Low tech update this week to let you know Michel and I are alive and well and working on Archmage. I was away last week travelling.
Usually dev blogs are an opportunity to say what is good about a game. Perhaps a small way to celebrate features or progress.
This week I’m going to talk about what’s wrong!
We’re in the final phase of shipping the Events feature. Except there is one problem.
It doesn’t feel good.
This is the harder part of game dev. Making features is relatively easy: you code up something and get it to work. But how it feels is more art than science. This dev blog about the 3 year history of Balatro talks about what I mean.
Admittedly, this is something I want to improve on. Why? Historically, I’ve put out features too soon, before they had time to ‘bake’.
I want to do better with Events. I want to refine it and make it as fun as I can.
Today I was playing around with it. What feels right:
1. Collecting resources feels nice. You walk over a hex, see some floaty text of what you got, move on. Much better than what we had.
2. Road events follow the road. Simple I know, but it feels right they don’t veer off.
Feels off:
1. Tracks are spawning way far away, like 7 hexes away. If a hex represents a mile, that just doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t feel good even if it did make sense.
2. Travelers along the road spawn far away too. I think I should only see those when I’m close to the road, when I want to interact with road traffic, not when I’m off in the woods.
3. There is no reason not to go for a resource event. But even if 1 in 4 times it results in combat, or HP loss, or something like that – it still wouldn’t feel right. All that would do is make me never want to do them. So this needs some serious refinement.
4. Our inspiration for the events was FTL events. Those are great! But today I realized that in FTL the events are mandatory, in Archmage they are optional. And that difference is a BIG difference. In FTL if I get a crappy event, well, I deal with it. It is a challenge to overcome. I have to keep moving sectors to get to the goal, so I take the cards I’m dealt. Slay the Spire is similar: deal with it.
But we have a big open map, plenty of room to walk around and avoid events. If the player is CHOOSING to OPT IN to an event, it is a much different context than FTL, and can’t follow their “make the best of a bad situation” vibe.
So, the technical work is done, but the design work continues. I think this is one of those situations where the only way out is through.
I think if we write more events, we’ll get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. That can then be codified into rules for writing events, so they always have the same right feel.
I have a list of “rules” for writing an event, based on what I think is working from the previous ones. I refine the rules after I finish each event.
So far the rules are:
1. Have multiple outcomes to each choice, so even if the event is a repeat it can still be fresh.
2. Have some sense of uncertainty to each choice
3. Is there a way to have Now vs Later rewards?
4. Interesting choices involve “which do I want more? A or B or C?”
5. Give the player a chance to roleplay in their choices
6. Events are a small chance to learn more about the world (lore)
Today I wrote a Tracks event that provides some cool world building about the origins of Skeletons. It gives a chance to roleplay and a small amount of lore. I wouldn’t originally have included those aspects without the reminding by the rules.
That’s it for this week, I’ll see y’all next week!