Applying Definitions to CartograTour

  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!

What is a casual game?

 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 seventh episode on how I'm defining the genre that my game is going to be in:

 Welcome to the Adventure Mechanics Side Quest and today it's just me, Chandler. As I've gotten feedback from early playtesting, I found that I've kind of lost sight of my initial design. The initial design for CartograTour, what I'm renaming my prototype I was calling The Mapper, was for it to be a casual-style cartography game.  As I've developed it, however, it's become more reflected the type of games that I've been playing, i.e. games that tend to be played more in rounds rather than as a casual experience. That made me realize that I never really went through and defined what a casual game was for me. So for this sidequest I'm going to be diving in and trying to explore what, exactly is a casual game.

So, what is a casual game? The most common definition I could find was a game that was easy to pick up and easy to put down.  But what does that mean?  Are sports games a sub-genre of casual games?  Is a one on one fighting game?  By this vague definition, they very well might be.  That doesn't feel right, though.  A sports game is pick up and play with relatively short time commitments, but if it's American Football or Cricket, the player will need to have at least some basic understanding of the rules of the game, which adds a bit of a barrier.  A more complex game is a less approachable to new players and a casual game is supposed to be inviting.  In the same vein, fighting games seem to fall flat in terms of complexity.  Sure, just playing a casual round of Street Fighter may be quick to pick up, but the complexity of the meta-game can quickly turn off a filthy casual like myself.  The competitive skill ceiling also makes playing with your more talented buddies far less interesting.  A skilled player will stomp a new player way more often than that new player will be able to beat the skilled player.  That's not really approachable as a casual game to play.  I think that this limited definition of a casual game needs to be a little bit more fleshed out.

So, what do I think it means?  Well, a casual game still needs to be easy to pick up and put down.  But the controls also need to be intuitive, as well.  If we take those requirements and rework the definition to something that encompasses it all, we can get to this first part of the casual game definition:  A casual game is limited in scope and complexity.  That means that a casual game won't have an overwhelming number of mechanics and won't have too many controls.  Moreover, any controls that are in the game need to be as clear as possible, be it through instructions in the game or leveraging the player's intuitions.  Any unexplained instructions will need to be intentional choices, not something that was overlooked in development.

That's great and all, but that now begins to include games like Diablo.  Is Diablo a casual game, too?  Is the core gameplay loop in it of killing, looting and equipping lend itself to a casual game?  It doesn't really feel like it should.  There's an urgency and agressiveness in the gameplay that doesn't really lend itself to a more casual game.  So, to better define a casual game, I'll need to refine the definition again.  It needs to have less urgency than a game like Diablo.  So a calmer core gameplay loop is necessary.  Twitch reaction and  deep strategic thinking aren't really part of the core loop for most casual games.  That means a casual game need to have a calmer core gameplay loop.

That takes the definition for a casual game to be a game that's easy to pick up and put down with limited scope and complexity that has a calmer core gameplay loop.  Does that mean we have a good definition of the genre for CartograTour?  Well, not quite.  Casual games as defined will certainly include CartograTour, but it doesn't quite fully encompass the core of what CartograTour will actually be.  After all, Cards Against Humanity could be called a casual game.  What I envision CartograTour to be is something called a life sim.  A life sim is a sub-genre of casual games that focuses on some specific aspect of life that the player may or may not be familiar with.  If they're familiar with the core gameplay, we can leverage the player's experiences in real life to intuit what to do in our game.  That greatly eases bringing new players into the game when they can guess what to do.

Just having that one definition doesn't really encompass all of what makes a life sim game, though.  Could a puzzle game like Tetris a life sim?  It currently fits into our definition of a casual game, but it doesn't really feel like it should be included in our definition for a life sim.  Sure, you can play it alone and have a blast, but ideally, a life sim is something that's shared.  A high score just doesn't feel like it's enough to me.  So what if we add that a life sim has some sort of social aspect?  That would exclude straight puzzle games from the life sim genre.  But what does including a social aspect mean?  The obvious answer is that it has people playing the game together.  Two people playing something like Stardew Valley is obviously social.  But if the multiplayer update wasn't added to it, does Stardew Valley still count as a life sim?  I would argue yes.  That's because having a social aspect doesn't necessarily mean that there has to be multiple players in the same game world.  What about the interactions that the player has with NPCs?  Trading, completing orders and being able to romance them all are something that we expect to do with people in our daily lives.  That brings back the pre-multiplayer update of Stardew Valley back into a life sim.

Life sims will also need to have some sort of major goal.  Sandbox worlds where the player can make their own goals are great, but a life sim doesn't really need to be open like that at all.  Take Papers Please, as an example.  It's a life sim of a very limited aspect of a person's life; their job.  They don't have the freedom of doing whatever they want, they are living out the life of a border guard.  This is a more guided goal meant to evoke a specific feeling.  A goal that forces the player into the mental state of that specific border guard is acceptable.  Our definition of a life sim needs to include this.  A life sim ends up being defined as this:  A game that is simulating some portion of a person's life with a social aspect and either open or directed goals.

Whew!  That's a lot of defining!  But, now we have a definition for what, exactly, I want CartograTour to be.  It's going to be a casual life sim.  In the next side quest, I'll be going over what that means for the game and if I need to adjust anything already implemented or change what I'm working on putting in.  If you have any suggestions or want to use a different definition of what either a casual game or a life sim is, reach out to me on Twitter as @jcsirron.  This has been The Adventure Mechanics and I'm Chandler.  I'll talk with you next time.