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So far the design diaries are still very much in the pre-production phase, where I am trying to sort out my thoughts on what kind of game I want to make, before actually figuring out all the various details. Today I put together my thinking about the incentives games put on players to make decisions and seek goals.
A lot of game design is about applying pressure on the player to create an interesting end state for a game. In a competitive game, the end is important and the pressure is typically another player who is competing against you. For a single player game however, both pressure and end state become important factors that have to be manually shaped. Early on in thinking through Amberspire's design, the question was simple enough - what is pushing the player forward?
My design tendency is to make anything the player is doing important and relevant to the system overall as a whole. I find it very rewarding for the player when all the threads of a design are pulling their strongest towards a single goal, but this can feel overwhelming if every decision has a great importance. Certainly The Banished Vault has this, for better and worse. For Amberspire I don't want decisions to feel pointless but I do want to encourage 'messing around', for lack of a better term.
Pressure
Pressure can be vague so I’ll be specific - essentially I see it as a reason the player should do something, to actively choose one action over another. You take a move to advance a position in chess, because the other player will gain territory if you make a ‘useless’ move. The pressure is in doing one specific action over another, or suffer some penalty. In The Banished Vault, you visit planets with the resources you need, because you have a limited time in the solar system. The ultimate end conditions for a game directly drive these pressures, but as I'll elaborate below, not all of them! Chess is sufficiently interesting with the sole threat of your opponent winning.
For Amberspire, my goal is to have these end state pressures be relatively minimal, to reduce that "every move must count" feeling. This is partly because the game is so dice driven - the consequence of most rolls are fairly mild, and resolving those consequences is not complex or time-consuming. My goal is for a lighter city-builder instead of an intense strategy game where every action has multiple and immediate consequences.
Messing Around
This affords the messing around. I highly value messing around in games of all kinds, and I think the majority of players do too. Messing around in our context is simply taking actions that do not further the player's position in the game towards an end point. This is very straightforward in open world videogames or crpgs - a sidequest. In something like a tabletop rpg, one could argue the entire goal is to mess around. For a board game, which typically has more specific end points and competitors, messing around can be exploring the design space to see what might be possible.
By making dice such a central factor in Amberspire, I am actively embracing messing around. The dice are meant to nudge you around in your pursuit of your goals, and add unpredictability to how your city grows. Even so, because of the generally light pressures on the player, messing around is encouraged. Rolling a bunch of dice and seeing what happens is a perfectly valid way to play the game, and will still result in interesting outcomes. The goal in this early phase of the design was to construct a system that encourages this without feeling like actions are pointless or meant nothing at all.
End States
So, what are the end states and what goals do they give the player? In some ways these are nebulous. There’s certainly a version of this game that is more run-based, where cities fail and the player should try again with better luck and/or strategy. Or, as city builders typically do, there is no strictly defined end goal. Big simulationist city builders end when the player no longer has interest in running this particular city, or eventually the homeostatic processes fail and the city falls to ruin, or both.
Neither of these felt particularly right for Amberspire. I wasn’t making a simulationist game, but I also didn’t want to impose a strong loss condition. I also want to explore a kind of ‘maintenance’ play, where the city does not grow or shrink but still provides challenge and drama for the player. As it stands now, the game does have a demarcated end state, but it's both optional and somewhere between 'totally start over' and 'play forever'.
Without a strong win/loss condition, as a designer I want to be aware of the goals the player will approach the game with. In my notes I outlined what I thought those goals might be, mostly to keep them in mind for myself. Those goals are:
- Expression - designing and organizing the city in a specific manner
- Growth - making as large a city as they can imagine or the game will allow
- Storytelling - narratively interesting events arising from the systems or player actions
- Stability - Creating a city that can handle unexpected events or bad dice rolls
- Luck & Drama - creating a plan that hinges on lucky dice rolls, or generally exploring the dice system
- Efficiency - using only the dice and resources necessary (or a small city) for maximum achievement of other values listed here
Not all of these are equally supported by the game, or given a full suite of tools to explore to the fullest. Nor is this probably a complete list! But early on to give a design some direction or some metric to judge ideas upon, it's a pretty good start.