How to choose between realism and fun in game design
I’ve been working on the city interaction screens this week on Sol Trader, shown above. I’ve been considering how to implement the ‘business as usual’ tasks that players complete on landing at a city, such as filling the fuel tank, repairing their ship, or buying and selling trade commodities.
Here’s the city market screen from the old prototype version of the game:
I could bring this up to date and polish it for the current look of the game, but considering this has brought up an important gameplay question.
Do I make the interaction between the player and the organisations purely a GUI experience, or do I make the player interact with the employees of the organisation to achieve their goals?
For example, instead of clicking on a table view like the one above, players would head to the market, start a conversation with a broker, state what they wanted and get a price direct from them. Which is better?
For a number of reasons, I’ve chosen the less realistic ‘interaction with employees’ option for now. Here’s why.
Focusing on a compelling vision of fun
It’s easier for the player to buy goods from a tabular view like the one above, by just clicking on what they want. It’s efficient and fast. It also isn’t very realistic to make these interactions personal, especially for the 24th century. Much of our interaction with organisations is via an automated system these days, and I would hazard a guess that this is only going to increase as the years pass.
However, my game is all about relationships: the friendships that the player forges during both the pre-game history generation and whilst playing the game. When at cities, players are getting ships fixed, finding contract work and buying and selling goods. If I make this daily business solely done through interacting with in-game individuals, then the game won’t feel nearly as impersonal and cold. The game isn’t about making stacks of money or buying the biggest ship as fast as possible (although players could do that if they wanted) - it’s about the interactions with the individuals along the way.
I want to create a game where players will genuinely look forward to landing at a certain remote city to catch up with an old friend whilst upgrading their ships, or actively avoiding a certain hotel through a poor relationship with the manager. That sounds fun to me, and that’s what’s going to keep people coming back to the game. Having a compelling vision of what the fun looks like is essential to ensuring we stay on target with our design.
It might not be ‘realistic’ but fun is more important than realism every time. The only important type of realism in a game is a ‘sense of realism’. Players should be able to suspend disbelief long enough to immerse themselves in the world we’ve created.
The right decision isn’t always the easiest to implement
This decision causes some design headaches. If the only way to do business with an organisation is through an AI employee, this means a few things:
- The conversation engine has to be top notch. I’m just about to start working on this and I’m doing my research first to find out the best way to make this work well.
- What happens if a job is vacant? If no-one took a certain job though history generation, then potentially that organisation cannot be interacted with at all. The way I’m handling this is to have the concept of ‘essential jobs’. Certain jobs simply have to have someone doing them. Just after history generation we trawl through all the eligible characters in the game and match them to these jobs.
We’ve added more complexity to the code base, but some extra work is justified. It’s very easy to simply choose the option that’s easier (or cleaner) to code, but that’s how we end up with poor design and no fun.
Finding the fun is hard work
Once we have a decision, it’s important to implement our chosen solution as quickly as possible and then to play around with it, to see if it captures the fun that we’re looking for.
Fun in games is something that has to be worked for. It doesn’t appear without effort. Our raw materials are art assets, sound files and code: we grind them together searching for the fun in the midst of the three. The formula is elusive and uncertain, and it can take hours of effort, but eventually our game will catch light and burn bright, almost like magic.
It’s very important not to gold-plate game code too early. Jumping to ‘clean well-factored code’ too early is dangerous: it’s essential for maintenance, but overdoing refactoring too early is a failure to understand that we’re in the complex Cynefin space. We could well be throwing everything away. As long as we don’t neglect code cleanup once we’ve found what works, hammering in a basic solution minimises the potential of wasted effort.
Summary: beware realism
-- Tynan Sylvester, The Simulation Dream
Beware realism. It sounds like the holy grail of game development, and it’s very enticing to us developers. Ultimately however it can pull us away from what’s fun to play.
An appearance of realism is what we’re actually looking for, and this can be a very different thing.
I’ll post an update when I’ve got this interaction into the game, to see whether it does indeed give us the fun we’re looking for. Stay tuned!
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The Job Is Not To Build
Startup CTOs or founding developers are the first technical people in the business. It is natural to think your job is to write code and build software. This is backwards.
Your first job is not to build software. Your role is to use your technical expertise to help the startup figure out fast if you have a valid solution to a compelling problem, and then a valid product for a big enough market.
You might do this through building software, but you might not need to.
Here is a story of how I did this wrong, and how you can do it right.
Read moreWhy Ealdorlight's Kickstarter might have failed
It’s now been over three months since the end of the Ealdorlight Kickstarter campaign. I’ve deliberately been taking some time to think and learn from the fact that it didn’t reach the target, and to work out what to do next. Frankly, I was pretty upset that the campaign didn’t make it, and it’s taken a while to get over it.
It’s also taken a while to think through the campaign properly. Some things are obvious in hindsight, and others less so. A lot of post-Kickstarter analysis feels like a stab in the dark. Nevertheless I’ve given it a lot of thought, and these are my best guesses for why I think Ealdorlight’s Kickstarter failed:
Read moreEaldorlight's Kickstarter is live at 4pm today
The sixth of June is a significant day for me personally. In 2004, I spent the entire of the day in hospital. I remember the 60th anniversary commemorations of D-day on the TV in the background, as I sat beside my wife, in labour with our first child. I became a father an hour after midnight on the 7th June; my son becomes a teenager tomorrow.
