Developer Blog #10 - Herding Cats And Little Space Men
Welcome back crew! And welcome to another blog post, this time it's me again! Senior Lead Designer Jorden and on this week's blog i’ll be taking you on a journey through the Astronimo’s Workshop! Or as it’s better known internally, the Garage! Your one stop place to build whatever comes to your mind and solve Astronimos many challenges and reach those precious recon rockets!
But that’s not how the garage started in life, it’s similar for sure! But the evolution of the garage can be pretty much chart exactly alongside the evolution of the game! Building and how you do so is at the core of the Astrionimo and each change we made to the garage influenced every part of the game and in turn every part we adjusted in outside the game equally had some effect on the components of the garage and how you built your contraption. They are inseparable and it became easily the biggest challenge I faced as a designer to date to make them work together and make it fun!
So lets go take a peak at where we started, the problems we encountered and how we solved them.
As mentioned in my last blog, the roots of Astronimo can be traced to games like Little Big Planet and Factorio. Combing elements from them ended with this early loop: You had to go around the planet, find and then mine different types of resources which allowed you to manufacture and build the components and combine them into vehicles in special “garage zones”. You then used those vehicle contraptions to solve the environmental challenges in the world and ultimately progress on through it. Need a bridge? Explore and collect bronze, silver or gold ores and with enough of each you could construct that bridge and open up a new path in the world for you and your friends. The reward for completing these challenges was more often Research Ore’s! Minable pieces of progression that you could use to unlock newer and better components to use in the garage.
Complete and solve enough problems via your exploring, mining, construction and problem solving and you’d earn your way off the planet onto the next area.
What this all meant was that the problems/challenges you faced on your journey around the world had to be balanced against your potential resource gathering, how much you’d already spent trying to solve a problem, what you spent your research on unlocks and what parts we expect/required you to have to solve some the tricky challenges further along in the world.
If you read my previous blog post, you probably saw towards the end i mentioned how we followed the fun, and how it led to us abandoning our original “Outrun the sun” timed concept of hopping from planet to planet and just focused on making the moment to moment gameplay as fun as possible. As we developed the game and improving the usability of the garage, we kept bumping into some fundamental problems we found that were often at odds with each other.
You know what doesn’t gel very well? Trying to herd Cats to the same goal. On the same screen. Try to imagine yourself in a group of Mario Party players, each running around, each wanting to do there own thing in the world. Suddenly a huge part of the game can’t be accessed or enjoyed, you can’t do X or Y or even progress to the next area because the group have ran out of money! They don’t have some resource all of a sudden and now you and players now have to leave the place where the fun was happening. Now the group had to organise themselves on a new sub goal on top of all the other stimuli, where now you all have to trod back to some mining area, collect new resources and then go back and rebuild the contraption because you couldn’t afford that one of 2 components you might have actually not needed!
We came across a real sticking point, players were great at recognising problems, but utterly awful solving them, and when you combined that with a group that now has to mentally manage resources, goofy physic characters and complicated creations in a shared sofa setting, we had one sticky problem.
So began adjusting the numbers! We reduced prices of the components, remove reliance on mining, remove silver and gold combination requirements, removed options of individually unlocking select parts yourself and made it work like you were permanently leveling up your character, brought back silver again, improved what unlocked and where and then ultimately removed science ores and silver. Each changed was playtested against in attempt to make the garage and resource building a fun experience for our shared party game.
Whilst we kept working the problem, I noticed something during the playtests. To save them the fath of collecting the resources, i would give players an motherlode of money to play with and just let them go buck wild when attempting to solve the latest challenge. That’s when i began to notice players had the most amount of fun messing around with all the different parts and creations when they didn’t have to worry about the costs. The playtest led to some really memorable moments where their try and try again with all kinds of daft creations using everything they had.
So that got me thinking, what if we just never charge for parts? What if we never make you run around for science to unlock them? What if we could simplify all these complexities thats preventing players from just jumping in and getting to the fun part? And prompting all these…well not fun or engaging activities? Just because we want resources to play this big part in the game? Is collecting and spending and managing money really that fun when mixed in with out 4 players running about the place like headless chickens?
Enter…Inventory! Now,when players come to a challenge, we, designers can set what parts they have access to front the list of all components in the game and they’d have unlimited parts! Now they can build freely and as with much as they have access too. It provided to be way easier to explain and, as a bonus, we’d combat a troubling behaviour we kept noticing, where players would build the same contraption over and over to solve problems and be super cost effective, now we could make it so you DON’T have access to this component or that one and you’d have to get creative from the get go with what puzzle pieces you were given!
The pivot was big success! Players respond really well to the change! they even collected all that ore we still had left around. Despite the fact though it really didn’t do anything anymore! It reminded was useless right up until we introduce spending the collected ore on cosmetics!
And so inventory worked and made its way all the way into the final release of the game this year! Did we make the right call? Could we have worked the problem some more and gotten a solution that achieved both desires? Collect resources and build solutions to challenge? Maybe. But ultimately i’m really still happy with what we have in the final product. The amount of crazy vehicles i’ve seen in the playtests i think proves it was a good shout in the end and i can’t wait to see what you end up making soon!
