Design Pillars

Dev blog – August 13

/ prometheus110 / 1 Comment

Hey, everyone!

…. Alright, I’ll admit that it’s been awhile since my last post here, but I have access to an Oculus Rift again and can get back to work!

In the two weeks since university life has started again, I’ve done a fair amount of work on Small Gods and another project that I’ll be talking about Soon(TM).

For starters, I’ve recently set up a Trello board dedicated to helping me —and the people who’ve foolishly agreed to help me 😀 — follow the basic SCRUM methodology. This was pretty badly needed as previously I’d been doing everything without a real plan and I need to get the game in as good a state as possible within the few months I have left as uni.

SprintBoard.png

As you can see it’s nothing much at the moment, but I’m hoping to properly fill it out as the weeks go on so that everything is in order and everyone knows what they’re doing.

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Small Gods’ Design Pillars

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I have no idea if I’ve done these correctly so here goes nothing. :v

 

1) Approachable:

‘Approachable’ is one of those terms that often gets confused with ‘simple’ by both developers and by players alike, and making a game approachable is one of the hardest things to get right in game design. Making a game more approachable often times means reducing the complexity of a game and that’s often mistaken for making it simple or shallow. However, in reality, making something approachable just reduces the number of steps to get a point in the game whilst maintaining depth. An example of an approachable mechanic that still has depth would be Tropico’s wage management system. Regardless of what you think of the game as a whole, the wage management system present gives players the ability to influence employment across their city by adjusting the wages of labourers in specific buildings by clicking one of two buttons. That system is both easy to learn and has depth, and adding any more controls would simply intimidate most players.

Similarly, I will be aiming to ensure that every design decision I make for Small Gods will result in a system or behaviour that’s presented to players in an easy to understand way and whose implications they can grasp within seconds. Every time I make a decision, I will essentially be asking myself “Can the average person understand what is happening and where this will lead?”

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