I don't spend many of these devlogs talking about design philosophy (though it happens regularly in our discord). Today’s topic is worth talking through carefully, even for my own sake.
MoteMancer has two mid-game flow points that could be better:
- End-Game Structures - like Sovereign Manaheart, Slipway, and Cloudspring Fountain - require keystones from two planes, which in itself is not problematic, but it does mean you also need interplanar logistics of some sort to start researching them, which adds several hours at minimum.
- Automation puzzles on each plane can feel samey once you’ve already solved a similar pattern on a previous plane. The logistics puzzle is still unique, but the production chain itself can feel repetitive.
Both of these problems feel like there's a single solution to fix them together, but it turns out there is a lot of nuance. It wasn't until my 6th or so idea that I finally came to a solution that felt like an actual improvement rather than a side-grade.
Immediate consequences
The simple starting point to solve bullet 2 from, above is to require combo-element Structures as ingredients. Easy. Let's take Life/Water as our test case - this means that Verdant Streams and Primordial Manawells would become ingredients for Verdant Deltas and Coral Pools. That solves our 'make something more complex than an elemental prism' problem, but already reveals two issues: requiring the automation of Manawells just to get Verdant Deltas seems a bit extreme, and even if we swapped Deltas and Manawells, it's a little weird because you think of Verdant Streams as a precursor to Deltas conceptually. We'll get back to that, because there's another issue lurking.
Should you get End-Game Structures on your first Plane at all? This is tough because I want players to enjoy using powerful Structures, but I also think that your first Plane already has so much to offer - you are learning 3 elements (not to mention the game as a whole), and visiting your second Plane should be a goal in your mind sooner than later in general. For the sake of argument, let’s assume visiting a second Plane should be required - how do we do that?
Exploring Paths
All of design is tradeoffs, so let's talk through some of the ways to achieve our goal of second Plane:
- Require Keystones for the legs of research - Verdant Streams take Life Keystones; Manawells take Water Keystones. This is elegant because it naturally gates the later researches, and was my favored plan for a while, but has many downsides. You guarantee that you split the kits up for synthesis research - your first plane would get Verdant Streams OR Manawells, not both, worse you wouldn't get Verdant Deltas at all until plane 2. That can be fine, but then you need to assign which of the two pieces are most useful to one element or the other. For some this was an easy sell, like Fire rituals from Blazecaps belong to Fire, where Ritual size from Radiantshrooms belong to Shadow. Others are kind of iffy - does Earth want Burrowroots and Rooted Grippers as much as life does? Does gating either of them by a Plane make sense? Does gating even one of them behind Keystone research make sense? It feels like we are solving a problem, even elegantly, but making just as many new ones.
- Require researching Coral Pool simply but on each Plane - This would be something like a Life Keystone requirement on the Life plane and a Water Keystone requirement on the Water plane. This solves the not needing interplanar logistics problem, but now you have to automate the lesser ingredients twice, which taps back into the samey vibe we were trying to avoid. Plus it's a lot of extra UI to explain it.
- Allow research from multiple Altars to contribute - This is a really cool idea actually, where you have a global or phased Altar that can take ingredients from any plane and combine them into a given single research recipe. While awesome, this is a pretty significant paradigm shift, and feels better left to an Affix or something. Yay picking up ideas along the way to solving a problem though.
- Contextually change the recipe depending on your starting plane - So in this case Coral Pools would take Water Keystones (and the smaller Structures) if you started on Life, but then change to Life Keystones if you started on Water. We're getting close, this solves all the earlier tech and elegantly solves the last tech, but the kit would feel super weird. Why does this Ultimate Combo research only require one of the constituent elements?
- Requires Completely Restoring a Life/Water Portal - getting even closer now, this proves that you can automate Life and Water Keystones without requiring them together, and has a reasonable fantasy to it, but it's still a little detached. It's still a good option and feels like we're giving up the least so far, mostly what you pay is a forced pacing moment (restore the way back even if you are not planning on using it right now).
After exploring all of these options...
The Simplest Path might be the Right One
What if we literally just say - Locked until entering a second Plane - and put a lock icon on the research itself. This has several nuanced benefits:
- Incredibly clean and clear UI.
- Plants a clear goal without a tutorial.
- Opens up Two End-Game Structures at the same time (Coral Pool and Cloudspring Fountain will both be available upon setting foot into Water). Giving you a little more to explore and enjoy.
- Ties back into how Entropy currently works, where traveling to a new plane changes the world state (and in this case, how aggressive Entropy and Rifts are).
- Leaves all the simpler structures free and clear to be categorized in whatever way makes sense.
This feels very clean and lives up to Shigeru Miyamoto's - "A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once." I think it's important to highlight how many ideas you can riffle through that seem good at first glance, but have undesirable cascading consequences as you think through them.
I guess I'm full of quotes today but I'm reminded of "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one." Design is the same way - the simplest and most elegant solution often requires the most amount of time and thought.
Experimental Up Soon!
So this whole story is a long way of saying - I wanted to shore up this research and pacing problem before moving on to Affixes because its a significant structural change, and it's worth having it available for testing while building towards the full update. To that end, I'm also going to make the alphatest feedback channel in the discord public - making it private was sort of an old habit that no longer makes sense. This way you can see the conversations happening even if you aren't actively participating.
MoteMancer runs on community feedback so feel free to comment here or join the discord. And I just want to say that design is always 'the best idea I have right now' and is always open to improvement. The Experimental branch with new research will be up soon - look out for a minor patch update!
Back to the lab 🌿
~CyanAvatar