Start of BGP
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Big Game Project Last week we started working on our game for the Big game project course and boy have I been waitin for this course all year long. I am really excited about the upcoming weeks and it feels good working full time on a game project again. The game is a survival game with real time strategy like elements in it. You control a group of settlers that have decided to build their homes on an island floating above a dangerous jungle. To build their little village the settlers need to go down to this jungle (yes there is an elevator) to gather resources. The jungle is filled with hostile wildlife and the player needs to fighting off the animals to bring the resources up to the island. When enough resources have been gathered houses can be built on the island which will enable the settlers to rest, eat, heal and upgrade themselves. At the start of the course, i.e last week, we had only a vague (vague, as in not so good) idea of what this game actually was. We did some prototyping to test the gathering mechanics, and the initial idea was to have the gathering play out like in your standard RTS-game, e.g Age of Empires. You would command the settler to gather a resource, say wood. He would go to a tree and start chopping it down with an axe, slowly gathering wood. When the settler couldn’t carry more wood he would proceed to walk to the elevator and unload the resources, walk back to the tree and repeat the process. The prototype contained game breaking bugs and lacked a sense of overall goal there was almost nothing to do in game, and we all thought it was kind of dull and that we couldn’t get useful feedback from it. But it did in my opinion do a fine job of test the gathering mechanic we had in mind at that point, and guess what, the gathering was boring as hell. We all thought that if we only could get all the other cool systems we had planed in place (the upgrade system, building houses, combat, day/night cycle, processing resources e.c.t) then the game would be fun! It probably could have been if we had all the time and money in the world, but that we sadly don’t. So while I has at Swedish Games Awards (SGA) conference that weekend I tried to pitch the game to some fellow developers. Robert Graff who works at Freashly Squeezed asked me what the fun was in our game. If you removed all the unnecessary systems like the upgrades which we had focused a lot on, then what made the game fun? I couldn’t give him a clear answer, and I discovered just how broken the core loop was. I could not even pinpoint what our core loop was, let alone what was fun about the game. We had focused so much on all of these systems that was gonna make our game great, that we had forgotten about the core experience. I started thinking about this and on the monday me and lead game designer Marcus Lindholm had a long discussion about the core loop. We realized that there was a huge problem with gathering mechanic and we had to make this as interesting as possible and we decided that the entire game should revolve around the resource gathering. So instead of the gathering mechanic working like in a traditional RTS, we are now going for a similar system to what Don’t starve have. When chopping a tree, smaller logs will spawn from the tree that the player then has to click in order to gather. The player then has to manually walk the settler back to the elevator to unload the resources and here is where we want to engage the player in combat with wildlife. We’ve prototyped this version of the gathering mechanic and we feel like it is way more interesting than the first iteration. However as of now we have not done any playtesting on other people, and I feel like we need to conduct play tests ASPA to get feedback on this mechanic. Hopefully we will do this tomorrow! Next time I’ll write a bit about the combat system i our game. Till then, have a good one! //Johan Holmér  |