This was a strong week for design. I wouldn’t describe the first draft of design as done but… the foundation for it certainly is. I would describe the current draft as a big glob of thought processes that need to be extracted into a simpler format. It feels really good to start on what looks like the very first step towards genuine completion of the game. Up until now the project has been dogged by, “will probably change this later” which created a crushing feeling of creating an endless stack of work. Being able to sit down and say, “THIS is going to be how it is” is relieving, even knowing that much of it could end up changing later (but probably won’t!).

The design process has been a little lower level than how I usually work at this stage (but is honestly how any designer probably should work at every stage). I sat down and isolated a primary chunk of the game (in this case, the map and objects on it). I then asked: how does each object affect a player’s thought process in deciding what to do in a turn? The goal being to create interesting decisions each turn where the player’s selection would have ramifications on future turns, allowing for both long-term and immediate consequences. This lead to some interesting discoveries falling out of the process, such as it being more interesting if you make the rewards for an action more explicit (as then the player gets to weigh risk vs. reward, rather than simply picking which risk he’s more comfortable with based on the current situation).

From there it was all about going down the list of game elements, listing out the various ideas for them that we’ve come up with over the years, and weighing the effects of each on player decision making and balance. In many cases it hinged on one style of system invalidating another style of system for a different game element, making the ideal choice fairly obvious in the context of the complete game.

Of course the best thing to come out of this process is that I’ve finally settled on what needs to be changed for the battle system. It’s sort of amusing to consider the evolution of the idea. Early this year it all started with an idea of “to make a minimal turn battle interesting, then each single action needs to have multiple consequences). This started out with an incredibly complicated system that could probably be spun out into its own entire game, which basically made every action have 4-5+ consequences associated with it. It was a cool system, but it had many flaws, including that making a quality AI for it would be too much work and it wouldn’t be as fun to fight as a player (even beyond that, it was simply too big of a game to fit within the rest of the game). Then towards the middle of the year I came up with a system that only had 2-3 consequences associated with it. This remained the leading system for a long time, but I still wasn’t sold on it. Only this week did I finally reduce it to a system where every action has 1 additional consequence to it. And it’s almost certainly perfect. It achieves exactly what we need: adding mind games to player vs player battles, and rewarding pattern recognition in monster battles. The funny thing is that I didn’t really realize what each iteration of the system was actually tweaking until after the fact.