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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Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
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.
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.
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!
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