Thought I give this section a try as I see a lot of well discussed topics here.
I’d like to discuss how you come up with your game data and how you manage it over the process of development and after release. It should be less technical but more about questions like those:
Variation over simplicity: Should I include Oak and Birch or just Wood?
Inflation: Do you deal with values like 10 or 10.000, what is the scale of values?
Diversity: Do I have just one Farm that can produce all Crops or one Farm for each type of crop?
Abstraction: Do I need just 1 or 10 types of materials for a building?
Balancing: Should a twice as big object cost 2 times more or 1,5 or 3 times as much?
Those are jsut the questions that I have. While I think I make good progress I’d like to discuss this here. Maybe some of you made some rich encounters on how to improve the process. Asides from that, maybe there is Game Design Theory that can help to answer the quantity and diversity questions. What can also be interesting is simply if you tell us why you think that your solution is best for your game.
What works best for me is to take my notepad (a analog one) and write down my thoughts. It might take an hour to write down like 40 words but that is the end result of the questions like above. I think the results have been great for my game. While the main idea remained I was able to simplify and reify my idea.
One issue I had was that I wanted different styles for my buildings based on material used. For instance you could build the same building either with 60% metal and 40% wood material, or with 100% wood. Not that it would face me issues on the graphical aspect it also would be hard to manage by the player.
My solution was re-categorization. I now have a material that is mostly used for construction and combines both metal and wooded elements. It just doesn’t matter. I still have wood and scrap as separate materials but now I have a distinction between construction material and material used for production. That was actually another point, having two materials that are both for production and construction seemed a bit harder to manage by the player as he would have to manage material usage for both.
Another benefit was the quantification question. As there is no relationship between construction and production material I no longer have to think about their amounts. For instance if I can produce a weapon with 3 scrap, but a house costs 10 scrap, that seems a bit off and would make me think that the house can also be made of 3 weapons instead. But now I could say that the house costs 10 of my construction material (name pending…).
I think it is good to think your game through. Think about the challenges and work the player faces and if certain things are actually worth it and fun. Of course it has to be tested but having a good foundation early helps you alot before you start coding and putting data into the game.
I’ll add these suggestions: MVP and iteration. I participated in GGJ18 this weekend. After paper prototyping, we started strong by implementing a very small minimum viable product (MVP), the least amount of features that still represents the core idea. This gave us plenty of time to iterate on the gameplay and experiment with enhancements that worked better than our original ideas. Some of the other teams tried to implement their whole idea from the start, with varying degrees of success and/or stress. There were some really great games, though, issues or not.
In terms of your post, @McDev02 , an MVP could entail:
Variation over simplicity: just Wood
Diversity: just one Farm that can produce all Crops
Abstraction: just 1 type of material for a building
As for “Inflation: Shall a house cost 10 or 10.000?”, one of Sid Meier’s game rules is to double or halve values when iterating. If houses end up too cheap at 500, double it to 1000. Or even try 10x, such as 5000. Don’t waste time trying 550.
You might also be interested Joris Dormans’ Machinations. It’s a little academic, but it’s a way to formalize game systems to measure how they interact.
For time critical development MVP is definitely best. Also in general simpler is often better.
That is a good note so I added that point. I actually meant only absolute numbers, not relative once. So what numbers you deal with basically. If a house costs 10 and you start with 100 or if that house costs 1.000 and you start with 10.000. For sure depends on what you actually represent, e.g. real world numbers. But makes sense to think about as in EVE you deal with huge amounts of Credit whereas in simple casual games you often deal with small numbers. Maybe Screen space on mobile is one point to consider
I know Machinations, it is actually tricky to represent your problem in it but it was once useful.
I think a lot of this comes down to a project by project basis, and your target platform. If you’re building a PC game for adults that tries to keep a level of realism, you’re probably going to end up with a much more complicated number of available materials, buildings, items, etc, than if you were building something for mobile as an example. I think in general you need to look at these systems and try to strike a balance between complicated depth and ease of use simplicity.
Try to avoid nonsensical complications, that would appear to a player to be rather trivial differences between items. If you have different types of building materials, they should result in vastly different behaving items, not just barely different. For example, don’t have 10 different types of wood to choose from when making a boat if the end result is the same boat, or just a 5% difference in the stats of the boat. Make the difference a big deal, or don’t have the different types of wood at all.
Although in fairness, minecraft did pretty well with cosmetic differences between materials. Functionally Oak was the same as Spruce, Birch, Jungle, Acacia or Dark Oak. That didn’t stop me wandering half way across the map to find the right color wood for my floors.
Back to the OP, a lot depends on what level of detail are you creating. Detail and scope are inversely correlated. At the one end you have minecraft, where players can place individually choose the colors of doors and the size of windows. But the average player only builds a handful of buildings throughout the game. At the other end you have civ, where the level of detail is limited to cities, but players control the fate of entire civilizations. Choose your level of detail/scope early, and stick to it.
