Yonatan Shaham
Game making posts
I tried to play RimWolrd a few times, and each time the same things disappointed me. So why I'm not a fan of such a successful game?
Today I worked on improving my game UX. I started with a high-level sketch. Then reusing what even assets I can to reduce delivery times.
Finished creating the basic game loop as a minimal working software. The next step is improving the UX.
Two days ago, I worked on my new game idea for 60 minutes. In those 60 minutes, I put some key product management, lean, and agile principles into work.
I have an idea of how to combine two of the indie game demos I developed into a new game.
I did not post a lot in the last few days, partly because I was swept by work. I did have a lot of thoughts on the game, and applied many changes. The first thought that I started to run with, emerged a week ago. I realized that I've been too fixed on the notion that the game experience should be pretty much the same in all game phases. I think that the success of open world game like Minecraft and GTA/RDD, combined with the general way strategy games work, biased me towards the thought that as a game maker I should create some game mechanics and probably some work generation procedures, and that these should create the entire game (I think Magic Survival is a great example to this type of games.)
Following the user-testing , I changed the movement controls from WASD to mouse. the user points with the mouse and right clicks to set a destination. Once clicked, the avatar progress to the destination without stopping. This was not my initial intention, but a result of some logic from the WASD code. By I decided to keep is as it manifests the roguelike nature that once the player makes a decision they cannot change their mind and needs to face the consequences.
Today I focused on user experience (UX) improvements. The first improvement originated from quick user testing I did earlier this week: a user expected to see something on the screen around the player avatar when they buy or sell something. They offered an animation of popping coins. This type of animation is very excepted in games these days. So I created a simple animation each time the player makes a transaction: When the player buys a resource, a coin drops down and the resource pops up. When the player sell a resource, a coin pops up and the resource drops down.
I created a new UI, based on icons instead of text. Drag to compare:
In the last few days I did not have the chance to write something. I did complete a working game prototype with a complete game loop: The player moves around the world on a grid, and can explore it at will. Player movement advances time. The player can buy or sell cloth at villages at different prices. Buying at a low price and selling at a high price is the way to make money. With time, player gets hungry. High hunger levels reduce health. Health automatically restores when hunger levels are low. The player can purchase food at one of the villages. The player can purchase a wheeled cart that reduced hunger buildup, as physical effort is reduced. The cart is expensive. The player wins when the amount of money is 50.