I regularly see people talk about worldbuilding best-practices, typically with a warning against simulationist or overly detailed worlds.
The idea is to have interesting stories to tell in that world, right? So focus on that, rather than endlessly detailing how many centuries ago the elven court left for the high hills.
There's a few things to talk about here. The first is:
Yes. That is good practice. To me, the most critical thing about a world is how well it supports on-theme stories. That said...
Obsessive, detailed worldbuilding is fine.
We're talking about worldbuilding as the process an author goes through, not as the world is revealed to an audience in the final product. Obviously, including lots of dumb details in the final product is bad writing... but those details aren't necessarily bad worldbuilding.
One reason to worldbuild is to experiment with the boundaries of what's possible in the world. When developing a world, it's often unclear what the unique elements of the world allow. If you have a special kind of magic, or an unusual technology, or even something as simple as just a slightly deep dive on a particular social issue, it's often unclear where it will lead.
So you explore it. You detail out all the things that seem interesting and unique about this world. In the process, you realize there's something unique about the way this culture evolves, or an interesting take on the theme of family, or whatever else you can dig up while you're rooting around.
Filling the stories you tell with details nobody cares about is bad writing. Similarly, sticking to a fiction you've invented when you can replace it with something more powerful is bad writing. But those are bad writing, not bad worldbuilding.
When some obsessive worldbuilder shows you a ream of notes on the world they've invented, they're not showing you a finished story.
Maybe that's not how you work. Maybe you don't need to explore those ideas, because you already know where you're going to go 100%. It's a different process, but one doesn't invalidate the other.
Like a cartoonist with three pens talking to a painter: the cartoonist doesn't rag on the painter for their endless paint supplies and brush variants. It's understood that the two have completely different approaches.
Sure, the painter might suck.
The cartoonist might suck, too.
Another reason to worldbuild is to fill up the author's "working imagination": to make the world feel real to them. Some make the mistake of thinking that the notes they take can give someone else the same "working imagination", and then they get yelled at for misunderstanding how writing works.
... That's not writing. That's worldbuilding. I'm sure they regret bringing you into their process.
The next time you see someone excitedly building a world in a way you don't like, consider that they're searching their world for new ideas, new variants, and trying to leave a vivid impression in their own minds.
Friday, April 28, 2017
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Wondrous Random
One of the problems with generating content for games is that it always feels prosaic and dull.
So generative games are seeded with wondrous details. The generative content is used as endless filler.
Let's talk about wonder.
It's certainly possible to generate wondrous things. Here's a twitter bot that generates endlessly wondrous planets.
But these aren't suitable to put in video games. The biggest issue is the lack of interaction: a video game's strength is interactivity, right?
Let's consider sci fi, since I'm a sci fi nerd. So let's talk about a few wondrous moments, whether they're interactive, and whether these moments could be generative.
When I considered wondrous moments, I realized they are all either introducing us or bidding us farewell. They are transitions. They are exclamation points. They are a hello or a goodbye.
For example, a rocket launch is amazing. It's wondrous to launch a rocket.
But if we show every rocket launch in a game, the player will get truly bored no matter how pretty it is. See Mass Effect: Andromeda for details.
Instead, we would focus on the rocket launches that take place during notable transitions. When we are saying goodbye to a beloved planet and hello to the stars, that's when we put in a loving shot of the rocket launch. Even though the player has undoubtedly seen a million rocket launches in their life, this moment is wondrous because it comes at the right moment. Just when we're saying goodbye, just when we're saying hello.
Obviously, there are also things that are rarer. Ancient obelisks. Forgotten planets. Derelict space ships. Strange aliens. The sight of your ship being split in half while you're inside it.
These also have the most impact if they happen when the player is saying hello or goodbye. Timed poorly, these amazing things will feel as mundane as having to shut off your alarm and get up for work.
As an example of this, in Mass Effect you spend a lot of time discovering new planets. It's incredibly boring. Discovering new planets is boring! ... because it's part of your daily tedium.
On the other hand, in Stellaris you inevitably discover another alien star nation. This feels surprisingly powerful, because the game leads up to it with popups about how there's no intelligent life even though you're searching for it. Things are just starting to slow down for your star nation, you're ready for a change, and then BAM - a new civilization calls. And then another and another!
There's not much fanfare in terms of selling the illusion. A few lines of text before, one extra line of text afterwards. But because it happens at the right time it feels thrilling. Say hello to a new era!
