Game Design, Part 2 (Patreon)

 Greetings!

Writing the game design essay was beginning to become a distraction from actually developing the game, so I decided to cut the process short. But writing what I did - including the stuff I didn't publish - helped me refine exactly what problems I was trying to solve, which in turn helped me think about how I would go about solving them. I'm writing this post to lay everything out for both your benefit and mine.

The Problems

I had a vague sense that there were some problems with TPE's development, and after thinking a bit more I narrowed it to the following:

• Long development cycle
• Lack of difficulty progression
• Lack of ways to meaningfully reward the player

Causes

Why do I have these problems? It mostly boils down to not having a real core mechanic, as I'd discussed in the last post. How do these problems stem from lacking a core mechanic? Let's look at each in turn:

Long development cycle: Since there's no core mechanic, the player's experience in game consists almost entirely of conversations, quests and minigames.  At least for me, dialogues and minigames both take a long time to create. 

Let's contrast this with a typical RPG where you engage in a lot of combat. Developer A releases an update with a new dungeon, and it takes you about an hour to go through all the new content. 40 minutes of that were fighting monsters and 20 were story events and H-scenes - but that's still an hour of entertainment!

Since almost all the playtime for my game is story events, H-scenes or minigames, I have to do a lot more writing, planning, and coding to provide the same hour of entertainment. Story events are time consuming to write, and coming up with minigame ideas, implementing them and testing them is a lengthy process. I don't think 'playtime' should be the metric used when evaluating developer output, but it's one that a lot of people probably use subconsciously.

Lack of difficulty progression: I broke this logic down in the last post, but to recap, since the minigames rely mostly on reflexes or puzzle solving skills, it's tough to subtly ramp up difficulty and provide a more engaging experience. In a typical RPG, the developer can simply give baddies more HP or make them hit harder, but it's harder for me to do an analogous thing for minigames. This effect is worsened by minigames usually being quite different from one another.

Lack of meaningful rewards: Since there's no core mechanic, I can't give you things that make you better at it. Something that makes you a better chicken healer won't help you time bombs properly, for instance.

Solutions

How can I resolve these problems? Well, I won't be able to completely fix all of them, but there are a few things I can do to help.

Reuse mechanics: Rather than coming up with a completely new idea every time I want to add a minigame or boss battle, I can leverage stuff I've done before. This will save time in all phases of minigame development, from coming up with ideas to implementing and testing them. It will also allow me to create a bit of difficulty progression - the new game can be a slightly different or more complex version of a previous one. This will also allow me to give rewards that will be useful in subsequent minigames or boss battles.

There is a downside to this. If someone really hates one of my minigames, they'll usually suffer through it if they're already invested in the game since they know they probably won't have to see it again. Reusing mechanics would change that. In order to mitigate this problem, I'll have to work on addressing the aspects of my minigames that a sizable chunk of players don't like - which is just another way of saying that I'll need to make better minigames.

Make more use of quests: Quests provide something interesting for the player to do between story scenes, and they've been a part of the game from the beginning. While some probably will be standard FedEx-type quests, others can be more involved and interesting (like Val's quest.)

Add rewards that are useful in multiple contexts: A good example would be a group heal spell for Alex. It would obviously be helpful in standard RPG battles, but what if I also made it useful in healing minigames? You see that chicken/ally might die before you can reach them, but the group heal spell would let you heal them a little from a distance, ensuring they live long enough for you to hit them with a big heal. The same logic would apply with a resurrection spell, for instance. Not only would these make for good rewards, they would also allow me to add a bit of difficulty progression to the minigames.

Add cosmetic and quality of life rewards: I've already started this with the transmogrification plugin, but I could add rewards that don't have much combat or minigame utility, but which are still fun or nice to have. You can expect to have special outfits as rewards from time to time (like with Val's quest) and other things as I think of them. Any ideas?

And finally... I'll just have to accept that The Proteus Effect is a quasi-Visual Novel experience which requires a lot of writing and stage direction for a new release. I thought a lot about it, but there's really no way for me to add a core mechanic to the game this late in development without being grossly unfair to the player. You'd be rightly angry if you got halfway through the latest Final Fantasy game and it suddenly turned into a first person shooter. It's kind of the same here. My next project will definitely have a core mechanic, but The Proteus Effect does not and will not.

In the coming weeks I'll be asking for input on which minigames you liked and which you hated in order to help me refine ideas for future ones. 

Anyway, that's all I have to say about game design for now. I'm going to get back to writing. Please let me know your thoughts, and thank you for your support!