Hello everyone!
It’s time for another Foundry Friday post. Today I, mrmcduck, will talk about what I’m currently spending most of my time on: Content. A word everyone knows in relation to video games, but what exactly is content?
The way I see it, a video game is mostly split in two categories: Mechanics & Content. Put simply, Mechanics define the ruleset which can be used to create the content.
Examples for mechanics in FOUNDRY would be big things like our building system, the power system, how crafting recipes work, the conveyor belt and loader system but also smaller things like personal elevators, scanning for ore or the jetpack.
While content on the other hand is simply coming up with all the machines, items, crafting recipes and trying to balance them in a way that makes it a fun experience to play.
In particular my work has been revolving around two different tasks:
- Reworking & polishing the old content.
- Generating new content.
So let’s have a look at those two tasks!
Content Rework
Why I generate more content is pretty obvious, but you might wonder why am I reworking some of the existing content? Our game was available for a while in a pre-alpha state and our team was able to gather tons of feedback. This feedback helped us identify where our content had problems and where it worked fine. I have been tackling the areas where our content needs improvement. Here are the key issues we identified, sorted by severity.
Too many mechanics introduced too close together
Many players got frustrated by the pacing of new mechanics. Sometimes the game dragged along where you had to build up lots of regular building chains (going through content), and then it suddenly introduced a lot of mechanics at the same time, here’s our worst example:
Producing steel required Ignium, something that could only be found deep underground, so the game had to introduce personal elevators, freight elevators, underground mining and new machines (the crusher) at the same time. On top of the complexity it also took a long time to build that all up before you get a reward.
Another, albeit a less drastic example would be our game start where low voltage and high voltage power were introduced very closely together, causing confusion for some players.
So what I am trying to do is spread the introduction of new mechanics into similar paced intervals, providing a less frustrating and more entertaining path through our content.
Overly complex or expensive recipes
This one is easy to explain, some things were just a little excessive in complexity, meaning it took a very long time to build up its production lines. For recipe complexity it matters that there are rewards in regular intervals:
Let’s say the recipe to craft Steel is complex, but as soon as you are done you unlock new buildings, giving you a reward as soon as you gain your first Steel. Later on the recipe for Machinery Parts requires Steel and on top of that is additionally complex for other reasons, that is fine too as the steel production is already built up.
However let’s assume the recipe for both Steel and Machinery Parts is unlocked at the same time and there is no isolated use for Steel, that would mean you have a very time consuming task just for the Machinery Part production. It would be way more frustrating because the time spent before a reward might be too long.
This might seem more of a perfectionist problem to solve, and while it partially is, such things are not to be underestimated in regards to the players feeling while progressing through the game.
Limited ingredient or machine usage
Some items and machines had very limited use, with our redesign I plan to be more conscious about not having machines that only do a single task. This fortunately gets easier as the overall content amount increases.
Minor Changes
I’m not going into full detail on this point as it would end up in a long list of short problems, but there is a lot more to polish than the mentioned points above. I’ll provide a few examples:
- I tried to create a better onboarding experience by making sure the first hour of the game is easy to understand.
- Certain things got simplified, f.i. having four different ways to make Xenoferrite Plates was just too much.
- Other things got more depth, f.i. a boiler and turbine setup for power generation instead of a single generator machine.
- Some technologies were moved, f.i. solar panels are now only unlocked much later. While they seem like the obvious choice for easy to use energy at start, most people just had an extremely frustrating first couple nights with powerless factories.
- Lot’s of balancing changes, especially recipe costs: Let’s face it, waiting until conveyor belts and building blocks (foundation) are crafted is no fun, I made both really cheap so that you don’t feel constrained in your creativity.
Most of our existing content rework is done at this point, the result so far? The initial hours of the game feel a lot better and should provide a more coherent gameplay experience. The pacing behind the introduction of new mechanics is more evenly spread and the next reward isn’t far away in most cases. It’s worth noting that a lot of improvements have been made by adding or modifying mechanics, but this is not the topic of today's Foundry Friday post.
New Content
So let’s have a look at what you all want to know most: What’s new and what’s coming at the mid and endgame?