Well, half the time the pacing is off. It's not a perfect game. But when it works, it works - even without the majesty of long edits and low camera angles.
Later on, discovering a new species feels dull and pedestrian. You're already in that era, and there's no transition happening, so it's dull and pedestrian.
So... let's discuss some techniques we can use to make this stuff shine.
Understanding the Phases of your Game
Rather than discussing how to generate wondrous things, the critical thing is when to generate them. By guiding the player through distinct chunks of game, you create moments where wondrous things fit, and even mediocre wonders will play well in those moments.
The difficulty is in making the chunks feel sharp and clear. For example, in Mass Effect you might go visit the Citadel and spend three hours doing side quests. This is a phase. But there's no "punch" to the beginning or ending of the phase. Mass Effect does play a little video of you pulling out of space dock, but it's perfunctory. It has to be, because the staging isn't heavy enough for the player to put up with more.
How can we build up these phase as things that feel real and heavy?
There are two factors here: the construction of the phase and the transition moment.
Constructing the Phase
The biggest things that add weight are events and characters tied to the specific phase, with a focus on them being left behind when the phase changes.
For example, if it's a visit to The Citadel, you can have the player solve various problems... but have the characters wait on the way to the docks to wave goodbye and say thank you. This doesn't interfere with the player - the player can just run right past - but it does make the player realize they're leaving a place that they've affected.
There are plenty of other, heavier ways. For example, the player knowing they'll never return makes those goodbyes more intense. The player knowing the place is about to sink into a fiery magma pit also punches things up.
Adding play on the exit is also valid: in order to get off-world, the players have to fight through the local thugs and decouple the dock lock-down locks. When considering where to put these kinds of fights, the answer is "before the wondrous thing" - so if our wondrous thing is the launch, then we want the fight to happen before launch, not in space.
If you're creating a linear game, this can all be added in manually. If we're talking about generating content, it's clear we have to generate these heavy elements. The wondrous launch isn't the thing we have to generate: we have to generate the thugs and the teary children waving goodbye and the battered old robots throwing flowers.
We have to generate the context. The meaning.
This is something people talk about a lot, but I think they generally discuss how to create long chains of content. Our focus is different: we don't need complex, evolving narratives. We need short, punchy narratives that fit within this phase of the game and have a clear "goodbye" state.
You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello
Transition moments can be on the "goodbye" side or the "hello" side, and there can be scenes between those sides.
For example, when we leave The Citadel we can linger on our ship going through the relay and let the weight of our passing slowly roll through us. Orrrrr we can show an exciting shot of us approaching a new planet, slamming aside the purple clouds as we burn down on a re-entry.
But we can't show both.
I mean, we do show both. But only one will count as wondrous. The other will count as just a long shot.
Which one do we focus on? Well, which phase is heavier? Is the phase part of a longer chain of similar phases?
For example, leaving The Citadel is usually not a huge deal, because it's a hub world and you visit it a lot. In general, goodbyes are going to be weak from places you're revisiting... unless it's the last time you'll ever visit them. The last goodbye from a hub world is extremely strong.
Similarly, if you are leaving a world exploration phase and immediately entering another world exploration phase, the goodbye is going to be weak and you'll want to play up the new elements with a strong hello.
In theory.
Either way, it's probably best to pad some time between the goodbye and the hello. In a video game, this usually consists of world map navigation, although that's less than ideal. Useful non-phase activities such as party chatter, inventory management, and so on are probably better.
Repeated Majesties
Whether you're generating them or seeding carefully-created content, you're going to have some kind of amazing thing in your universe. You'd like it to not get boring.
An example of this is the relays in Mass Effect. Ancient technology that lets the folks travel great distances without much effort! Amazing!
But in Mass Effect they quickly become so mundane you just want to skip any scene involving them.
Why? Because they are mundane. They are part of the ordinary play of the game. They are not at a start point or an end point. They do not say hello or goodbye. They just happen over the course of your day-to-day affairs.
That's fine, to an extent. Not every encounter with them has to feel magical. But we want the player to be aware that they're playing with something potent every day. So we should try to tie our transitions to them whenever we can. Rather than showing a rocket launch, we would show a relay launch.
They become a "staple wonder", used whenever we need a wonder but don't have any specific wonder in mind.
The issue is that you only have so much space for these. For example, our ship is, itself, a staple wonder. Loving shots of our ship are also a major repeated theme. But is there room for both the ship and the relay? It'd dilute the shots if you played up both the ship and the relay in the same scene: wonders need to be punchy.
