This week marks the first official sprint of Team Swanboats' capstone project, on which I am the lead designer. To keep my introduction brief, I'll be posting about our weekly goals and progress as well as my own design process. Should be a pretty exciting year!
In this first stage of the project most of what we're doing is throwing around ideas, discussing them, and seeing what works. Eventually we boiled down our ideas into two solid concepts: a fighting/deckbuilding game and a mole person simulator. The fighting/deckbuilding game resembles a 2D fighting game like Super Smash Brothers, except instead of choosing an existing character each player assembles a fighter from several moves that they choose from a shared pool. The move pool is randomized each match and no move can be picked more than once, so the players have to be flexible and build their "kit" of attacks and defenses around what their opponents are picking. That is, if they want to get a competitive advantage. Alternatively they can just grab whatever they think the coolest moves from the pool are and mash those together, and we're planning on catering to both of these styles of play. The mole person sim, working title Underminers, is another 2D game similar to the Worms series. Each player controls a single mole in a 2D "ant farm" slice of dirt, and has a few tools to dig around and set up traps. Each map has a number of hazards like lava, natural gas, and skeletons, and the goal is to kill the other players by tricking them into one of these hazards. You can set up a trap door that drops an enemy mole into a river, or you can route another mole's tunnels into an active volcano and flood them out with lava. The goal is to have a wide variety of options in an environment that the players can freely interact with.
One thing I really enjoy in games is a sense of discovery and exploration for the player. It helps a lot with replayability, but its also a great tool to keep the player engaged in an otherwise long-winded or complicated design. Unloading a great deal of complexity on a player is usually met with confusion and disinterest, especially when its all rules. If the player isn't having fun or is engaged in some way then they're more likely to drop it and take their time elsewhere. A great example of this is how tutorials in games have evolved over the last decade or two. In System Shock 2 (1999), the tutorial stage of the game takes up a solid half hour of vaguely playable walks between voice recordings, each describing some mechanic, system, or control to the player. It's a lot to handle, and to me it felt like a barrage of information of varying importance. In Bioshock: Infinite (2013), the newest game by the same studio, the tutorial stage of the game is both longer and more interactive. It gradually explains mechanics to the player one at a time with longer stretches in between to let the player explore their environment and the mechanics at their disposal. The connection between the tutorial and the rest of the game in Bioshock: Infinite is seamless and keeps the player receptive to new gameplay later on, while the finality of the training mission at the beginning of System Shock 2 almost makes it seem like "here you go, that's it, that's everything that's in this game now go play it".
The principles of a good tutorial aren't terribly important to us yet, as we're still very deeply in an experimental and iterative stage in the project, but you can see how these ideas of discovery and engagement relate to our designs. If we tried to explain everything about the fighting/deckbuilding game in one go we'd probably just be making a movie, and the mechanics of Underminers are so subjective and dependent on context that explaining the "right" way to ambush and outsmart your friends is basically pointless. I've been working on designing these games in such a way that the player can take them at their own pace and gradually achieve a level of mastery beyond what an info-dump tutorial could teach. The fighting/deckbuilding game has the players interacting with progressively smaller groups of abilities, from a large pool down to the handful of attacks they select for an individual match. The player gets to practice and become familiar with a small subset of the game each time they play, and it eventually adds up as the player learns more about the unique dynamics of certain groups of attacks and how to play with or against them. Underminers on the other hand drops the player into an environment with a simple goal and simple tools, and lets them figure out a plan on their own. New players will likely use the same tactics repeatedly, but as they get more experience with the tools they can branch out into more complicated traps and snares when they feel comfortable with it. The game is open no matter what your speed of acquisition is, and it means the route from one strategy to the next is limited only by your own skill and knowledge rather than an invisible design wall. Hopefully we'll be able to run with this in whichever idea pans out and create an experience both accessible to every player and as deep as they'd like it.
See you again next week, folks
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