Welcome to the first of many development diaries for ZOR: Pilgrimage of the Slorfs! The plan is to release a new diary every two weeks, from now up to the eventual release.
It seems like the best place to start is:
What is the vision?
The inspiration for ZOR was a confluence of three separate things I couldn’t stop thinking about. Anyone who had lunch with me around that time would be sick of hearing these things over and over.
- “I want to make a game that feels like the first 50 turns of Civilization for the entire game. Where the decisions are simple but have a huge impact (like building library or walls) and the snowball effect hasn’t taken over yet. Every time you play its a new puzzle using familiar elements”
- “Survival games appeal to me, but wish it didn’t have to be as tedious. Like, 100 sticks? I would love to see it concentrated down to board game mechanics where picking up a single stick vs stone is as monumental and tense as a turn in Agricola”
- “The breadth of stone age tech is so huge and just gets skipped over by most games. I want a game that never reaches metallurgy, where weaving is like discovering electricity” (Was reading clan of the cave bear, and binging on primitive technology videos at this time)
Over time these merged into the general vision of:
Survival with the feel of a board game
This meant a turn based take on the familiar survival elements of gathering, crafting, and managing vitals. What would that experience be like? My dream version was like this:
- Chess like decisions: Simple, deep and tense because there is a huge impact.
- Tenuous balance between survival and combat layers, you cannot ignore either
- The game rewards thinking ahead, mastery and knowledge of content
- Designed to be resistant to min maxing and metagaming
- Puzzles to solve naturally emerge each turn
- Each element like cards and resources have value and meaning
The next question I grappled with was:
What kind of systems and rules could achieve this?
- Small numbers
- Smaller, manageable scale
- Hex grid map, since survival is tactical, and the outdoors is organic
- Cards for crafting and collecting, since a board game would undoubtedly. Maybe they could drive the tactics on the board rather than just be an inventory?
The vision became a plan. More specifically:
A tactical survival game, driven by a deck of cards.
And more ambitiously, that deck of cards represents the actions the Slorfs take, and also the objects you gather and craft. (this part took remaking the core game about three times to get right)
I will finish off with some additional things that excite us about a game where cards drive the action on a hex map:
- The formula has been used in board games, but less common in video game space, so it would be fresh.
- Cards have an elegant way of adding randomness and keeping the decisions manageable, with a consistent rhythm. One by one you work your way through a gauntlet of new and puzzling decisions
- Combining card play, a smaller scale, and the survival layer, solve a common issue with grid based combat games where movement can be tedious in between the action. Moving an army of units to the exit tiles anyone? Or how about walking across the map over 6 turns to attack that one remaining unit? The click-move-click-move moment is an anti-vision.
- Card relationships with the map, rather than typical card to card synergies in deckbuilders, could be more resistant to the game being solved. When and where to use a card on a procedural map can be fun forever like those first 50 turns of Civilization. Card synergies are amazingly fun, but over time tends to fall into a pattern of knowing the obvious choice and starts to feel scripted.
There is big value in thinking a few steps ahead
Finally, being Righteous Hammer, it has to be this wild early 80s style fantasy setting which mixes cute and creepy, light hearted and dark. Think Dark Crystal, Secret of Nimh, Labyrinth, and so on. Like, you might want to pet the Slorfs but they would bite your arm off.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And please, share your thoughts on our demo and this vision for ZOR!
Next time we will get into some specifics in an overview of the game and how its played, we hope you enjoy the demo.