There are plenty of times when the ship can be used and the relay can't... but are there any times when the relay can be used but the ship can't?
These are the questions I want writers and devs to ask themselves when they're designing their universe. Not "are relays cool/plot-important", but "when we show cool stuff with relays, are we getting in the way of showing other, more important cool stuff?"
Please note, generative elements can work here just fine. For example, the "deep monsters" in Dwarf Fortress could easily be re-used in different games rather than regenerated from scratch each time - until you defeat this one, you won't get a different one.
Epic Generation
OK, OK, what about actually generating epic, wondrous stuff?
Well, there's a few categories of epic stuff, and presumably they'd be generated with different systems.
For recurring touchstones such as "your awesome ship" or "the bloodthirst armies of Throckwoodle", those are likely to be specified by the dev, then slotted in as appropriate. As discussed, "generating" those is more like generating a reason for you to use them.
The idea of generating some amazing scenario is also appealing. How do you generate an amazing scenario?
Well, that's a book on its own, but in general you have to remember to make the "hello" connect to the play. The deeper the connection, the better.
In general: the hello needs to tell the player why they're here.
For example, let's say you roll the dice and come up with a pirate base on a mist-covered moon. The wonder is the mist-covered moon - it feels still and epic. But the players aren't here for a mist-covered moon. They're here to tangle with the pirates.
How do you set that up? Well, you can show a shot of the pirate base within the mist, or pirates on motorcycles in the mist, or whatever. You can have an event where the pirates burst out of the mist to capture or ground the players. There's a lot of options: a battered merchant ship half-lost in fog, for example.
These are not too hard to generate, because you can largely just use category matches. The fact that it's a foggy moon is not important to the algorithm: it's just considered "MASK category GRAVITY FIELD category", and so it would have the same set of options as if you were on a smokey volcanic planet, an acidic Venus, a snowy ice moon, even an artificial-gravity planetoid covered in silver clouds.
Besides making the hello introduce the play, it's also valuable to have the play reference the hello. For example, the pirates can explain that they set up base here because the mists are an excellent cover, or they can have tactics derived from the mists, or they can have problems and keep getting lost because of the mist, or maybe they have mutant winged wolves that the mist has created... again, these aspects don't have to make too much sense, as long as they're not actively nonsensical.
The other kind of wondrous event I tend to want to create are the action-packed transition scenes where things turn. For example, your ship takes direct laser fire from the megacannon and is ripped in half with you aboard, now you're staring over a spiraling debris field struggling to get to the megacannon before you run out of air. Or there's a chase in the jungle as speeder bikes race for safety. Or you have to trick the zorgblat to smash down the walls of the alien zoo so you can escape...
These moments are dangerously close to talking about "generative plots", so we'll leave them mostly in the background for now except for one important fact:
These are transition scenes.
This is a moment when you say goodbye to where you were and hello to someplace new.
And that's considerably more important than whether they are simulated correctly or whatever.
...
Anyway, them's my thoughts. Tell me what you think.
So generative games are seeded with wondrous details. The generative content is used as endless filler.
Let's talk about wonder.
It's certainly possible to generate wondrous things. Here's a twitter bot that generates endlessly wondrous planets.
But these aren't suitable to put in video games. The biggest issue is the lack of interaction: a video game's strength is interactivity, right?
Let's consider sci fi, since I'm a sci fi nerd. So let's talk about a few wondrous moments, whether they're interactive, and whether these moments could be generative.
When I considered wondrous moments, I realized they are all either introducing us or bidding us farewell. They are transitions. They are exclamation points. They are a hello or a goodbye.
For example, a rocket launch is amazing. It's wondrous to launch a rocket.
But if we show every rocket launch in a game, the player will get truly bored no matter how pretty it is. See Mass Effect: Andromeda for details.
Instead, we would focus on the rocket launches that take place during notable transitions. When we are saying goodbye to a beloved planet and hello to the stars, that's when we put in a loving shot of the rocket launch. Even though the player has undoubtedly seen a million rocket launches in their life, this moment is wondrous because it comes at the right moment. Just when we're saying goodbye, just when we're saying hello.
Obviously, there are also things that are rarer. Ancient obelisks. Forgotten planets. Derelict space ships. Strange aliens. The sight of your ship being split in half while you're inside it.
