So we’re making a crafting game? YUP! We asked Goose Byte game designer Alexandre “Breeze” Brisebois to break down some the “making of” a whole new crafting system from scratch:
“One of the challenges which has come up while working on our crafting system is the idea of crafting in context. Traditional crafting – where a player builds a thing inside the world – has a lot of natural feedback: when I’m building a house or an outpost I can see the area I’m building in and build around obstacles. If I need to build a bridge I know when I’ve hit the other side because I can see it. But by moving some of the crafting into an external space (i.e. into a Workshop) it can be easy to make mistakes in the details you would see naturally in the world.
Our approach attempts to alleviate repetition in crafting by letting players create reusable drafts, but it’s natural (and desirable for a game) that every problem doesn’t have the exact same solution. Balancing crafting around eliminating repetition in the broad strokes and helping players focus on the details that need to be changed is a fun design challenge, both for the UX of the workshop and build modes, and how we're building the environment you’ll be exploring.
We’ve been hard at work on UX improvements for the Workshop and Build modes lately and the work has been paying off. As we improved the UX we saw different members of the team not only produce different kinds of drafts, but watching them use the workshop… It's like seeing inside their thought process.
Watching new members of the team try the crafting for the first time, or seeing what kind of habits the old hands have developed has been very affirming because it’s showcasing a lot of variety. Even in the early stages it’s clear that our crafting system lends itself to individual expression and I can’t wait to see what kinds of drafts players will share once they get their hands on the system.”
What do you think? Who did it better?
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- Goose Byte