Monday 20 November 2017

Post Morten Diary: Island Survival Disaster (Or how to do things wrong!)

Hi!

Island Survival Disaster was the first completed I made that was published. The idea of the game was a mix of text game with options for the players that will affect the outcome, and a board game where you discover the map and manage your resources.

It was fun to do, but in retrospective the game has many problems that made the game confusing and tedious. At least, there are a lot of lessons I learned for future games. In no particular order:

Before start coding, define the scope of what you want to do, and stick to it


The game has an event system. This event system tells the player a history, depending on his actual location, stats, friends and their situations, inventory and a large list of parameters. The system is to calculate the possible options the player can take, and their outcomes. In theory is something cool, but it grew bigger and bigger every time I wanted to do a new event and I needed a new check of some sort. "It would be cool to also check for this.."

This lead to a very big system, that in some cases some features were only used once for one event (and we are talking about hundreds of events). Also, the player never know why or what is triggering that action or that event, just clues, making the game very confusing for the player, and very time consuming for the developer because adding features that are not going to be used it only add another layer of complexity on the game that will also make the maintenance of the code and the bug fixing harder.


If you mix  game genres, think twice, and do it right, or don't do it


The game could be a lot better if the game was only a text game or a board game, but mixing both, and trying to add features to the less important of them (adding building, resource management to the exploring part of the game) can be very confusing for the player if you don't split very well both parts. A text game only would be fun, and the board just to move and nothing more was the correct thing to do. Now it's veeery late.

Make every option clear, and do anything you need to the player to understand how to play the game


Even if you have a very simple game, if the player don't know what to do, probably it will unistall the game without even trying. You need to hold the hand of the player even if you need a big interactive tutorial (or other types of tutorial). Mix them in the starting gameplay, as only tutorial screens with a very big "skip" button will be not useful, as the average player, eager to play, will skip it. (This is a lesson I learned on another game, but fits here too)


Don't make a text based game if you are not a writer or you don't have someone that can do the story


What a bad writer I am! And I made a game with lots of text. This lead to many problems. The first one, the player will be "amused" about the level of what is reading, and probably will quit after a while. The second.. is that is very very time consuming. Probably I spent more time writing that doing actual code, and the game needed that extra coding time. Doing it twice (the game was translated to English/Spanish) did not help. (Look at the text of the image, parallelism anyone?, horrible I know)


The GUI is very important

Making menus on a game is not a fun task. But it's a very important one. And in a mobile game it also need to be very clear. Show your progress to someone you can trust, and make changes accordingly. A bad GUI kill any games, because the player will not know what are their options, what that button do, the resources or items he has.. frustrating.

If you are not an artist, at least made the game easy to read

One of the major problems I always have, is that I'm not an artist. I need to borrow from CC or public domain files/textures/music/sound. I can make simple draws or change what I already have to fit my needs, but of course, is not the same that the work of an artist. The game can fun anyway, but please, don't clutter the game and try not to bleed the players eyes (or at least, don't mix different styles, be coherent!)

Final words

Nevertheless, looks like a waste of time uh? Not a bit, I learned a lot, not just on game design, where the major flaws are, but I improved my skills on how to code, architecture, reuse, mobile optimization.. and in my following projects I code a lot faster and cleaner. (Yes menu system, I'm looking at you!). (BTW I unpublished the game from the store a while ago.)

Anyway, hope this help, and have fun coding! If you are not having fun, something is wrong!


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