These also have the most impact if they happen when the player is saying hello or goodbye. Timed poorly, these amazing things will feel as mundane as having to shut off your alarm and get up for work.
As an example of this, in Mass Effect you spend a lot of time discovering new planets. It's incredibly boring. Discovering new planets is boring! ... because it's part of your daily tedium.
On the other hand, in Stellaris you inevitably discover another alien star nation. This feels surprisingly powerful, because the game leads up to it with popups about how there's no intelligent life even though you're searching for it. Things are just starting to slow down for your star nation, you're ready for a change, and then BAM - a new civilization calls. And then another and another!
There's not much fanfare in terms of selling the illusion. A few lines of text before, one extra line of text afterwards. But because it happens at the right time it feels thrilling. Say hello to a new era!
Well, half the time the pacing is off. It's not a perfect game. But when it works, it works - even without the majesty of long edits and low camera angles.
Later on, discovering a new species feels dull and pedestrian. You're already in that era, and there's no transition happening, so it's dull and pedestrian.
So... let's discuss some techniques we can use to make this stuff shine.
Understanding the Phases of your Game
Rather than discussing how to generate wondrous things, the critical thing is when to generate them. By guiding the player through distinct chunks of game, you create moments where wondrous things fit, and even mediocre wonders will play well in those moments.
The difficulty is in making the chunks feel sharp and clear. For example, in Mass Effect you might go visit the Citadel and spend three hours doing side quests. This is a phase. But there's no "punch" to the beginning or ending of the phase. Mass Effect does play a little video of you pulling out of space dock, but it's perfunctory. It has to be, because the staging isn't heavy enough for the player to put up with more.
How can we build up these phase as things that feel real and heavy?
There are two factors here: the construction of the phase and the transition moment.
Constructing the Phase
The biggest things that add weight are events and characters tied to the specific phase, with a focus on them being left behind when the phase changes.
For example, if it's a visit to The Citadel, you can have the player solve various problems... but have the characters wait on the way to the docks to wave goodbye and say thank you. This doesn't interfere with the player - the player can just run right past - but it does make the player realize they're leaving a place that they've affected.
There are plenty of other, heavier ways. For example, the player knowing they'll never return makes those goodbyes more intense. The player knowing the place is about to sink into a fiery magma pit also punches things up.
Adding play on the exit is also valid: in order to get off-world, the players have to fight through the local thugs and decouple the dock lock-down locks. When considering where to put these kinds of fights, the answer is "before the wondrous thing" - so if our wondrous thing is the launch, then we want the fight to happen before launch, not in space.
If you're creating a linear game, this can all be added in manually. If we're talking about generating content, it's clear we have to generate these heavy elements. The wondrous launch isn't the thing we have to generate: we have to generate the thugs and the teary children waving goodbye and the battered old robots throwing flowers.
We have to generate the context. The meaning.
This is something people talk about a lot, but I think they generally discuss how to create long chains of content. Our focus is different: we don't need complex, evolving narratives. We need short, punchy narratives that fit within this phase of the game and have a clear "goodbye" state.
You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello
Transition moments can be on the "goodbye" side or the "hello" side, and there can be scenes between those sides.
For example, when we leave The Citadel we can linger on our ship going through the relay and let the weight of our passing slowly roll through us. Orrrrr we can show an exciting shot of us approaching a new planet, slamming aside the purple clouds as we burn down on a re-entry.
But we can't show both.
I mean, we do show both. But only one will count as wondrous. The other will count as just a long shot.
Which one do we focus on? Well, which phase is heavier? Is the phase part of a longer chain of similar phases?
For example, leaving The Citadel is usually not a huge deal, because it's a hub world and you visit it a lot. In general, goodbyes are going to be weak from places you're revisiting... unless it's the last time you'll ever visit them. The last goodbye from a hub world is extremely strong.
Similarly, if you are leaving a world exploration phase and immediately entering another world exploration phase, the goodbye is going to be weak and you'll want to play up the new elements with a strong hello.
In theory.
Either way, it's probably best to pad some time between the goodbye and the hello. In a video game, this usually consists of world map navigation, although that's less than ideal. Useful non-phase activities such as party chatter, inventory management, and so on are probably better.
Repeated Majesties
Whether you're generating them or seeding carefully-created content, you're going to have some kind of amazing thing in your universe. You'd like it to not get boring.
An example of this is the relays in Mass Effect. Ancient technology that lets the folks travel great distances without much effort! Amazing!
