I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game this year. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the eighth episode on apply the definition of the genre I want CartograTour to be in to the game itself:
Welcome back to another Adventure Mechanics Side Quest. It's me, Chandler. If you were looking for one of the mainline episodes, don't worry, we're still doing them. We just ran into scheduling issues and had to push the episode for July. We'll be continuing on as normal next month. Consider this a side quest extravaganza. Last side quest, I ran through what genre I want CartograTour to fit into and how I, personally, define that genre. For those who don't remember, I want my game to be a casual life sim. I defined a casual game as a game that is easy to pick up, put down, with limited complexity and a less urgent gameplay loop. That's quite a mouthful for my definition, but I wanted to define it as precisely as possible. As for a life sim, I defined it as a game that simulates someone's life, or portion of their life coupled with a social aspect. Keep in mind, I define a life sim as a casual game as well. I can imagine that there are some life sims that aren't casual games, but I struggle to think of a specific example. If you can think of one, leave a comment. I would be interested in seeing a game that does that.
As for applying my definition of a casual game, let's apply it to CartograTour. Is my current build easy to pick up? It doesn't have a tutorial right now, nor does it have any cheat sheet for controls in-game, so that's likely not true. I'll have to add a controls menu under options at the very minimum to even start to say yes to that question. I'm not going to start in on the tutorial until I get all of the mechanics into the game. This may be a mistake, but conventional wisdom for game design says that the first parts of the game should be done last, as the team is most familiar with the mechanics and will be (ideally) putting their most polished work into it. That being said, there does need to be something to on-board the player into the game, and right now I'm doing none of that.
For the second part of that phrase, is my game easy to put down? With the implementation of saving and loading, the player can certainly leave the game and come back at any time. It may be too easy to do, at least looking at other casual life sims out there right now. As it stands right now, though, I'm happy to let the player cheese the saving/loading to find their way back to the home tile. At least I have that portion handled. The player will be able to put the game down at any point and not feel like they need to complete something or make it to a certain point before quitting. I don't know about you, but I appreciate that sort of laid back attitude in my games. Well, at least the casual ones.
So, what about the limited scope? Am I living up to that in CartograTour? Currently, yes. All of the game focuses on filling out the map and using that information in some way. As I look at my game design document, however, I do see some things that aren't necessarily in service to that. Is allowing the player to place and customize a house in service to that? Not really. Is creating a social network while building the town relavent to cartography? Again, that's not, strictly speaking, relavent to the core gameplay loop. That being said, I think those types of features will make the game more interesting and will keep the player more engaged with the game longer. That may be worthwhile to deviate from strictly adhering to a limited scope to include. More importantly, they are potentially the cornerstone of why I want to call it a life sim. I'll get into that a bit later, though.
First, I should finish off my definition of a life sim. In CartograTour, the player can spend as much time as they need exploring and planting flags to create their map. The player doesn't even to ever engage with the quest board in the current iteration of the game. That sounds like a really non-urgent game to me. I don't ever plan to add any survival mechanics to the game, so this shouldn't change too much as I flesh out the day-night cycle. The only thing that may change is that I plan to hook up the time expiration mechanic to the quest board. That may push the player to complete the quests faster. It may end up making players feel rushed to complete the quests before they really feel ready. I won't know that for certain until I implement it and get some solid feedback, though. And if it doesn't feel right, I can always pull it out.
The other part of my definition of CartograTour's genre was the social sim, so I guess I should talk about that now. In terms of simulating the life of a frontier cartographer, putting together a map for others to use definitely feels right in the current build. To further drive that feeling home, I need to implement more interesting things to put into the world, such as rivers and other natural barriers, animals and other hazards and whatnot. For the astute players, these features are already stubbed out in the last release, but it's exactly that, a stub. If this game is going to be much more than what I already have, I'll have to implement these. I do want the player to also feel like they are on the frontier, so I plan on putting in a basic building that they customize with things that they find in the world or get as rewards for quests.
On that note, I plan on taking the quest board out and force the player to interact with non-player characters (NPCs) to get the quests instead. That wil require a rework to the current system, but I think it will be worth it. I want the player to get familiar with the NPCs and (hopefully) build a bond with them. I am currently working on the first iteration of them, and, to be honest, they feel like I'm just talking to a quest board. That's because they are little more than the quest board, but I'm working on getting them to be feel a bit better. Hopefully by the time the next release comes out, there will be at least one NPC to interact with that doesn't feel like little more than the quest board. I suppose that depends on how much I get done, though,
Now that I've applied the genre definition to CartograTour, I should talk about what I have been doing to it over the last couple of weeks. I made a foolish mistake of perusing other developers' tutorials out of boredom shortly after the last release and one of them pointed to a lot better way of laying out the game, also known as the architecture of the game. So, instead of implementing more features into the game, I spent the last two weeks on a complete rework of what I had already implemented. It was soul crushing to do so, but I know that the new way everything is laid out will make it easier in the future to add features. At least that's what I keep telling myself to justify spending two weeks on converting everything over. We'll see how fast I can add features now. If I'm wrong, at least I learned a lot from it.
Anyhoo, that's all that I have for this side quest. Next side quest, I'm going to be talking about the importance of the tutorial. As always, if you have any questions, comments or musings that you think I'd find interesting or funny, reach out to me on Twitter as @jcsirron. This has been the Adventure Mechanics side quest and I'm Chandler. I'll talk to you next time!
