I designed a handful of new interactions for the game, unique to each region and resource node. These special upgrades will sit further in the upgrade trees and change the way the harvesting feels when unlocked. The goal is to really push the differentiation between regions so that each one can stand on its own, without having the player feel like they are repeating themselves. This is a core challenge to creating interesting content games on a smaller resource budget. There's two types of content that can go into the game. One is play content, and the other is mechanical content. Play content is, as suggested by the name, more theatrical, more in presentation and performance. Play content encompasses story, levels, and is presented to the player in a form that resembles storytelling. With play, the player has more things to do. Creating play content feels like a 1:1 endeavor. That is, every moment has to be handcrafted. That goes from creating the characters to writing the lines of dialogue, to sequencing out the level progression. Mechanical content is more about the designing of interesting, repeatable game interactions. Mechanics are akin to toys. With toys, a player can take time to feel, explore, discover. And to find joy in the toy's feedback. What else can the toy do? Does it act differently in a different context? Toys are the mechanics that take a players input and distills it into a clear output This distinction is important as the I think about continued work on Grindy Gacha. Because I need to strike a good balance between the two. If I lean too much on just Play Content, then the game will be heavily scripted, depend on the strength of the storytelling and plot beats and production value. For an indie project, pushing the production value is the hardest part! We often have to make tradeoffs here, opting for style and economy over high resolution polish. So, I'm looking to strike that balance by putting substantial work on the mechanical side of things. Making everything in the game toy-like so that even simple, repetitive gameplay can be fun (even if for a short while). At the end of the day I do want players to stay and play for more hours -- and have those be super enjoyable hours! My prototype was just a 20 minute experience for what felt like a helluva lot of work. So when I think that the full game has to be about 10x bigger it is daunting. Framing the development roadmap as Play vs Mechanics helps me understand what part of the process I'm in, and how far I am from a complete design. We are really just scratching the surface on it with the 5 basic resource nodes. They have a nice unique interaction pattern, and yes I can add more and more juice to make playing with it feel exciting and the rewards substantial. But there's still second tier, potentially third tier resources, and a host of other systems to create and hook up. I did talk about the other features in passing - heroes, gacha, quests, collections. My ambition for these is that they will feel like a natural extension of the game space. That they can stand on their own as fun toys, too. So the question on my mind today is, how do I make pulling gacha more toy-like? How do I do the same for a Hero roster, or for Questing? These features are fairly common in the classic RPG design, what can we do to make each one fun to interact with as a system?
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gamedevlog #011 - Incremental, Multiplicative, and Special Upgrades
I designed a handful of new interactions for the game, unique to each region and resource node. These special upgrades will sit further in the upgrade trees and change the way the harvesting feels when unlocked. The goal is to really push the differentiation between regions so that each one can stand on its own, without having the player feel like they are repeating themselves. This is a core challenge to creating interesting content games on a smaller resource budget. There's two types of content that can go into the game. One is play content, and the other is mechanical content. Play content is, as suggested by the name, more theatrical, more in presentation and performance. Play content encompasses story, levels, and is presented to the player in a form that resembles storytelling. With play, the player has more things to do. Creating play content feels like a 1:1 endeavor. That is, every moment has to be handcrafted. That goes from creating the characters to writing the lines of dialogue, to sequencing out the level progression. Mechanical content is more about the designing of interesting, repeatable game interactions. Mechanics are akin to toys. With toys, a player can take time to feel, explore, discover. And to find joy in the toy's feedback. What else can the toy do? Does it act differently in a different context? Toys are the mechanics that take a players input and distills it into a clear output This distinction is important as the I think about continued work on Grindy Gacha. Because I need to strike a good balance between the two. If I lean too much on just Play Content, then the game will be heavily scripted, depend on the strength of the storytelling and plot beats and production value. For an indie project, pushing the production value is the hardest part! We often have to make tradeoffs here, opting for style and economy over high resolution polish. So, I'm looking to strike that balance by putting substantial work on the mechanical side of things. Making everything in the game toy-like so that even simple, repetitive gameplay can be fun (even if for a short while). At the end of the day I do want players to stay and play for more hours -- and have those be super enjoyable hours! My prototype was just a 20 minute experience for what felt like a helluva lot of work. So when I think that the full game has to be about 10x bigger it is daunting. Framing the development roadmap as Play vs Mechanics helps me understand what part of the process I'm in, and how far I am from a complete design. We are really just scratching the surface on it with the 5 basic resource nodes. They have a nice unique interaction pattern, and yes I can add more and more juice to make playing with it feel exciting and the rewards substantial. But there's still second tier, potentially third tier resources, and a host of other systems to create and hook up. I did talk about the other features in passing - heroes, gacha, quests, collections. My ambition for these is that they will feel like a natural extension of the game space. That they can stand on their own as fun toys, too. So the question on my mind today is, how do I make pulling gacha more toy-like? How do I do the same for a Hero roster, or for Questing? These features are fairly common in the classic RPG design, what can we do to make each one fun to interact with as a system?