Until next time Crew!
But that’s not how the garage started in life, it’s similar for sure! But the evolution of the garage can be pretty much chart exactly alongside the evolution of the game! Building and how you do so is at the core of the Astrionimo and each change we made to the garage influenced every part of the game and in turn every part we adjusted in outside the game equally had some effect on the components of the garage and how you built your contraption. They are inseparable and it became easily the biggest challenge I faced as a designer to date to make them work together and make it fun!
So lets go take a peak at where we started, the problems we encountered and how we solved them.
As mentioned in my last blog, the roots of Astronimo can be traced to games like Little Big Planet and Factorio. Combing elements from them ended with this early loop: You had to go around the planet, find and then mine different types of resources which allowed you to manufacture and build the components and combine them into vehicles in special “garage zones”. You then used those vehicle contraptions to solve the environmental challenges in the world and ultimately progress on through it. Need a bridge? Explore and collect bronze, silver or gold ores and with enough of each you could construct that bridge and open up a new path in the world for you and your friends. The reward for completing these challenges was more often Research Ore’s! Minable pieces of progression that you could use to unlock newer and better components to use in the garage.
Complete and solve enough problems via your exploring, mining, construction and problem solving and you’d earn your way off the planet onto the next area.
What this all meant was that the problems/challenges you faced on your journey around the world had to be balanced against your potential resource gathering, how much you’d already spent trying to solve a problem, what you spent your research on unlocks and what parts we expect/required you to have to solve some the tricky challenges further along in the world.
If you read my previous blog post, you probably saw towards the end i mentioned how we followed the fun, and how it led to us abandoning our original “Outrun the sun” timed concept of hopping from planet to planet and just focused on making the moment to moment gameplay as fun as possible. As we developed the game and improving the usability of the garage, we kept bumping into some fundamental problems we found that were often at odds with each other.
You know what doesn’t gel very well? Trying to herd Cats to the same goal. On the same screen. Try to imagine yourself in a group of Mario Party players, each running around, each wanting to do there own thing in the world. Suddenly a huge part of the game can’t be accessed or enjoyed, you can’t do X or Y or even progress to the next area because the group have ran out of money! They don’t have some resource all of a sudden and now you and players now have to leave the place where the fun was happening. Now the group had to organise themselves on a new sub goal on top of all the other stimuli, where now you all have to trod back to some mining area, collect new resources and then go back and rebuild the contraption because you couldn’t afford that one of 2 components you might have actually not needed!
We came across a real sticking point, players were great at recognising problems, but utterly awful solving them, and when you combined that with a group that now has to mentally manage resources, goofy physic characters and complicated creations in a shared sofa setting, we had one sticky problem.
So began adjusting the numbers! We reduced prices of the components, remove reliance on mining, remove silver and gold combination requirements, removed options of individually unlocking select parts yourself and made it work like you were permanently leveling up your character, brought back silver again, improved what unlocked and where and then ultimately removed science ores and silver. Each changed was playtested against in attempt to make the garage and resource building a fun experience for our shared party game.
Whilst we kept working the problem, I noticed something during the playtests. To save them the fath of collecting the resources, i would give players an motherlode of money to play with and just let them go buck wild when attempting to solve the latest challenge. That’s when i began to notice players had the most amount of fun messing around with all the different parts and creations when they didn’t have to worry about the costs. The playtest led to some really memorable moments where their try and try again with all kinds of daft creations using everything they had.
So that got me thinking, what if we just never charge for parts? What if we never make you run around for science to unlock them? What if we could simplify all these complexities thats preventing players from just jumping in and getting to the fun part? And prompting all these…well not fun or engaging activities? Just because we want resources to play this big part in the game? Is collecting and spending and managing money really that fun when mixed in with out 4 players running about the place like headless chickens?
Enter…Inventory! Now,when players come to a challenge, we, designers can set what parts they have access to front the list of all components in the game and they’d have unlimited parts! Now they can build freely and as with much as they have access too. It provided to be way easier to explain and, as a bonus, we’d combat a troubling behaviour we kept noticing, where players would build the same contraption over and over to solve problems and be super cost effective, now we could make it so you DON’T have access to this component or that one and you’d have to get creative from the get go with what puzzle pieces you were given!
The pivot was big success! Players respond really well to the change! they even collected all that ore we still had left around. Despite the fact though it really didn’t do anything anymore! It reminded was useless right up until we introduce spending the collected ore on cosmetics!
And so inventory worked and made its way all the way into the final release of the game this year! Did we make the right call? Could we have worked the problem some more and gotten a solution that achieved both desires? Collect resources and build solutions to challenge? Maybe. But ultimately i’m really still happy with what we have in the final product. The amount of crazy vehicles i’ve seen in the playtests i think proves it was a good shout in the end and i can’t wait to see what you end up making soon!
Until next time Crew!
(Concepts courtesy of our talented Art Department!)
Big, wide gestures!
Pen and Paper
Adding the Art
