📄️ Overview
Designing a game is not easy. Because It's easy to design a game that is not fun but hard to design a game that is still fun after the first 30 minutes.
📄️ Wide Game Mechanics
When we talk about deep or wide mechanics we do not mean the common play style of playing tall or wide.
📄️ Deep Game Mechanics
Deep game mechanics can be summarized with, it's a game mechanic that changes the way we interact and see the game world and have a profound effect on them. In Crusader Kings III: Roads to Power a new way to interact with the game world was introduced become and play an adventure. Adventures are deeply integrated in the game world itself. Every realm can interact with them and every adventure can interact with every realm. This strongly deepens the game mechanic. Now imagine instead they implemented a new government type that gives a new way to interact with the realm and character in that regions with said government, with new resources, buttons to press... I think you get my point. Having 30 similar ways to interact with something getting only minimal results from said interactions is not a deep mechanic.
📄️ Grand Strategy
Grand strategy games are confronted by a big design problem, how can you give the player options over important parts of nation building and strategy in generally without needing to dumb down mechanics to not overwhelm the player or to ignore it and simply overwhelm the player.
📄️ Map Painting
Players really like some good-looking graphically representation of their work. They built their empire, make it possible to look at it. Generally a rule of thumbs is. Would you hang it in your room to see it? In the real world there are maps that show history, land possession, etc. And they all look quite good. Take them as an example.
📄️ Aggressive Expansion and Its Problem
Aggressive expansion has only one purpose, to slow down the game. The problem here is that it is just a stop sign that gets smacked into the face of the player. It boils down to: ohhh your war was too easy? Now slow down pale you took already a huge chunk of land, at that speed you conquer the world in 100 years! But if you really want to conquer the world in 100 years even the small city state in India will fight you so you don't take Warsaw.
📄️ Automation and Its Problems
Automation can give the player the option to better determine what he wants to engage with. Distant Worlds 1 and 2 have the ability to actually automate everything, from diplomacy, economics to warfare. Sadly this comes with some problems.
📄️ Micromanagement and Its Problems
"Micro Management is the bane of my existence." - Me and probably you
📄️ Macromanagement
Macromanagement is all about the bigger picture.
📄️ Don't Blame The Player
We have a tendency to blame other and always see their faults. In game design this can result in the following. We start blaming the player for playing the game wrong.
📄️ Difficulty
Difficulty is another hard topic. Most games handle this by increasing values. Enemies are 2x stronger, etc. We don't need to discuss if this is a good idea. It's a bad one.
📄️ Event Chains
At some point you will get the desire to implement a chain of events that tell a story. Maybe this story will include branching trees and different options for the player to choose. All modern paradox games have event chains in a some form or another.
📄️ Time Invested does not Equal Time Well Spent
There is an ongoing debate about how much a game costs and how much time you can spend with it. How people value they time spent vs how much they paid for the game is subjected. So excuse my straw man argument here. My friend use the thumb rule of $1 spent for each hour is well spent. If you spent 60 bucks for a game, and he only plays it 10. He would argue that he didn't get his moneys worth out of it.
📄️ Role-play
At first, it seems weird giving the player options to role-play in a grand strategy game. It opens a fantastic solution to the difficulty problem. When a player wants to role-play he has a different solution to what should be my next move.
📄️ Asymmetrical Gameplay
What makes gameplay asymmetrical? This is a complex discussion because it relies on where you draw the border. Chess is an "asymmetrical" game because white starts before black. Its asymmetrical because the starting positions are different.
📄️ Balancing
Player vs Player
📄️ AI
A bad AI is worse than no AI - Me
📄️ Mods
I have some strong opinions on modding support, so please take everything I say here with an extra grain of salt.
📄️ Multiplayer Interactions in a Singleplayer
Here a singleplayer game has some way to interact with the singleplayer worlds of other players.
📄️ Why do Some Decisions by Game Designers Later Anger Players?
We all know it, or experienced it our selves. A new patch is announced with huge changes. Most players are concerned, offer feedback, and think the changes will be improved. The patch lands, most players hate it. How is it possible to release a new bad patch/content to players that already are invested in your game and like it?
📄️ Information
In most grand strategy games the player is provided with an insane amount of information. Usually the player know exactly the amount of troops a nation has, exactly the amount of production power, population, etc. Not only does the player have all information about his own nation, often he also knows everything about others.
📄️ DLCs
I believe every DLC should expand the game, and each new interaction for the player should be added in two ways. A free version shows a simpler abstracted away interface. A paid version that enables the detailed abstraction. This enables us to patch the game with new mechanics. Make them available to all. And give the player a reliable option to disable them. With that he can mix and match the way which interactions the player want to see and use. If the player does not like a detailed spy system, he does not need to buy it or to enable it. He instead can work with a simplified version.
📄️ Be Bold
A permanent choice between 15% bonus damage done by you with a 10% increase in damage taken by you and a choice between 100% more movement speed but 50% reduced carry capacity is easy to see.
📄️ Layers of Limits
There is always a bottleneck to growth. But this is often ignored. In many strategy games you can simply grow, and grow, and grow. Without really hitting a limit.
📄️ Making Losing Fun
Every player will lose overtime. You simply can't win every game or win in every action you do. Some games actually dumb down the gameplay in such a degree that you will simply never lose. I believe this is a bad decision.
📄️ Event Driven Vs Player Driven Stories
When playing Hearts Of Iron 4 mods, I always had one big problem. When I do something like declaring a War does it break major event chains? Lets take Kaisereich as an example. It give nations different story paths. The problem is that often the actions of the player can and will break it. The stories are all quite linerar in nature.
📄️ Powercreep
Every game I play that gets constant updates suffers from powercreep. Even strategy games suffer from these problems. Every card game suffers with each new card drop. Every MMO suffers, every life service game suffers. Every manga that goes on for too long suffers.
📄️ Respecting Players' Time
One thing must always be respected: the time a player invests. Players want to see meaningful progression. Resetting a player's progress breeds long-term resentment.
🗃️ Critiques
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