What's Micro Missions?

A LMOG (Lightly Multiplayer Online Game) that aims to bridge the gap between Social games and Party games by combining mini-games into story-based missions, and allowing people to play those missions together both synchronously and asynchronously.

In most mini-game collections, the individual games are either pass/fail or score-based. The mini-games in Micro Missions instead have a qualitative effect on the overarching world and story. For example, some mini games may allow you to travel in the world, while others are fighting mini-games to resolve conflicts with enemies, and others represent side-quests of a sort. At the same time, these games also take input from the overworld - where you are at the moment, whether you have encountered an enemy, what actions are available in the current location and story context, etc.

These mini-games are tied together into missions, and each mission outlines a story through the sequence of mini-games and short informational cut-scenes. Particular missions are based on encoded templates that define what the goal is, what the different roles are, and what must happen along the way. For example, the Hero’s Journey can be encoded into a very flexible and scalable template for missions (but not all missions have to be based on the Hero’s Journey).

The social aspect of the game is tied into how the individual missions intertwine and work together in the overarching world. Since these missions all take place in one big but unified world, players will often encounter the effects of other players’ actions, whether it is recurring characters, passages that have been closed off or opened up by other player, or other, more subtle changes to the world. Friends can also play together synchronously: they can go through the same mission, co-op style, or encounter each other asymmetrically: imagine if one player is the villain, throwing stones in a throwing mini-game, while the other player is trying to dodge these stones in a dodging mini-game.

The mini-game collection aspect of the game also lends itself naturally to social play: acquiring, collecting, trading and showing off individual mini-games are all extremely social activities.

Selecting mission templates, populating the missions with particular mini-games, and reacting dynamically to player actions will be the main source of “intelligence” in the system, and the major research topic in this project.

We want to build this game using HTML5 and related technologies, with hooks for both facebook and Google+. HTML5 would also allow us to extend the game to mobile platforms in the future. We also want to use Flash as a prototyping tool (for developing the mission architecture) and as a fallback in case the relatively new HTML5 technologies prove to be unsuitable for this game.