gamedevlog #010 - Resource Harvesting via Game, Board, Source nodes
End of the month update here, with progress made on the resource harvesting part of the game. I've gotten the preliminary UI layout setup and a couple of working sections (Wallet UI, Timer & Game Board sections). So the player can grind now! Each resource has a different 'playstyle' so to say. Instead of having every harvest by a click, I've designed 5 different resource harvesting mechanics, which makes each one feel different an unique. The stardust is harvested by simple click and hold, just like in the prototype. The resin is generated on a growth timer, like a waiting for a plant. The coolant is filled and processed automatically, it's a set and forget type. The sparks are gathered from charging the red shard, and each spark must be collected after it flies out. Lastly, the dots are created by clicking on the vertices of a shape to trace the symbol. I also have 2 basic upgrades working! They are the basic ones for Amount and Hold Time, which make harvesting faster. Each source has a list of parameters that can be manipulated, and these are all going to be used for the upgrades system. There is support for multiple resource types as an upgrade cost, so the progression will not be tied to one currency. More to come now that the system is set up, it is a matter of iterating on the design and hooking up the properties.
Early Grindy Gacha UI
These are the first three versions of the Grindy Gacha UI. You can see the progression in both layout and node choice as I learned the capabilities of Godot.
In the prototype versions of the UI, I focus mainly on setting up buttons, as these were the interact elements that I was familiar with, and you can see this full prototype dashboard view is full of all the buttons that I would need in the game. That was essentially how I built the prototype by linking all these buttons to the game script. My idea for the dashboard view was that everything would be visible at a glance this wasn't designed for a player, but for designers to understand what the game mechanics were so everything was on the screen, and there were some hints of extended list for the menus and arrows to suggest tabs or sections to keep things organized. It was all menus and horizontal boxes and vertical boxes.
When I was getting ready to ship the prototype, I had to make a lot of adjustments to the V1 UI mainly hiding all of the unnecessary UI elements that would distract the playtesters from the core gameplay.
So there was a lot of work to hook up heroes in the code. Only the ones the players acquired were made to show up. I hid features that weren't available in the prototype such as items and cards. And the prototype would start with a fairly empty screen only showing the player the early grinding forging in gacha actions and a little bit of the story elements.
Features became unlockable. I hid the research and prize sections, they were no longer available or visible to the player at the start and players would have to pay a little gold or make progress towards their missions to unlock them.
After cleaning up the UI, the prototype became a lot more readable to playtesters, and I could focus their attention towards the core gameplay experience.
And finally, this is image below the UI mock up for the pre-Alpha version that I'm currently building. The biggest difference is that I'm using mostly color rectangles to block out all the buttons and shapes, and that I learned how to anchor containers to the corners of the screen.
My favorite part about using color is that I can actually paint in the visual hierarchy to the scene instead of all the buttons looking the same. By me setting a color and a shape, the interactive elements can have a different texture and quality to them just .
I also started using tab containers. This is something I learned from developing the main menus and settings menus. The tap containers let me compartmentalize different expandable and minimize minimize UI sections. I did this to the upgrades and heroes sections in the corners. This lets me easily hide collapsible UI groups so that there's more room for the core gameplay and that the player can choose when they actually want to interact with these supporting features.
This layer is what I'm going to build off of for the alpha built as I move into pre-alpha production work. in this version the game isn't interactable yet, but I can already get a good sense of how each feature is presented to the player, how much screen space they might take up or have room for, and also be able to think about making sure all the context is presented to the player when needed.
These are the procreate exploration sketches for the screen. I talk more about them in my last video but I can explain really quickly here the basic thought process.
The core gameplay experience is going to be front and center perhaps bounded in a box and that leaves a room for the UI elements to take the space of the left right and bottom of the screen.
I try a few variations each one touching on different feature types so the first hear with gotcha front and center and the main feature on the left with the map on the right
The second one is more about requesting layout where I'm showing the progress for quest on the left side of the screen. Each quest has four little pips to show the party members that are assigned and then in the center of the screen is a quest party staging area where the player can make adjustments to their team before dispatching.
