Butting heads at the game design table.

In honor of me finally owning all the X-Com games I decided to start documenting what I think would be a true successor to the franchise. While the idea itself isn't ready for me to show the world yet I do have an unusual story and challenge regarding a game design decision.

One of the many benefits about being a gamer and creating a game idea is that I have an understanding of what most gamers will do when faced with certain decisions. One of the hallmarks of an excellent strategy game is having interesting decisions for the player to make. You can substitute tough for interesting and the point still stands. In my strategy title one game mechanic I've come up with is that like X-Com you will receive spoils from successful missions; however what you do with them will be quite different. There are several groups who coexist with your group , a military group , scientific, etc, each group will create different equipment (weapons, armor, etc) based on which one you sell your spoils to. Obviously the military guys are the way to go for the best weapons, but they won't help you much in terms of defense. You can focus on one group for the entire game and you will still be able to beat the game, but you can diversity your equipment and tactics by dealing with multiple groups. Sounds good so far, except this is where I ran into a problem.


I started to think about what I would do when faced with this mechanic and what I would do is subvert it to my will. I would go up each group so that I could easily pick and choose the best equipment ruining the decision of the designer which is me in this case. Now putting aside the split personality argument for a second I needed to think up a way to force gamers to deal with this decision by actually making a decision. After some thought and pacing around my room not only did an idea hit me, but a way of adding more things to do in your home base other then placing troops into ships.

The idea was to make it harder and rarer to make a sale with the spoils and in the process forcing the player to decide which groups to focus on. Now, one of anything is easy to come by however 5 or 10 is more of a challenge and lets add the detail that everything you bring back is considered "raw materials" and needs to be refined. Now the player must include space in their base for equipment that refines X amount of item into something sellable.

One aspect of game design that I think a lot of designers forget, is actually playing the game. In an entry I made earlier I talked about how important it is to have outsiders play your game for testing, however the people making the game should still test the game as well. There are various little things that can go a long way in improving a title beyond game play which I like to call "Quality of Life" improvements, which I have an entry about soon.

Josh