We already announced the Assembly Lines, a feature where we visualize the manufacturing process of various end products. We continue to stay silent about what the end product you’ll be making is, but I can tell you the following: It’s high-tech and it has lots of room for different variants. Given that, we are going to venture into production of typical high-tech products like advanced electronics (processing units and alike), specialized metallurgic goods (precision parts) and other things required to create high-end sci-fi products.
Expect ores, machines and production methods around such a theme. We will also continue to expand on heavy industry with large buildings like the blast furnaces.
There are endless details I could go into, but I will save this for another day's blog. Instead of that I want to conclude with a little insight on how I come up with new content.
Content Generation
Coming up with new content can both be easy and super tricky. And it’s different all the time, depending on so many variables and circumstances.
When I work on coming up with new content I try to combine the following requirements:
- Sticking to my vision for the game and what it should be about.
- Keeping in mind which game mechanics are available, need to be introduced or need additional content.
- Making sure the player will have a positive experience progressing through the content.
Most of the time those three things fight each other. Sometimes the vision is way too ambitious and the mechanics don’t support it, or sometimes the mechanics do support it, but it won’t be fun at all for the player. Sometimes you have the almost perfect mix of content and mechanics, but it seems like it simply doesn’t fit the narrative.
Here’s an example, one of the key mechanics in FOUNDRY is our Minecraft like voxel terrain system, therefore we want it to appear early, showing players how our game is different to competitors. So this would count as the 3rd point, we know what player experience we are aiming for. But introducing elevators and complex underground mining mechanics after just an hour of play time? Very bad idea, doesn’t work at all with the 2nd point. Those advanced technologies should also require steel instead of metal, so the narrative (the 1st point) isn’t matching either.
I solved this by changing the depth of the first underground ore vein, so that it can be reached with regular drilling instead of requiring advanced technology. Now all requirements are met. This may sound like a trivial task, but such things often take days of iteration and playtesting before you finally figure it out!
But that example was extremely mechanics-related, so let’s have a look about how I generate content that isn’t so heavily constrained by mechanics and player experience. Right now I’m working on our oil-equivalent called Olumite and how it’s processed into other goods. Here I just want to create an hour or two of playtime, so I need to come up with items, liquids, machines, crafting recipes and a science unlock progression.
I tend to start off by gathering information about real-life equivalents. Even if our game is sci-fi and I could make up whatever I want, I firmly believe that things feel better if you have a loose connection to what could exist in reality. It makes things easier to understand and remember as you can relate to it, otherwise you would be forced to remember my made-up thing. While working on FOUNDRY I read hundreds of articles about industry, manufacturing and material science just to get a feeling about such things.
Once I have the understanding of how it works in reality I try to adapt it into what makes sense for our game, I do replace certain parts to mix things up and to make it closer into what fits the gameplay loop. In my head there is a lot of (basic) lore about ore types and what characteristics they possess and why our crafting recipes ultimately make sense (mostly!). One day I will add that information to our info database.
From here on I lay it all out in various internal tools, mostly charting software where you can quickly visualize production chains and progression trajectories. During this step I evaluate a lot, make sure it’s neither too simple nor too complex, trying to avoid all the pitfalls I wrote about above that made content reworks necessary and most importantly of all I try to create something that feels cool and entertaining. There is no specific process on achieving this, I just try things until I’m happy with them - often I do this while going for a walk.
Once I’m happy with what I see in my charting software I add it to the game and build it once to see how it feels. And only after that I start looking at the actual numbers like input/output item count, machine speed, science costs,... For all of those I have custom-written software to assist me, for example showing how certain machine speeds match various conveyor belt speeds. Getting the numbers right is one of the hardest but fortunately also most forgiving parts of the process - it’s easy to modify and tune afterwards, also it’s not a disaster if some things don’t match perfectly. I try to create machine speeds and ratios that add up nicely, but it’s never possible to come up with numbers that work all the time in any case.
The final step of creating content is doing several independent internal playtests to ensure it’s all ready for a wider audience at the experimental branch.
I initially planned to write a way shorter post but it looks like I got carried away sharing what I do most at the moment. I enjoyed shedding some light into a topic most developers rarely talk about and I hope you have enjoyed reading it.
This wraps it up for today's FOUNDRY FRIDAY post,
-mrmcd