West Karana

As a Founding Member of Hello Kitty Online (you may now be seated), I was hoping to install it last night with the hopes that I would have better experiences with it now, than I did in closed beta.

In closed beta, I could not patch the game — at all. Only when HKO would release each patch as a separate download that I could run locally could I get into the game.

VERY frustrating. So much so that I eventually stopped playing.

HKO entered “Founder’s Beta” last Tueday, so I figured I’d give it a shot last night. After a ***2 gigabyte*** download, which they required you do through BitTorrent, I tried to launch it and — nothing. The cursor would spin for hours. I would watch an episode of Buffy — “The Prom” (I cried at the end even though I knew Angel wouldn’t abandon Buffy) — then check in on HKO and still, a spinning cursor. The two part “Graduation Day” — where the Mayor is trying to assure himself that though things look bad, his adopted daughter, Faith, won’t die, will be all right — hit a really personal note with me.

When I looked again, Windows Vista was reporting a file error.

So no gaming got done last night.

I guess I’ll just wait for release, buy the disk, and not worry about these mega-installs.

Why play Hello Kitty Online? It’s a game meant for kids, in closed beta, it was really grindy with that click-to-move interface Asian gamers apparently love so much but doesn’t really mesh with Western play styles, a title depending more upon its IP than any real innovation in game play? A game combined with social networking aspects that will likely be done better by SOE when Free Realms comes out?

It’s because it’s HELLO KITTY! And if THAT isn’t reason enough to play — then you aren’t the target market for the game.

It’s really, really hard to write about Hello Kitty Online without irony. But I have to come clean. I was a huge Hello Kitty fan back about fifteen years ago. Well, DUH, in an ironic way. Because that’s the only way an adult can really enjoy Hello Kitty.

Back this spring, Hello Kitty Online had a closed beta which I was fortunate enough to be part of. It wasn’t a great experience. I could hardly even play the game, because the patcher didn’t work for any of my computers. They began publishing their patches as separate downloads so it became possible to at least play. The game itself was an exceedingly grindy Asian import — you don’t just get quests to kill things, you have to kill FIFTY of them. That’s like one of the very first quests.

Click to move, repetitive gameplay just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time.

Just like the forthcoming Twin Skies and Free Realms, though, the game itself is only half the experience. All of these games have social networking features and ways to interact with the game through your browser. HKO has a fairly sophisticated video editing tool, an appointment calendar, email — everything needed to make a fairly good try at being your home page on the web.

Judging by the screenshot above, assuming it isn’t from SNK Capcom vs Sanrio, which, you gotta admit, would be kinda cool, there have been lots of changes to HKO since I played. For one thing, you couldn’t play as a Sanrio-like calendar before. So there’s that.

Yeah, I signed up for the “Founder’s Beta”. I am going to give it another chance to make me a Hello Kitty fan.

BRB after I finish painting my laptop pink… Here’s some omake for you all –

- Do that Hello Kitty Online! video.

My idea with this is to have a car driving along and the world around it being taken over by Hello Kitty. Houses, pasted on other cars, and so on. I have no idea how I’m going to do it. I’ll probably get Andy to help, but Windows Movie Maker is entirely unable to do the job. Maybe, since I won’t be getting source video from Fraps, I’ll be able to use some Linux tools like Cinellara to do it. I think if I can get a compositing layer there, I can just do the Hello Kitty overlays in POVRay. I have lots of JPop music to use (because I love J-culture, proving I am white, apparently) as the background, but I think Hello Kitty is Chinese. I don’t know if I have any Chinese pop. Maybe some of the Fushigi Yuugi stuff, which was set in China. Although, since I am an American gamer, it should probably be some really loud metal. Symphony X. Oh, Miranda Sex Garden! It’s not KMFDM, but it’ll do.

- Work on my Emergent Intelligence raid demo.

I have this wild notion that raids would be more fun if they used the properties of emergent intelligence on the part of the enemies. It’s easy to make a boss fight so powerful that it isn’t any fun, but what if it could adapt itself so that any particular boss fight would always be different, always be a challenge, always require you to know your class well and have good gear, but not be so overwhelmingly hard that it isn’t fun? Because it’s all about being fun and feeling your presence on the raid was important to its success, and then being rewarded with appropriately scaled loot.

Anyway, there’s been a bunch of studies over the past couple of decades on what they call emergent behavior — which basically states that if you have a large population of entities operating with a couple of simple rules, that their behavior as a whole will show signs of intelligence and adaptability. The famous example is flocking behavior. The researcher who discovered this programmed his birds with a couple behaviors — don’t get too close to a neighbor, follow the nearest bird flying in front of you at a certain distance, fly straight otherwise, avoid objects — and noticed that the flock as a whole behaved like flocks do in the real world — wheeling and flying around, sometimes splitting in two and merging back together — a flock being an entity in its own right comprised of individual birds but not controlled by any of them but showing behavior never explicitly programmed.

