Oct '24 • JOURNEY
I'm switching my game idea (don't kill me)
It's been really fun prototyping Rogue Deck Builder for a good chunk of this year. I've learned so much about game design and game development. So here's a quick post-mortem to justify some of the thinking I've been doing lately.
It all started when my first game (Mooselutions) got accepted into a local festival. I wanted to present the game in the best possible light, which meant switching off of prototyping and back onto more of a production schedule so I could release a juicier version before November 14th and do the iOS port by Jan 23rd of next year.
I immediately noticed a change in my emotions. I was *excited* again. I was presenting something more polished with gameplay I'm more into. I like games with deep emergent gameplay, which Mooselutions has in spades.
In short, it felt like Rogue Deck Builder was trying to force deep ideas to happen. It's not that there weren't deeper ideas in the game. They were there, but they were also the parts of the gameplay most players didn't seem to like.
People just want to place completed deck sections down in the world. They want it to be simple, convenient, easy. They don't want to think about how rim joists form a structure which supports a deck panel. They really don't want it to be a puzzle, but I do!
And then Factorio: Space Age launched. Playing it made me feel like a kid again. I wanted to get up early and play. Imagine that; actual excitement for a new game :-). That experience made me question why I don't feel a similar level of excitement about the game I've been prototyping for months now.
So now I'm going to take the core elements from Rogue Deck Builder and prototype an automation game I've wanted to do for a while now.
At the heart of it is, literally, a heart. It's an automation game where you have to manage a living circulatory system. I got the inspiration for it a year ago when I had to get heart surgery to repair my mitral valve. It made me realize that everything I am is downstream of a pump. If the pump fails, it all goes.
I'm hoping the game will have deep ideas similar to those found in Factorio. I truly believe Factorio is the best kind of puzzle game. You don't solve specific constrained puzzles like you would in a game like A Monster's Expedition. It's the next evolution because the whole world is a puzzle with elements that lead to all of these interesting emergent designs.
That's the kind of game that makes me want to get up early and go to work.
So after all of this festival prep is done, that's what I'll be working on.
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I'm switching my game idea (don't kill me)
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