Posted October 26, 2023 by VivianOverbey
Hi, welcome again to my design blog. I'm Vivian Overbey, lead designer on Entoworks, a lightweight strategy/tactics game about steampunk mechanical bugs. for a bit more context you can check out my first design blog. You can check out the fourth production blog to see what got done by the rest of the team, this post focuses on the game's design and how it changes through development.
Sprint 4 has finished out, some major changes to the game's design were made. The main goal of this sprint from my perspective as designer was to adjust the design of the game to be more in scope, taking into account what we can more or less guarantee will get done by the end of the semester (Sprint 7). Working with my producer, we figured out how much of the different elements of the game could be completed.
We came up with -
Other assets such as general 2D assets, audio, or VFX are unlikely to cause issues, so not many of those are planned to be cut, though the reduction to 3 game environments cut a lot of miscellaneous work people needed to do to, which helps with keeping in scope.
The main bottleneck of scope for Entoworks was programming. The team has 3 programmers, and creating a strategy game like Entoworks takes a good bit of programming.
The main issues were these -
These 3 factors, and how they interact, meant that not a lot was getting done in terms of programming relative to the rest of the team. The primary goal of the changes written out this sprint was to streamline and simplify the design to take some work off of the programmers, and simplify the tasks that needed to be done. This included the removal of a substantial part of the game loop, the upgrading and managing of units, and some other combat mechanics. Some other features of the game has to be adjusted and simplified around the removal of these mechanics as well.
What got cut (features) -
What got simplified (features) -
With these changes made, the game is a lot smaller and simpler, but should feel more complete. The philosophy has changed from making a full game with tons of biomes and bugs, and all the things, to creating a polished small game, a "vertical slice" of what a larger Entoworks would look like.
Overall these design changes make the game easier to envision, and design for in terms of specifics. While its never fun to have to cut content, being able to have a much more specific vision of what the final product will be is nice, and I'm looking forward to seeing the progress over the last few sprints.
Thanks for reading, there should be a build attached to this post you can check out if your interested.