Week 42 review

This week we made our first prototype of our game. We focused heavily on or two goals; to have an interesting exploring mechanic and to generate a race for resources between players.

Originally we had an idea that was very focused around a cave. This week however we scaled most of that back in order to get base level systems we can test on their own merit. This has made our system much more modular, the theme of exploring as part of a race for resources can be used in many settings other than mining a cave. One example we imagine is the colonialism era where the European superpowers competed through exploration for the rights to various resources. You could also have completely fictional settings if you imagine the resource-race aspect of Star Craft or Heroes of Might and Magic singled out.

Having the first prototype feature only the necessary elements; we can now test and polish so that these elements become more powerful and stable if we for example want to go on to build a cave-based game using our system.

We do still have much testing and revising to do though, as our first testing session showed us that the sabotaging features of our game works poorly. Sabotaging in the game is basically just a drain at this point both for the player performing the sabotage and for the subject they attack. This lead to our testers feeling that the optimal way to play the game was to avoid player interaction altogether and focus on exploring your own corner.

This, of course, is unfortunate. What we really want in the game I feel is a curve looking somewhat like the one in Settlers, where the players experience steady growth towards the goal of winning the game. This growth, once there, cannot be removed, but players will use part of their resources to increment their own progress towards the goal and part of their resources to slow down other player’s progress. Getting this balance right is incredibly important. You don’t want your game to end up in a look down the way we felt abduction tended to do, and at the same time you don’t want the players to feel their is no meaningful interaction between players to be had in the game.

So to recap; we have much work to do, but I think we have a good foundation to work from.