The third one is a variation on the last where the staging area can be expanded which covers the core window in the center and on the left and right I was playing a little more with different shapes so you see more triangles and and inspector profile for heroes on the right
This is just a simple map with large icons representing each region
The thinner rectangles on the margin allow more screen space in the center for featured gameplay
I threw in a little character, hero sketch here I rather like this one I might go ahead and do a full render
This example of all the navigation being on the left, and then the player having a pop-up tool tip when clicking on impracticable or upgradable things so this pop up in the center of the screen shows upgrades and detail details about the upgrade
And get in these last two images, I marked up a relationship conversation between two characters and also a larger version of the prototype style opening of gotcha boxes.
gamedevlog #009 - Main Menu Flow and Mock Screen sketches
This week I got a cool main menu working with all the flashy elements like splash screens and parallax camera viewing a starfield. It's all pixely placeholder art but that's the aesthetic that I'm going for to make it feel like an retro style GBA era game. The Grindy Gacha logo plays on the star theme elements and the night sky does as well. It will be so cool when I get the shooting stars and gacha animations going. For the main menu flow, the player can choose continue if they have a save file, or start a new game which automatically saves to a new save slot. I'm so excited to start on the visual work for the game, it's really a step up from the plain UI prototype, and with the UI mock up screens I'm working on next, it's starting to take shape. I drew the mockups in Procreate with the Kestrel Pen brush, and will be taking them into Clip Studio Paint for cleanup and creation of placeholder UI assets.
Ami & Ito
Casual Patrol. Ami.
Just sweeping the streets, checking up on things, not watching you in particular.
Some days I don't feel like putting on the uniform.
Sherry Magpie. Ito.
Definitely giving you a weird look.
gamedevlog #008 - Playable Prototype
I finished the prototype! Last week was soo soo busy adding the final features and cleaning up the entire experience into something a brand new player could play through for the first time. I did get feedback and 1 playtester and that was very helpful to identify what I needed to focus on UX-wise. The new gameplay systems demonstrated here today are the Research, Prizes, Collection, and Story text. It took a lot of iteration to get each one working, especially as I wanted the new player experience to be as clear as possible. There were also so many tweaks to the tuning, I chose to lean into fast upgrades and fast progress. My target of 30 minutes is to make sure anyone can play it in one sitting, and that it would be hard to feel stuck making no progress. What finally clicked in the game for me was seeing heroes complete quests more quickly, and also seeing all the pips on the screen fly towards my resource wallet. It was so satisfying to see a stream of placeholder coins flying and the number going up. And when heroes get high level enough, their quests start clearing within seconds! It gets really crazy and that's core to the fun. I share in this video the final version of the playtest experience. Next up is laying the groundwork engineering foundation for the full game experience. I do have some additional things I want to talk about my prototyping experience, so I'd like to create do a postmortem on the prototype and maybe a video on how to start, develop, and improve a short 30 minute playable game. I know I showed the entire game in the video so there wont be any surprises, but if you're interested in getting your hands on the prototype or want to be a part of future playtests, join the discord and we can chat and get you on the list.
gamedevlog #007 - Stories, Regions, More Heroes
Short snippets of story were added to the game so it talks to the player as they make progress through it. There's an intro blurb and some semblance of a mission objective hinted at to set them on their next task. I play through about 20 minutes of the prototype and voice my thoughts on how development is progressing.
Regions are set up with 5 heroes each, unique resources per region, and their own set of upgrades! Now I'm working towards the final stretch of finishing the prototype.
I do show the spaghetti code, it's quite a mess but I'll be cleaning up after I move onto the next step! Onwards!
Syx & Pam
Scarfy Elf. Syx.
Collecting stripes for bonus agility.
Novice Adventurer. Pam.
I wanted a heavier fit with a long skirt but let's save that for her level-up!
I wanted a heavier fit with a long skirt but let's save that for her level-up!
Nia & Jan
Crystal Caster. Nia.
Drew from my memories of the classic GBA Fire Emblem casters and their signature capes. So many parts to this were challenging to figure out! Would be fun to animate
Moon Huntress. Jan.
Moonlight over shadows. Melding ideas from 2008 to figure out this one.
Axy & Tal
Space Cyberpunk. Axy R.
She has a gun. She has some armor. She shoots in space: Stellar Shooter.Done with character 1! Had to stop here with b/w version in my process. It's been so long since I've colored that I need a full refresher and some levelling up
Urban Fantasy. Tal
She probably works at the regional 'library'.
I drew this one faster, without a vivid concept so the outfit is rather plain. I like the bracers, they might do things.
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