But in Mass Effect they quickly become so mundane you just want to skip any scene involving them.
Why? Because they are mundane. They are part of the ordinary play of the game. They are not at a start point or an end point. They do not say hello or goodbye. They just happen over the course of your day-to-day affairs.
That's fine, to an extent. Not every encounter with them has to feel magical. But we want the player to be aware that they're playing with something potent every day. So we should try to tie our transitions to them whenever we can. Rather than showing a rocket launch, we would show a relay launch.
They become a "staple wonder", used whenever we need a wonder but don't have any specific wonder in mind.
The issue is that you only have so much space for these. For example, our ship is, itself, a staple wonder. Loving shots of our ship are also a major repeated theme. But is there room for both the ship and the relay? It'd dilute the shots if you played up both the ship and the relay in the same scene: wonders need to be punchy.
There are plenty of times when the ship can be used and the relay can't... but are there any times when the relay can be used but the ship can't?
These are the questions I want writers and devs to ask themselves when they're designing their universe. Not "are relays cool/plot-important", but "when we show cool stuff with relays, are we getting in the way of showing other, more important cool stuff?"
Please note, generative elements can work here just fine. For example, the "deep monsters" in Dwarf Fortress could easily be re-used in different games rather than regenerated from scratch each time - until you defeat this one, you won't get a different one.
Epic Generation
OK, OK, what about actually generating epic, wondrous stuff?
Well, there's a few categories of epic stuff, and presumably they'd be generated with different systems.
For recurring touchstones such as "your awesome ship" or "the bloodthirst armies of Throckwoodle", those are likely to be specified by the dev, then slotted in as appropriate. As discussed, "generating" those is more like generating a reason for you to use them.
The idea of generating some amazing scenario is also appealing. How do you generate an amazing scenario?
Well, that's a book on its own, but in general you have to remember to make the "hello" connect to the play. The deeper the connection, the better.
In general: the hello needs to tell the player why they're here.
For example, let's say you roll the dice and come up with a pirate base on a mist-covered moon. The wonder is the mist-covered moon - it feels still and epic. But the players aren't here for a mist-covered moon. They're here to tangle with the pirates.
How do you set that up? Well, you can show a shot of the pirate base within the mist, or pirates on motorcycles in the mist, or whatever. You can have an event where the pirates burst out of the mist to capture or ground the players. There's a lot of options: a battered merchant ship half-lost in fog, for example.
These are not too hard to generate, because you can largely just use category matches. The fact that it's a foggy moon is not important to the algorithm: it's just considered "MASK category GRAVITY FIELD category", and so it would have the same set of options as if you were on a smokey volcanic planet, an acidic Venus, a snowy ice moon, even an artificial-gravity planetoid covered in silver clouds.
Besides making the hello introduce the play, it's also valuable to have the play reference the hello. For example, the pirates can explain that they set up base here because the mists are an excellent cover, or they can have tactics derived from the mists, or they can have problems and keep getting lost because of the mist, or maybe they have mutant winged wolves that the mist has created... again, these aspects don't have to make too much sense, as long as they're not actively nonsensical.
The other kind of wondrous event I tend to want to create are the action-packed transition scenes where things turn. For example, your ship takes direct laser fire from the megacannon and is ripped in half with you aboard, now you're staring over a spiraling debris field struggling to get to the megacannon before you run out of air. Or there's a chase in the jungle as speeder bikes race for safety. Or you have to trick the zorgblat to smash down the walls of the alien zoo so you can escape...
These moments are dangerously close to talking about "generative plots", so we'll leave them mostly in the background for now except for one important fact:
These are transition scenes.
This is a moment when you say goodbye to where you were and hello to someplace new.
And that's considerably more important than whether they are simulated correctly or whatever.
...
Anyway, them's my thoughts. Tell me what you think.
Tuesday, April 04, 2017
Intense Gameplay Balance
Let's talk about unscripted, intense moments in a game.
Something that happens organically, as you play.
A lot of games are good at this, and it's the reason why roguelikes are still so popular. It's why Kerbal and Space Engineers have such a long-lasting following as well.
There's an adage: "failing is fun". These games rely on trying, failing, and trying again as a tight iteration loop.
I think this mixes two things. There's the tight iteration loop you get from failing and trying again, but there's also the fascinating and fun loop where you struggle to work through the realities of a situation not going quite according to plan. AKA, "plans-awry" play.
