IDENTITY & IN-APP COMMERCE IN FPS

Our deathmatch anywhere, anytime, first-person shooter has progressed considerably since we first showcased the concept at Apple’s OS3 announcement event. We’re fast-approaching gameplay Alpha with all the weapons in and playable, a handful of really fun maps, an identity system, ranking and matchmaking from our global servers, a great new look and a whole lot more.

One of the OS3 features I blogged about previously was in-app commerce and its role in this and other games. There’s been quite a bit of thought on that subject as well as some decisions and this seemed like a good time to share where we are with it.

First I’ll talk about identity in our FPS game, because its related to our approach to in-app commerce.

Because our FPS is a dedicated online-only game (over 3G or wifi), every player will have a unique login (account) with an associated identity inside (and outside) the game. Your in-game identity starts with your account name, and is further defined by your cumulative performance stats (kills, exp…) and Rank. Your stats and Rank, when compared with other players’ stats and rank, determine a relative skill level used by our matchmaker to ensure players are matched up with other players of similar skill whenever possible.

These stats are presented in-game as your “Combat Card”, a stat summary UI browse-able in the pre and post-game lobby as well as in the armory (more on that in a bit). So if you’re playing with someone really good, you can easily tap their name or avatar to open their combat card and study their stats or check out your own card to keep tabs on your performance. Each rank has a unique insignia as well, so you can quickly identify higher ranked players on sight during combat or in a lobby.

Your Name, Combat Card and Rank Insignia are the bases of your identity, but we’re taking it farther than stats sharing. You can also choose your own armor set, which is reflected in the appearance of your in-game avatar, in the lobby and on your combat card. When we started experimenting with custom avatar visuals, it really stood out as the most powerful way to enhance your in-game identity. We’re planning to have certain armor materials that are only available to players of a certain rank, so if you see a guy with black armor, you better watch your back. 

And this is where in-app commerce started to find a comfortable fit with our game design. You’ll unlock new ways to personalize your appearance (mainly material color changes) as you play the game and rank up, but you’ll also be able to visit the in-game armory and purchase cool new armor sets via in-app commerce. These purchasable armor let players choose an appearance that better suits the identity they want to project (a heavy armored dude, amphibious suit, stealth, etc). The armor sets have different silhouettes and material schemes than base armor. We’re working with some of the artists form the original Halo™ team and the results have been very encouraging.

We’re also in the process of experimenting with gameplay-affecting attributes for purchasable armors. This feature is in the early stages of testing for balance and is something we may or may not ship with, but the design idea is to differentiate the armors sets by speed, protection, physics and other properties that align with the concept of a given armor. So a heavily armored combat suit would take more damage than base armor, but would also come with slower movement. The intent is to give each a bonus and a trade-off, rather than a complete upgrade, to keep things in balance with the base armor set. Another idea we’re discussing is giving each armor different modifiers to power-ups (either instead of or in addition to base stat modification), so a heavy battle suit might enjoy longer bonus from damage power-ups and shorter bonus from a jet-pack powerup.

The armory feature lets you change your armor whenever you want between games, so you can play as an armored guy all the time or switch between a variety of armor sets at will.

So that’s the latest on our FPS design as it relates to in-app commerce. We have more to say in the coming days – about weapons and gameplay…. and the name! We had a working title when we first announced the game, but now that we’re so much further along and the features have evolved from cool ideas to great gameplay, we’re revisiting the name. The quality of the game is obviously the most important thing, but we want to get the name right too – something players can identify with and we can take forward with this and future FPS games.

Stay tuned for that.

Cheers and good hunting,

-chris & the ngmoco fps team