A couple of weeks ago, I was working on my new game, when this happened:
And suddenly I had a much clearer vision of what I expected from the experience. And a reminder of the importance of keeping your expected core gameplay loop in mind.
Let’s backtrack a little and see where this comes from.
That sweet loot
Derelict Delvers is essentially a dungeon crawler in space. The tagline is “scavenge the galaxy for survival and profit”, so it’s my job to make sure the mechanics deliver these core elements.
But I saw myself caught up on how loot worked. One of the core ideas was that enemies are determined by a die size (from d6 to d12), and by defeating them, that die would generate the loot for your character.
The concept sounds pretty simple (because it is), but one of the pitfalls of game development is zooming in on a single mechanic at a time to figure out how it would work, and when you zoom out, you have a jumbled mess of procedures that keep chasing its tail.
Welp, that’s exactly what happened here. As I developed the mechanic, here’s the convoluted sequence I ended up with:
You defeat an enemy and grab its die as Loot
You roll that Loot die to generate Credits
By the end of the mission, you use those Credits to buy Gear dice
You roll Gear dice to upgrade and purchase new gear
Or, essentially:
Enemy Dice > Loot Dice > Credits > Gear Dice > Gear
Keep it simple, smart-boy
Looking back at it, it’s easy to understand how absurdly serpentine the design was. But, I have to tell you, if you don’t step back and zoom out, you might let a lot of those slip into your final version of the game.
That’s why I always encourage my fellow game designers to write down your core gameplay loop as a recipe, and when you do, ask your game questions about itself. Most of my games nowadays even include a how-to-play summary as a numbered list. Here’s the one from the Push SRD, for instance:
It helps if your game has an explicit procedural loop, but I believe every game should. It makes it clear for you, as the designer, what you want to offer the players, and for them, the players, what they should expect from the game and, most importantly, what they should do next at any time during play.
One of the pitfalls of game development is zooming in on a single mechanic at a time to figure out how it would work, and when you zoom out, you have a jumbled mess of procedures that keep chasing its tail.
In this case, looking at this system revealed that I had extra steps in the middle that weren’t adding to the experience at all. That led me to ask the game some questions:
What do I want from the experience of getting loot?
How can I make the whole process rewarding?
How can I reduce bookkeeping without making it dull?
What if dice were the currency?
Again, it sounds so obvious in hindsight, but boy did that feel like a Eureka moment. The new mechanic works like this:
You defeat an enemy and grab its die as Loot
By the end of the mission, you roll the Loot dice to upgrade and purchase new gear
Or, essentially:
Enemy Dice > Loot Dice > Gear
That sweet loop
What a relief, right? I mean, it was right there in front of me, but if I hadn’t taken the time to step back, look at the gameplay loop and start asking some questions to the game, it wouldn’t happen.
Of course, I could choose a different path and go Enemy Dice > Credits > Gear, but that solution a) is kind of dull (instead of a mini-game, you just go shopping), and b) wouldn’t fit well with the general feeling of the game and its other mechanics.
So, my suggestion for you today is: zoom out. Take your game out for some coffee and ask it some questions. You might return with more elegant and evocative solutions, or discover that some problems needn’t exist in the first place.
A quick reminder that Derelict Delvers is crowdfunding for two more weeks, and if you want to support the development of the game, I’d encourage you to check out the campaign and share it with your friends! It really means a lot.
Asking yourself and others question throughout the design process is key! Hammer on the head of the nail on this. Questions help even good designs become great.