I continue my design adventures, this week we’ll talk about an aspect that pertains to so many games: Resources.
A common issue (at least more common than it should be) with resource management games is resources feeling the same. Let's say you have three resources(A, B and C) and you use A+B to build building X and B+C to build building Y. While technically different, they are going to feel pretty much identical. If you have some A you'll think about getting some B to build some X. If on the other hand you have some C, well, it's going to be the same but with B and Y instead. The problem is quite clear, they inspire similar lines of thought because they mimic one another. The solution is obvious, right? Resources should be different.
Obvious points are a bit of a trick, if you look at them a bit closer, in their obviousness, they often conceal that you aren't getting to what you're trying to get at. "Just make the game more fun" I mean, yeah, now that you mention it... The trick however doesn't stop there, obvious points can also conceal their usefulness, you just need to interrogate them a little bit. How could you make your resources actually different? What would that mean for this game? Now we're getting somewhere. That's what I'm going to talk about, how I tried to answer those questions.
As I mentioned last time, I wanted the game to be relatively easy to assemble, so I was aiming to pack as much punch as possible, in as little resources as possible. I began thinking in terms of potential actions, what resources they could require, and their relation to the setting of the game. At this point, I was just throwing stuff and hoping something stuck. To give an idea, I was thinking stuff like:
- It's a bar, we should probably have beer.
- You're supposed to build your bar, so you'll need a resource for that, I guess bricks or something.
- We need something to pay workers, maybe food or money(?).
- Bands are going to be playing, so we'll also need something for that too.
Aiming for a limited amount of resources also meant there had to be some overlap between them and their uses, little points of tension do add up (Do I use money to build a room or to give a concert?). In the end I arrived at 3: Food, beer and money. There's also band cards, so technically 4.
With those in mind, I began thinking about across which axes, I could differentiate them. For this I thought about their inflection points, that is to say, how do they get in, move around and exit the system. Then I looked at their value fluctuations: Are they more valuable at some point? Are they harder to come by at different points? What kind of situations would make them more desirable?... Finally, I took into account to what parts of the system do they relate the most, with the aim that there should be specialization but also some overlap. I should clarify, I was looking for a modest amount of differentiation, not for MTG colors level of personality, so this seemed like enough levers to pull. Even then, I think having more than one axis to adjust, is highly desirable in terms of achieving some reliability. If, for whatever reason, your only source of differentiation fails, the whole effort could fall with it.
Food
Food is about energy, i.e. about getting to do things, about surviving. The main use of food is to pay volunteers (workers) at the end of each round. If you don't pay them, they'll leave. This isn't a novel idea, but makes sense both thematically and in bringing about a certain way of being perceived/thought about. If we look at food, it enters the game and then gets consumed automatically. You just think about getting enough, not about how to spend it. It also ties to how workers are perceived. Growing your roster increases your actions, but does so in a self-limiting manner. Getting new workers is good, but you have to pay more food, so it comes with strings attached. Food is harder to obtain at first, but once you set up some pieces of your engine, it stops being a burden. All in all, food is highly desirable at the beginning, with a spike at the end.
Beer
Right from the beginning, I decided beer should be a resource closely related to bands. For those not familiar with Metal (or Rock in general), it's a running joke (although not really a joke) that (new) bands get paid almost exclusively in alcohol. Signing bands is a huge part of your engine building effort, so that’s the main use of beer. The other obvious use for beer was, people buy a ton of beer during concerts (and festivals). I considered some forms of "selling beer" during concert (the gig action of the game), but it was cumbersome and too snowballish. In the end, I only kept it for the festival. It does mirror food in having a spike of value at the end, so while their curve of desirability is similar in form, their fluctuations take place at different points in time.
Money
What is money? Depending on who you ask, you'll get tons of different answers, one of them is that money is a way of storing and exchanging value. More than storing or exchange, I made money about the acquisition of value. This means, I put it at the center of the engine building part of the game. This happens in two ways, either by building rooms (long term/passive value) or giving concerts (immediate value). This was also part of my reasoning when deciding to use beer for signing (the other form of engine building). Since engine building is at the core of the game, splitting it among two resources made sense. A final observation on money in games is that you can easily give it more than one use and, pretty much no matter what, it's going to sounds like: yeah, I guess people use money for that.
Trading
Losing a worker early on can be so devastating that I had to add resource trading as a last chance option for getting food. With this in mind, it made sense making it a free action (instead of an action that requires a worker). At first, you could trade at a 1:1 rate (or 2:1 for money), but it was so convenient that pretty much made all resource differentiation became meaningless. Changing it so that you trade at a loss (2:1 and 4:1 respectively) solved the problem. An unintended benefit of "free" Resource trading is that the flexibility it affords extends beyond food, making the game a bit more dynamic all around.
I'll save the last "resource", band cards, for next week, when I'll also talk about combos. See you then.
Link of the week.
Almost passingly, but this piece makes an interesting point about how cloud-gaming being targeted at a hardcore audience was part of its undoing. My hot take would be pushing that idea further and point to lack of appeal for a casual audience as a big part of it. If we look at tv/movies and music streaming, both are aimed at their equivalent of a casual audience. People who just want to watch a show here and there, or mostly want to listen to the latest hits. People that prefer watching movies at 1.5+x and don't mind if their music comes at 128kbps. In both cases, not the most dedicated of audiences. For sure, some do get intense about it, but most don't.
My claim is that, for a "streaming gaming" service to catch up, it would need to have a big enough catalog of widely appealing games. Is there anyone out there with such a catalog? Anyone that wouldn't see bigger numbers via F2P?