3. Harsh Realities

I mentioned in my last post that I had a flood of ideas. Lots of “cool stuff” that could go in. However all this detail was starting to become far too unwieldy, not to mention greatly increasing the potential development time with each new idea. This game was only intended to be a small, easy to make game. Nothing hugely detailed and most importantly something I could actually complete and release. It's all very well having loads of great ideas, but if you never actually finish anything they are as useless as a salt sandwich in the desert.
So, time to take a step back and analyse what I'd come up with so far. I had to decided what was essential to the game I was trying to make and what was just 'chrome'. When I considered all the ideas I had for functionality it sounded like two games being crammed into one:
1. A “sim” style game, where the main goal is collecting ore and maintaining the base and equipment to gather as much as possible before your time on the planet was over.
2. A story/exploration game where the main goal is to uncover artefacts.
Now if you add too much of 2 to 1, you lose the simple purity of the sim and create a distraction from the core mechanics. If you had to add some, it would have to be done subtley. If you added too much of 1 to 2, then it would overcomplicate things and could bore the player who just wanted to get on with the 'proper' exploring.
– Sim or Exploration
I really had to tie this one down now, as each different type of game would require a vastly different approach and different mechanics. My own personal preference is for story, or at least an engaging narrative of some kind. A sim could be entertaining though, but adding a story to that would create too much work for me. “Keep it simple stupid!” So I did – I decided to go for the exploration game, which kept the game to just drilling and platforming mechanics, which by themselves were going to be more than enough work to create.
– So far I had four main parts of the game:
1. The Base (computer, gathered artefacts. transport)
2. Driving the transport across the surface to the driling zone
2. Drilling
3. Platforming in caverns.
Now the Base is useful for both a sim or story game – it acts as the player's home, a safe place. So I reckoned I would prefer to keep this. I would have to make it simple though, and use the platforming mechanics for it. If push came to shove however, I could still ditch it and just have an overhead map of the drilling grid, although I feel this would lose a lot of the personality of the game.
The driving section, in reflection, has little point to it at all. I just thought it would be cool to drive a bouncy physics buggy around, while tying the base and drilling sections together. However, for very little gain it would be a hell of a lot of work, so CUT!!
The drilling section is the core concept of the game, so it stays, but I will have to narrow down it's own content further (see below).
The platforming section was thrown in at the last moment, but would definitely be needed to go down the story/exploration route. It also enhances the drilling section giving the player multiple ways to enter a cavern, makes them seek out new chambers etc. It also ties in nicely with the Base as it uses the same game mechanics.
– Drilling: Collapsing tunnels
After some thought I decided to cut this. I tried to work out how it could work – maybe if the player drilled around and left single tiles by themselves, they could collapse, or there could be periodic planetquakes that would dislodge tiles with three or more other tiles drilled around them. In the end I decided that both the logic required to make sure the player drill never ended up inside a self-made chamber and that required to 'find' loose tiles and move them around was going to be too much work for little gain. Also it would be a logical nightmare if I suddenly collapsed a route a player had taken through a puzzle, and meant they could no longer get back to the surfact because doing so would mean having to create a 2×2 chamber. Yep, CUT!!
– Drilling: Collecting ore
This was originally going to be the main point of the drilling, as per other drilling/mining games out there. However, as the artefact collection and platforming elements came to the fore this became less and less important. Let's face it, if you were drilling for ore and started to discover alien ruins and strange artefacts below your feet, you'd quickly forget about rock processing! So, this was CUT!!
There were also lots of other little decisions about things to keep or drop, but the above were the main ones. These decisions are crucial to make early on so that you have a clear idea of where you are going and what you need to do, but also to avoid feature creep towards the end.
I am now certain about what type of game I want to make. Excellent 🙂
NEXT TIME: How to make it!