Over the process of making my previous game, I thought I understood the process of making games.
Step 1: you find the system. That’s where all the hard work is. You poke at nature and systems and emergence until you find something that is interesting. That’s the hard part. It takes a lot of time, patience and openness. But once you’ve found a system rich enough, then you can make the game. Ex: Baba Is You, and the system of making and breaking rules.
Step 2: you make the puzzles. Take this system that you have, and shake it around. See what bends and what breaks. See how it bends and breaks. See if you can make a puzzle out of it. Realize you can’t. Repeat.
Step 3: you do some design polish and shape the whole experience into something that is fun to interact with and play.
Step 4: ??? Step 5: profit
That’s it. But the three steps are not that easy to delineate. They weave into one another and intermingle in ways that can become impossible to untangle. That’s the beauty of this craft of game design.
So now when I’m making my current game, I thought it was going to be more of the same. It turned out to be wrong in a way that it took a long time to understand.
Reattempting the Process
So I started off on Step 1. Finding a system that can lead to emergence in ways that are beautiful. This time, I am making a resource management game, a forest-builder (like a city-builder, but forests), so I figured the Step 2 would be a little different, but still along the same lines.
It took me a year and a half to realize that it wasn’t working. And then another couple of months to understand my mistake.
The Difficult Learning
You cannot have a game without goals and constraints.
Puzzles happen to be a specialized genre, where the goal is solving the puzzle, and the constraint is the system itself (and only the system). That means that you just have to poke at the system, and hunt for puzzles that way.
The same process does not work for a resource management goal. Here, you have to explicitly set out the goals and the constraints.
I always knew I would have to set the values for things in the game, but I thought of that as “tweaking”. Something that can be done once everything else is already done. But no. That is actually the core of Game Design in any strategy kind of game.
Applying New Knowledge
Then I realised that a lot of the things I discarded over the year and a half may have actually been worth pursuing. I had discraded them without really testing them in the correct environment. With the correct goals and constraints.
Once I started adding in these things, the game just started clicking. The game had just not made sense for so long, but now things were a little clearer.
The constraints in this case were the costs of particular buildings and processes. Being more mindful in selecting these costs became an integral part of the design. These costs then spiral outwards and inwards.
It was also interesting to note that there was often no single “correct” balance. Some of that was still emergent. Whether the cost was one nutrient-producer to two food-producers, or two nutrient-producers to one food-producer, in both cases, as a player, you notice that balance and tweak your forest accordingly.
But I also realised how hard things are now. The system cannot be tested without the correct constraints. That also means that it is not clear whether its the system at fault or whether its the constraints. And that leads to a lot of frustration. But that’s okay. I can handle frustration when I see the glimpses of progress.
Synthesis
The other thing that I struggle with a lot is the loss of purity. Puzzles have a certain purity to them, where I don’t hide solutions in the puzzle. I discover solutions within the system and present them as puzzles.
Here, that purity doesn’t exist. Mechanics feel a little more arbitrary, and authored. That loses some of the awe of it for me. But I also think that’s a skill limitation on my end. Because I see games that are able to do both. And now I strive for that. Maybe in this game, maybe in the future.
Conclusion
This shit is really hard. But it’s also the hardest shit that is the shit most worth doing.
Onward. Forward.