So I thought we could apply this to raids. Sprinkle a couple dozen low level trash mobs of various classes, each obeying a couple of short rules, along with a boss mob or two with more complex behavior, and then throw a raid at it and see if we can get some emergent behaviors from the enemy force that will give it a sort of rudimentary ability to intelligently fight off the players while giving each player class unique ways of dealing with the threat.

Players would go in knowing generally the abilities of the bosses, since they need to be unique so that raiding doesn’t become purely a randomly-generated encounter (boring, players like to put themselves against the game designers, not a RNG), but with enough random, emergent elements that every fight will be different and challenging. Are the monsters going to try and keep you clustered together and then AE you? Are the mobs just going to keep healing themselves up? Will they all go stealth and attack you from behind? Some deadly combination? Who knows?

So I’ve been wanting to apply emergent behavior to raiding but don’t want to put a lot of effort (read: any effort) into tools development. I used to have a Java applet framework I built for animation back at Harcourt, but Java is passé these days, applets even more so.

Wired had a feature on animated, procedural artwork, and I noticed every single one of them had been animated using a language called “Processing”, and looking at it, it looks cool, but then I got thinking about PyGame, which wouldn’t require me to use any language but the one I love most, Python.

Also, my son is going away to Marines basic training this weekend, so it’s likely I won’t get to the emergent behavior applet. I have to do the HKO one soon because it is due Sunday. Just like school, always waiting until the last moment to do assignments. Mostly because it takes so long to think of good ideas. If I start on something without giving it a good long think, it sucks in the end.

While my son is away to boot camp, though, I’ll have a lot more time in my evenings for Rock Band and games programming, maybe I’ll finally be able to come up with some recent stuff so I can get some ideas into code and attend GDC next year, which would be fun.

I just want to write games so badly.

You can’t just sign up for the Hello Kitty Online beta and expect to get in. Oh, no. You need to make a video explaining why you should be chosen. Here’s the email I got:

Thank you for subscribing to Hello Kitty Online closed beta!

As much as we would like to accommodate all our subscribers, there are only a limited number of accounts to give out. We would like to pick best people to test the game, so this is your chance to tell us why you should be one of the chosen applicants. Here’s how you can get an account:

1. Create an account in SanrioTown.com and log-in.
2. Go to Dream Studio and create a video answering the question “Why do you think you should be selected for the closed beta testing?”..
3. The length of the video should be at least 15 seconds / 3 slides.
4. Include “mmorpg” in the video’s tags.
5. After saving the video, use the “Send video” function at the lower right corner of the page. Input the email address that you’ve used to subscribe for the closed beta account in the “Personal message” field, and send it to mmorpg @ hellokitty.com.
6. Multiple entries are allowed.

All submissions should be sent by 9 March 2008, 23:59 Hong Kong time. You can check out the Dream Studio tutorial (English / Chinese) for help on how to make your video. SanrioTown reserves the right to pick the earliest and best videos based on our own judgment.

SanrioTown reserves the right to pick the earliest and best videos based on our own judgment. Don’t forget to check the Hello Kitty online game site and the official HKO blog for updates.

Hurry! The number of slots is really limited, so be sure to make those videos as soon as possible. Screening will run on a “first come first serve” basis, so don’t miss out on this chance to get a closed beta account! Good luck!

So off a-video-making I go… I’ll post whatever I come up with here….

I know, you all think I am KIDDING about Hello Kitty Online.

I’m not. I’m deadly serious.

Decapitated naked women (now with NIPPLES!!!), or the sheer awesome goodness of Hello Kitty Online?

The screams of the damned or catchy synth bubblegum music that leaves you smiling and dancing in your seat?

Carving chunks of flesh from your thick-thewed foes on the battlefield, or fun games with your friends in a wonderland of sweetness?

In the twenty four hours since the Hello Kitty closed beta signups have been live, they have been completely crushed by interest. I just got an email apologizing for their delay but they have had WAY more interest than they ever expected. They had to close their forums because of TOO MUCH INTEREST.

If the chat we were having when we recorded Witty Ranter #3 last night is any clue, you guys are gonna get mighty lonesome shagging your skanky hos in AoC.

Come join the cute side.

It’ll be fun :)

(Sign up here!)

Looks free to play, financed with an item store — usual for these types of games from the East. You get your own home, your own farm, wide variety of gameplay including mini-games…