Boiling down the fun

Wow, you miss a week posting, and before you know it it’s been nearly six weeks. I’ve been doing a lot of back end type stuff, nothing terribly interesting, but all terribly important. I’ve been improving my tools for editing in game content, and adding the ability to have multiple save games, etc.

One thing I’ve also been doing is adding the ability to buy and sell merchandise. This has been a staple of space trading games (probably why they’re called space trading games), ever since Elite. So of course I had to implement it, also I wanted the player to be able to engage in piracy, and if there’s no cargo to buy and sell then there isn’t much point in piracy, is there?

Another thing I’ve been doing a lot of the past little while is watching a lot of Zero Punctuation (careful, there’s a lot of cussing and such), which I have found very helpful (the game analysis, not the cussing). You see Yahtzee frequently takes games to task for having features that aren’t any fun. And I realized that of all the times I’ve played freelance trading games, I haven’t spent much time on the actual trading. Because it’s like managing a spreadsheet, how much of X did you buy at Y, and you paid price W, so you should go to place Ψ to sell X for price δ. And it’s never really been very fun, especially when you get to the far off place to sell your product and realize that you’re selling at a loss.

So in listening to Yahtzee, I realized that I should figure out how cargo trading makes the game more fun, and focus on that. I realized that the whole heart of my game is the combat engine, so whatever you do in the game should feature that in one way or the other. So I decided that to simplify trading I would eliminate the guesswork in trying to figure out where to sell your cargo thusly: cargo always sells for more than you bought it for, and the farther away you sell it the better price you get; with the added wrinkle that the farther you travel with cargo the more likely and more vicious pirate attacks become. So you could make a killing dragging giant novelty sporks across the galaxy, but every jump you make increases the number of pirates hoping to get in on your deal. So that simplifies the system, and brings the combat engine into the loop.

Another annoying thing in these games is when you open up the cargo screen and there are three dozen different products you can buy and sell. Sure it’s very realistic, but I always find myself wondering exactly what the difference is between them, and this tends to tie into the first problem I mentioned above. So I decided that each base will feature no more than three or four products, and the big difference will be their unit size and weight to value ratios. So you can buy cheap night lights that have are worth about $0.50 a pound, but come in increments of one pound; or you can buy the industrial strength cat washing machines, which have a value of $5.00 a pound, but you have to buy them in increments of 50 pounds. You see that favors someone who builds their ships for transporting merchandise, if you slap a tiny little cargo hold onto your gun ship you’ll be able to carry a lot less cargo than a ship entirely dedicated to cargo transportation and your cargo will be less lucrative as well. Thus rewarding specialization.

Another thing I’ve decided to cut is the awful problem of having to stop at each place with a ship parts shop and compare all of their guns to all of your guns to see if they have better ones requiring you to upgrade. Yes it’s fun getting better equipment, but no it’s not fun at all trying to compare dozens of options and figuring out which is best. Again it turns the game into a spreadsheet. So I decided to mimic Mass Effect 2 and 3 in this regard. You’ll have a few guns with drastically different performance profiles that you can pick from. Each type of gun will favor a different type of strategy and a different type of ship build. Once you’ve decided on a particular build for your ship then you just pay to upgrade the components. You still get the fun of gradually improving your ships, but the only time you have to worry about comparing equipment is if you decide to alter your strategy.

An added benefit of boiling things down to just what’s fun is how much it can simplify things. I was planning on trying to simulate a whole economy that your flying around and trading would affect, and yeah that would be pretty neat, but I don’t know how much more fun it would make the game. And since I decided that it was wholly unnecessary I don’t have to program it now, so everyone wins.

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