Twelve years later, in 2016, I spent the entire of 6th June glued to Steam watching and waiting whilst my first game Sol Trader was released to the world. This was a career dream come true: since I started programming at six years old I’d always wanted to create and ship my own games. Sol Trader’s release was ultimately a painfully formative experience for me, which I wrote about at the time and was interviewed about recently in GamesIndustry.biz.
Over the last year, I’ve been keeping busy doing two things. One is to support Sol Trader as much as I can with countless updates and patches. I’ve also been very busy working on a new game, Ealdorlight, a medieval RPG-style take on Sol Trader’s mechanics, with turn-based combat, realistic damage and great graphics. I announced Ealdorlight in March and demonstrated it at Rezzed, strengthening my hope that the idea was a good one.
I decided fairly early on that I wanted to take Ealdorlight to Kickstarter. Sol Trader’s successful Kickstarter was a brilliant experience. The Kickstarter community is one of the kindest, most positive on the Internet. I also needed funding for this game: Sol Trader was self-funded through many long evenings and contracting work, and for Ealdorlight I need a bigger team to realise the vision. It’s built in Unreal Engine 4, which simultaneously saves me loads of development time and means I need a bigger team to pull off the realistic art style I’ve gone for.
As time came near to launch, the first anniversary of Sol Trader’s released seemed an appropriate day to launch the campaign. So today, 6th June 2017, I will spend the entire day glued to Kickstarter as my campaign goes live at 4pm today.
Visit Ealdorlight’s Kickstarter Campaign
There’s plenty more about Ealdorlight on the campaign - head over there and read all about it! A huge amount of work has gone into it, and I’m very grateful for all the support and help I’ve received from the team I’ve put together, and for friends and family who have given me endless encouragements and feedback.
This post is a little earlier than 4pm so that you can watch it go live if you want. Earlier backers get lower edition numberings on some of the rewards, so you might want to be there from the start!
Read moreHow Ealdorlight's story stands out
As we head towards the Kickstarter campaign launch on June 6th, I want to talk a little about the story behind Ealdorlight works.
The basic story stays the same for each game: you are discovered wandering through a remote village at a young age, and realise your destiny is to overthrow the King. However, like in Sol Trader, every person you meet is randomly generated. This means that your real identity will be different every time, and you’ll have to discover it all over again every time you generate a new game.
Handcrafted story in a random world
The trick is layering a great story on top of a generated world with random characters. Building empathy with the main character and his family when all characters are generated is hard, and hinges around being able to hook the story in at the right moments.
My plan is to write plenty of tightly connected story arcs that are triggered on events that happen during history generation. These will in turn trigger future quests the player can undertake. Not all story-arcs will appear in every game: it will depend on how the history generation goes. I will constrain things such that there is always a route through the game, and that players always have a way to overthrow the King, even if that might be easier or harder depending on the starting setup. These story-arcs then should interact with each other, hopefully producing a unique path through the game.
Identity
Ealdorlight is set within a low fantasy world, and there’s no traditional magic. The player gets more powerful through discovering key pieces of knowledge about their past. These insights into of your real past feed directly into your character’s stats, skills and abilities.
I’ve long been fascinated with identity: knowledge of who we truly are affects many areas of our lives for the better. In Ealdorlight I wanted to tell a story which takes this to an almost supernatural level. By removing the player from their birth family, they start as an entirely normal person within the world. It’s only after their early game encounter with the Ealdorlight and the discovery of their past that things begin to change.
Much more on this to come, but in the meantime, here’s a glimpse of our story’s beginning.
Ealdorlight: backstory teaser (updated)
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Ealdorlight Kickstarter on 6th June, Sol Trader 1.3 released
I am now back from some extended time away after Rezzed, both on holiday with the family and training some clients away from home. I’ve released Sol Trader 1.3 today, and set the Kickstarter for Ealdorlight to 6th June.
Rezzed was fantastic: it was great to see lots and lots of people wearing our Ealdorlight crowns. We ran out of crowns on both days, with some creative head displays on offer:
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Ealdorlight Kickstarter launch date: 6th June
Yes, I know I said May :) I’ve decided to go for a 31-day campaign, starting on the 6th June, for a few reasons:
- It doesn’t clash with any major US holidays, like Memorial Day. The 48-hour reminder email should go out on the day after 4th July.
- I want to give myself the best chance of success by polishing the combat demo hard. It was great to get such good feedback at Rezzed and I think it’ll be a great hook. I need more time to do that well.
- 6th June is the first anniversary of Sol Trader’s launch, so it ties in nicely with the ongoing Revelation Games story.
I’m excited and nervous about this Kickstarter campaign: my third one to date. After succeeding last time I’m really trying to take my time and get it right.
Sol Trader 1.3 released!
Now that I’m back, I’m able to support a new release of Sol Trader: 1.3 is now finally released after a length beta period.
Here are the highlights:
- You can now chat to characters directly on the right if they’re in the same location as you
- Pirate Chief and criminals are now more likely to try to destroy you
- Fix a bug where you’re not paid enough for a mission
- Dignitaries now fly around a little less than before to make it easier to pin them down
- Inter-faction missions now pay slightly less
- Business trips now pay slightly less
- Taxi missions now pay slightly more
- Talking to your criminal parents will no longer cause them to forget who you are
- Fix crash where a character develops an opinion of the player mid-conversation
- Fix crash when showing GUI for a ship the AI is driving
- Fix crash where a character would attempt to sell a good on a ship they’ve lent to the player
- Can now initiate conversations when paused - will restart the game but at realtime speed
- Fixed the Tiger II achievement
Your steam copy should automatically update. I’ll be releasing an updated downloadable version to SendOwl in the next few days.
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