotgun and pistol is sufficient for version 1.

From looking at the demo, I was curious how it would intergrate with the strategic mode.  I imagine the player would have to enter a building that had no zombies nearby, then do something to end the day.

I'd also imagine that safehouses in ZSS would be far less static than in LCS.  One can imagine that dropping supplies in any building in ZSS would make it a safehouse.

However, one advantage of a resistance game (LCS-like) or a secret organization game (illuminati-like) is that there are less competitors.  I've seen an awful lot of zombie games lately, although none with the detail that one based upon LCS would have.

Simulating the psychological effects of fighting off a zombie attack via character development is a real way to differentiate.  I remember the scene in Shaun of the Dead when the protagnist has to shoot his own mother because she was bitten by the zombies.  Best scene of the whole movie, and something most games of any type don't capture.

[highnesslordsir]

In all honesty for awhile I quite looked forward to your updates for LCS and would encourage any advancement into your own projects, and would happily donate some small amounts I could afford if just for the hours I've already enjoyed your work.  If your work tends to be more dark without the goofiness that is not necessarily a bad thing, I would quite enjoy a dark & gritty strategy game and am kinda sad that there isn't one out there.