Boiling the Yarnball

I've been thinking about why I like the construction games I like.

I'm including things like The Sims into this category. Whether you're constructing vehicles or facilities or people, there is one specific feel I like, and a bunch I don't.

I think it's yarnballs.

Big, soft, messy challenges that can be approached in a lot of different ways with a lot of different entanglements to the rest of the game.

For example, you're playing a space game. The rules are: you must have one point of life support per astronaut.

This is a small, hard constraint. There's no softness, no flexibility, no entanglement... no mess.

But in Oxygen Not Included, that rule is turned into a yarn ball thanks to the physics sim. I can create drafts of carbon dioxide, let rooms sort themselves into bands of gases and keep people in the oxygen zone, let them breath diseased oxygen, use pressure gates to optimize pressure for ideal algae conversion...

A combination of complex approaches (scrubbers, cleaners, algae, natural oxygen sources, etc) combined with complex topological possibilities (pressure, natural air sorting, air filtering, wind, etc) creates a lot of possibilities, a lot of bizarre, fun approaches that affect everything else in my facility.

It's not me balancing a spreadsheet. It's me building a facility, with all the complexity that entails.

One thing that makes this yarnball approach shine is how it ties into the rest of the construction, and how it turns a challenge into a narrative.

Challenge: you need to provide air.

Narrative: "the third and fourth floors of our Mars base are pressurized. Whenever we venture down to the first floor to change out the algae, we hold our breaths and work fast. Sandra got real sick when she couldn't hold her breath long enough."



The thing about yarnballs is that you do, eventually, sort them. Maybe not to some perfect standard, but you develop a method that works for you, and you'll usually stick with it.

That's why it's so important that the construction game is a huge pile of yarnballs.

If I sort one, there's another behind it.

More importantly, as I sort that one, I realize it's tied to the first one, and I didn't sort it well enough!

This creates an endless chain of narratives as I watch my facilities struggle with challenge after challenge, all their difficulties largely being my fault.



Another example of a yarnball is having children in The Sims.

Not only are the children themselves fairly complex, but caring for them is a convoluted, messy yarnball. You may think you have it solved, but then you realize your stay at home parent this time is a neat freak or something, and your timetable falls apart.

Or how about building a defensive entrance in Dwarf Fortress?

You have to deal with the threat of invaders, so you build a defensive gate. But how big is it? How do people get through it on their daily lives? How many resources can you afford to spend on it? What traps can you build? When you need to upgrade it, how will that work out?

And when the invasion happens, the gate helps turn the rather blunt narrative of "you lose, everyone dies" into a more nuanced narrative: "Bjornblatt lost an arm fighting off the goblins that got through the traps, and Hjornol is now responsible for rebuilding those traps into something more effective..."



I think yarnballs require a certain presentation to catch my attention.

I call it "boiling the yarnball".

This is a technique where nearly all of the game is incremental. In The Sims, your skills slowly go up, money slowly trickles in, you slowly do better at your job. In DF, you slowly farm, slowly build another bunkroom. It's all incremental.

Except then it's not. There's a challenge you're working towards.

In The Sims, is it time for a kid? Time to move? Time to get a promotion? Maybe just time to throw a big party?

In DF, is it time to build a defensive gate? Internal waterways? A magma forge? Maybe just time to rearrange who sleeps where?

What the player considers to be "a big thing" will vary depending on skill and interest. But you're usually working towards at least one big thing. You're playing the game to push the edge of what you can do, what you understand.

If the goblins trashed you last time, this time you're playing to build goblin defenses. If your sim died old and alone last time, this time you're playing to make a family. You build towards those challenges, and some part of your construction is difficult and challenging... because you haven't mastered that yarnball yet.

So the premise here is that the yarnball isn't thrown at you. It's something you walk up to. Something you explore.

The challenge that creates the yarnball might not be so gentle. The goblins will eventually attack. You will eventually get old and die. But you have some leeway before then.

Otherwise, there's not enough time to try and detangle the yarnball.



So I like to "boil the yarnball". You let the challenge that defines the yarnball simply sit there and simmer. When the player's ready, they can begin pulling at it... at which point, the narrative becomes more concrete.

To make it more concrete, I think there are four phases to this. I'm just getting started with my thoughts on this matter, but here's what I've come up with so far.

1) Planning
What challenge does the yarnball address? How will that challenge affect your facility? How will different levels of addressing it change that? How much space do you have to build in? How many resources do you have? How many workers can you divert, for how long, before things get risky?

Tie the planning into the overall flow of your facility, so it becomes part of the narrative: "in fall of 392, we began to defend ourselves. As harvest season ended, the farmers turned their hands to construction..."

2) Construction
Did you plan it right? What goes well? Poorly? What opportunities do you seize, or threats do you face that affect your construction efforts? Again, the construction is part of the narrative of the facility: "The great iron gates in the plan were changed to wood, at the request of the lord of the land, whose brother owns a lumberyard..."

There should be no real randomness in the mechanisms of construction. The randomness comes from outside: "oh, there's a gold seam where I wanted to put a wall. Oh, my workers are throwing tantrums because of the rain..."

3) Daily life
How does your construction affect things that aren't that challenge? The 'daily life'? What new opportunities does it create? What troubles? How does it integrate into your normal daily narrative?

For example, "The gate lay open, guarded by a single lookout. The lookout became very good friends with the hunters and lumberjacks, as they passed by nearly every day..."

4) Spotlight
How does your construction actually do its job? Specifically, how does it change a challenge into a narrative?

For example, "When goblins attacked, our lookout was slacking. Several got through the gate before it could be closed. Fjornblatt is fighting the intruders while, outside, torches are being lit..."



Each of these four phases of a yarnball helps to cement the narrative of the overall facility. The yarnball is positioned specifically to turn a challenge into a narrative, not just in the moment that the challenge arrives, but in an unbroken chain throughout the course of planning, construction, and daily life.

If you turn this idea towards other genres, you can see hints of it in other games. Coincidentally, those tend to be the games I like.

In an open world RPG? Building a character is several yarnballs. Watching the character face the challenges I intend them to face is great fun, as is watching that build struggle through challenges not related to their specialty. That's the part of an open world game I like.

Contrarily, without boiling yarnballs, even games in genres I like aren't very interesting to me.

For example, most "factory builders" where you assemble cars or medicines or whatever don't hold my interest. Either because the optimizations are all very cut and dry, or because the yarnball isn't presented in a way that helps me digest it.



How about you? Any of this fit into your idea of what's fun and what's not?