I don't think plans-awry play needs to fail in order to be fun. Struggling and succeeding is often more powerful, because it means your efforts were good enough.
For example, these days I build my Kerbal Space Program landers to survive hard landings. Those would have been failures when I was starting out, but now my landers survive because my planning has improved. That's a potent feeling: "uh oh oh noooo- whew, good thing I planned for that possibility."
I turned a failure into a success.
Fundamentally, this is about a learning curve. A player steadily plans better, sets things up better.
The "failing is fun" theory arises from a learning cliff that the devs sprinkle with glitter. It seems to me that self-directed missions can offer lower bars for success and turn this cliff into a slope. Allowing for smaller final goals, and allowing them to degrade gracefully can make failures into at least partial successes.
Thinking a while, I came up with seven factors I think turn learning cliffs into learning curves. Seven factors that make plans-awry play work.
1) Design refinement/mission arrangement. You need to be able to choose a mission and prepare for any mission you feel like doing in enough detail that you'd prepare differently for the same mission once you know more. For example, choosing different loadouts in Kerbal depending on your comfort in getting to orbit and landing on the moon efficiently.
2) Skill play. As the game unfolds, use your steadily improving skills to navigate challenges to your plan. This might be better ship handling in Kerbal, or knowing how to identify potions in Rogue, etc.
3) World state recognition. As your vision expands, you learn to plan further ahead and understand the world state at greater ranges. For example, orbital exchange windows in Kerbal, or understanding how long you have until a boss fight in the Binding of Isaac.
4) Composite/recursive planning. Allow the player to challenge themselves by trying several missions at once, or help themselves by planning a support mission ahead of time. This allows a player to adjust their plans to serve their skills: if they feel like visiting every Juul moon in one go, they can do that. If they aren't that good at fuel planning, let them send a tanker to Juul first to make it easier. Their choice.
5) Exploits/cheats. In single-player games (or friendly multiplayer), exploits and cheats are a core part of the fun. Exploits and cheats frequently turn into fun high-level challenges and opportunities. For example, the understanding that a torch holds up sand in Minecraft: torches can be washed away by water. Water can be blocked with sand. This is a basic setup which allows people to build a switch! Before redstone, it was the only way to build mechanisms, and even now, it's still used.
6) Cool factor. Allow players to do things that are cool because they are cool. Not everything has to be driven by mechanics. To this end, make missions much more open-ended than you ever expected, especially the low-level missions. For example, in Kerbal the lowest-level mission is theoretically "reach space", but it's so unenforced that people happily build slingshots and see how far they can fling Kerbals. Having a soft, unenforced fail state is a powerful tool.
7) Share-ability. Make it easy for players to share with each other. This partly includes things like screenshots and video: make it easy for players to take good-looking footage. But it also includes things like resharing blueprints, packaging up mod lists so everyone can import things without struggle, and very easy imports of levels, challenges, etc. Perhaps even automatic content sharing within some parameters.
These seven things seem to be really good at giving the player something easy to nibble on at the beginning, when they barely understand anything... and then letting the player just stretch their legs forever as they get more and more skilled. 7) is questionable, I suppose, but I definitely argue that it's part of the same concern.
Now, this isn't just theory for theory's sake.
I'm making a game. How does The Galactic Line do these things?
1) Design refinement. This is probably the most challenging for any game, because you have to come up with gameplay that makes refining your designs deep enough to carry the whole game, but easy enough that a newbie can approach it.
For TGL, I plan to do this by focusing mostly on the crew. A newbie understands the idea of putting people on a ship, they can focus on who they want to put on. They'll just choose whichever stock ship they like best.
This will naturally lead to them understanding how the crews and ships work, as they watch their story unfold. Critically, complete failure is unlikely. While chunks of ship get shut down and people start tearing their hair out, the stock ships will be well-designed enough to limp home even after a disastrous starting mission.
They'll hopefully feel the natural impulse to make their own ships, try longer missions, larger crews, etc.
2) Skill play. In TGL, the skill is mostly about optimizing for longevity by arranging the crew and ship modules. For example, when someone stresses out and something on the ship breaks, you have three options: leave it busted, repair it by salvaging another ship module, or dedicate crewmembers to massaging it into function 24/7. These options are about resource management and planning ahead.
