Looking for the "Big Picture"

[MBD]

It seems to me that you guys are headed down the same path that a number of similar efforts have gone. You can’t just keeping adding more and more bits and pieces here and there and expect to end up with a good game. You need to have a “big picture” – something that unifies and organizes all of the ideas, and I don’t see it here. Having the big picture in mind allows you to discard ideas that won’t fit, and also makes it easier to see where other ideas that will fit have been overlooked. I’m not saying the big picture will never change over the course of the development, but a game design really benefits from having a single point-of-view unifying it from the start. And that point-of-view has to come from the top.

So far, you seem to have developed an interesting multi-tiered medieval combat model. But that’s both fairly easy and not enough to base a game on. The trick is to find something that you can develop as fully as the combat model to counter-balance the advantage of a strong military, like Civ3’s use of culture. Even better, try to find three different ways to approach winning the game, kind of like the rock-scissors-paper thing. Each way might have an advantage over one of the others, and be at a disadvantage over the third. Some possibilities groupings are technology-religion-magic and economic-diplomatic-military. And make everything else in the game relate to those major approaches, like having espionage be most effective for factions that emphasize diplomacy, but less effective for factions that emphasize the military. Once you have that approach in place, you can use things like the effects of province buildings to minimize a faction’s weaknesses or emphasize its strengths.

Another possible angle on the design is to try to make two opposite approaches work – being strong militarily obviously has its advantages, try to give some advantage to being pacifistic. Similarly, right now being honorable gets you closer to one way to win and being infamous only gets you penalized. Make it so there’s some advantage to being infamous or some drawback to being honorable -- two parts advantage and one part disadvantage for any approach to winning.

What I’m trying to say is to keep in mind that you are not recreating somebody else’s game. This is entirely your game, and you control what goes in and what doesn’t. So don’t just throw a bunch of different ideas into the mix without thinking about where everything will fit and hope to come out with a good result. Before anything else, you need something that pulls everything else together into a coherent and unified design. You need the big picture.

[TCO]

Your most important point was the need to be disciplined about culling concepts, RIGHT NOW in the design stage. Vel si going to have to be the man to start chucking some great concepts out. Since they would be too much and would bog the game down. Probably a god way for Vel to do this is to summarize, organize and write down some of this stuff. He can than clearly say what was consdiered and what was excluded and he can clearly describe the theme of the game. And how remaining parts fit. And excluded parts, don't.

I think the team has a decent understanding of the need to reward different approaches (Your other point.)

[MBD]

Originally posted by GP
Probobably a god way for Vel to do this

Interesting typo (it was a typo, wasn't it?)

I guess I'm concerned about these projects that are vaguely defined and just beg for the kitchen sink approach to suggestions for what should be included. I understand that part of the point of having this forum is just visibility or "advertising", but I'd like to see an explicit statement of exactly what kind of a game this is supposed to be -- is it Medieval Civ with magic, HOMM lite, what?

I agree they probably understand about rewarding different approaches. The more interesting thing is that knowing where you're going from the start makes it easier to see how other things that maybe haven't been considered, like pacifism or infamy, might be turned into valid approaches.

[Velociryx]

Hmmm....a very good point, MBD, and hello!

The short answer to your question, just to put something afield with all speed, is that eventually, the aim is to develop a civ-like game (4x, tbs, strategically oriented) in a world built from the ground up, locked in a fantasy (and magic) laced medieval era.

And you're quite right....this forum exists at least in part to help give us some exposure. The larger piece of that though, at least in my mind, is to talk about what might be. What could be. It's very true that we need to prune ideas from the tree earlier, rather than later, to avoid spending hellish amounts of time developing a concept that we ultimately decide against using, but before we get to that stage, and unimpeded by anything beyond the broadest possible vision of the game, I wanted to give folks who were not with us at the start a chance to stretch those creative muscles and see what came of it.

So far, a lot of really amazing ideas have come from that, and in that regard, I view our ongoing discussions here as having been amazingly productive things.

Will all the ideas discussed here make it into Candle'Bre?

Nope...(but almost all of them are being stockpiled, and the ones that don't make it into CB will find their way into the other games in my head... ).

The ideas base though, really has reached a point where it's time to start drawing it down and refining, and I'm working on that now, in between doing stuff for v0.1, answering AI research questions, and the like, and I'll (hopefully, if the Muse is not fickle), have a good deal of that fleshed out in at least semi-coherent form soon...

-=Vel=-