If you do them well, you'll have "slack". You can use this to optimize hobby rooms and relationships, arrange for experience gains or career advancement, or optimizing ship modules for better performance in the next zone. This combined with the use of "redshirt" crew members gives players a lot of ways to manage things live in a skilled or unskilled way.
3&4) World state recognition/composite missions. The player will be faced with a lot of options as to what they want to do, but the most obvious pressure will be from "bounty" missions where people request specific resources from specific places. For example, "get me 30 points of astrophysics data from Beta Sirius". Those will be calibrated for the capabilities of the ship, but there's nothing stopping you from randomly gathering as much data as you want. It has some value.
Understanding how long those missions will take and what resources they'll require can allow you to do several missions at once, either in serial or parallel. If someone wants data from Beta Sirius and another person needs you to pick up five passengers from Gamma Draconis, maybe you can do them both in one run. If things go well.
4) Recursive missions. The game encourages the player to meddle with the affairs of non-space-ship folk using a simple colonization system. Hopefully this will not only allow the players to push through map choke points/extend missions, but also feel invested in the universe they're building.
5) Exploits and cheats. Not sure about this quite yet, but the plan is to make the game moddable and I'm not aiming to prevent them.
6) Cool factor. In addition to trying to let space ships look cool, a lot of the fun stuff is going to come from the way you can make custom crewmembers. As The Sims has shown, there is an impressive appetite for putting all sorts of random people in the stew-pot in different combinations. Want a ship crewed by your favorite band? Your friends? Vampires?
From the other side, colonies can also be made cool. Want to terraform a planet? Want to cover a moon in a huge city? Want to start from just one starving industrial colony on a barren world?
7) Share-ability. This one't a bit tough because it doesn't actually exist yet. The big challenge is that I'd need some kind of central database. Once I have that, automatically downloading ships, mods, stars, and world states is fairly straightforward. It's intended to be a "massively single-player" game.
In terms of making it fun to record/screenshot... I have to think about that some more.
At the end of the day, the plan for The Galactic Line is to focus on plans-awry play with a minimum of actual failing. We'll see how that theory works out in practice.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
Something that happens organically, as you play.
A lot of games are good at this, and it's the reason why roguelikes are still so popular. It's why Kerbal and Space Engineers have such a long-lasting following as well.
There's an adage: "failing is fun". These games rely on trying, failing, and trying again as a tight iteration loop.
I think this mixes two things. There's the tight iteration loop you get from failing and trying again, but there's also the fascinating and fun loop where you struggle to work through the realities of a situation not going quite according to plan. AKA, "plans-awry" play.
I don't think plans-awry play needs to fail in order to be fun. Struggling and succeeding is often more powerful, because it means your efforts were good enough.
For example, these days I build my Kerbal Space Program landers to survive hard landings. Those would have been failures when I was starting out, but now my landers survive because my planning has improved. That's a potent feeling: "uh oh oh noooo- whew, good thing I planned for that possibility."
I turned a failure into a success.
Fundamentally, this is about a learning curve. A player steadily plans better, sets things up better.
The "failing is fun" theory arises from a learning cliff that the devs sprinkle with glitter. It seems to me that self-directed missions can offer lower bars for success and turn this cliff into a slope. Allowing for smaller final goals, and allowing them to degrade gracefully can make failures into at least partial successes.
Thinking a while, I came up with seven factors I think turn learning cliffs into learning curves. Seven factors that make plans-awry play work.
1) Design refinement/mission arrangement. You need to be able to choose a mission and prepare for any mission you feel like doing in enough detail that you'd prepare differently for the same mission once you know more. For example, choosing different loadouts in Kerbal depending on your comfort in getting to orbit and landing on the moon efficiently.
2) Skill play. As the game unfolds, use your steadily improving skills to navigate challenges to your plan. This might be better ship handling in Kerbal, or knowing how to identify potions in Rogue, etc.
3) World state recognition. As your vision expands, you learn to plan further ahead and understand the world state at greater ranges. For example, orbital exchange windows in Kerbal, or understanding how long you have until a boss fight in the Binding of Isaac.
4) Composite/recursive planning. Allow the player to challenge themselves by trying several missions at once, or help themselves by planning a support mission ahead of time. This allows a player to adjust their plans to serve their skills: if they feel like visiting every Juul moon in one go, they can do that. If they aren't that good at fuel planning, let them send a tanker to Juul first to make it easier. Their choice.
5) Exploits/cheats. In single-player games (or friendly multiplayer), exploits and cheats are a core part of the fun. Exploits and cheats frequently turn into fun high-level challenges and opportunities. For example, the understanding that a torch holds up sand in Minecraft: torches can be washed away by water. Water can be blocked with sand. This is a basic setup which allows people to build a switch! Before redstone, it was the only way to build mechanisms, and even now, it's still used.
6) Cool factor. Allow players to do things that are cool because they are cool. Not everything has to be driven by mechanics. To this end, make missions much more open-ended than you ever expected, especially the low-level missions. For example, in Kerbal the lowest-level mission is theoretically "reach space", but it's so unenforced that people happily build slingshots and see how far they can fling Kerbals. Having a soft, unenforced fail state is a powerful tool.
7) Share-ability. Make it easy for players to share with each other. This partly includes things like screenshots and video: make it easy for players to take good-looking footage. But it also includes things like resharing blueprints, packaging up mod lists so everyone can import things without struggle, and very easy imports of levels, challenges, etc. Perhaps even automatic content sharing within some parameters.
These seven things seem to be really good at giving the player something easy to nibble on at the beginning, when they barely understand anything... and then letting the player just stretch their legs forever as they get more and more skilled. 7) is questionable, I suppose, but I definitely argue that it's part of the same concern.
Now, this isn't just theory for theory's sake.
I'm making a game. How does The Galactic Line do these things?
1) Design refinement. This is probably the most challenging for any game, because you have to come up with gameplay that makes refining your designs deep enough to carry the whole game, but easy enough that a newbie can approach it.
For TGL, I plan to do this by focusing mostly on the crew. A newbie understands the idea of putting people on a ship, they can focus on who they want to put on. They'll just choose whichever stock ship they like best.
This will naturally lead to them understanding how the crews and ships work, as they watch their story unfold. Critically, complete failure is unlikely. While chunks of ship get shut down and people start tearing their hair out, the stock ships will be well-designed enough to limp home even after a disastrous starting mission.
They'll hopefully feel the natural impulse to make their own ships, try longer missions, larger crews, etc.
2) Skill play. In TGL, the skill is mostly about optimizing for longevity by arranging the crew and ship modules. For example, when someone stresses out and something on the ship breaks, you have three options: leave it busted, repair it by salvaging another ship module, or dedicate crewmembers to massaging it into function 24/7. These options are about resource management and planning ahead.
If you do them well, you'll have "slack". You can use this to optimize hobby rooms and relationships, arrange for experience gains or career advancement, or optimizing ship modules for better performance in the next zone. This combined with the use of "redshirt" crew members gives players a lot of ways to manage things live in a skilled or unskilled way.
3&4) World state recognition/composite missions. The player will be faced with a lot of options as to what they want to do, but the most obvious pressure will be from "bounty" missions where people request specific resources from specific places. For example, "get me 30 points of astrophysics data from Beta Sirius". Those will be calibrated for the capabilities of the ship, but there's nothing stopping you from randomly gathering as much data as you want. It has some value.
Understanding how long those missions will take and what resources they'll require can allow you to do several missions at once, either in serial or parallel. If someone wants data from Beta Sirius and another person needs you to pick up five passengers from Gamma Draconis, maybe you can do them both in one run. If things go well.
4) Recursive missions. The game encourages the player to meddle with the affairs of non-space-ship folk using a simple colonization system. Hopefully this will not only allow the players to push through map choke points/extend missions, but also feel invested in the universe they're building.
5) Exploits and cheats. Not sure about this quite yet, but the plan is to make the game moddable and I'm not aiming to prevent them.
6) Cool factor. In addition to trying to let space ships look cool, a lot of the fun stuff is going to come from the way you can make custom crewmembers. As The Sims has shown, there is an impressive appetite for putting all sorts of random people in the stew-pot in different combinations. Want a ship crewed by your favorite band? Your friends? Vampires?
From the other side, colonies can also be made cool. Want to terraform a planet? Want to cover a moon in a huge city? Want to start from just one starving industrial colony on a barren world?
7) Share-ability. This one't a bit tough because it doesn't actually exist yet. The big challenge is that I'd need some kind of central database. Once I have that, automatically downloading ships, mods, stars, and world states is fairly straightforward. It's intended to be a "massively single-player" game.
In terms of making it fun to record/screenshot... I have to think about that some more.
At the end of the day, the plan for The Galactic Line is to focus on plans-awry play with a minimum of actual failing. We'll see how that theory works out in practice.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
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