[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]Sunless Sea is not a trading game. [Source: made the game.][/color]
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[color=#009900]OK, that’s cheap of me :-) and it’s entirely possible for players to find different things in a game than the things the designer puts in it. But I am raising a eyebrow at the fact that that list of my inspirations is mysteriously missing the two primary ones - FTL and Don’t Starve - which have no trading elements at all. I’d have liked to strip out the markets and replace trading entirely with story-based elements - not unlilke what Rosedragon suggests - but the content budget for that would have been much higher, and the UI would have been a bit painful. [/color]
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[color=#009900]MisterGone - I wrote a longish (and slightly supercilious, now I reread it, sorry!) here http://community.failbettergames.com/topic19495-suggestion-give-hearts-an-effect-outside-events.aspx#post97836 about why adding elements can often be more problematic than it seems.[/color][/quote]
I’m going to preface this by stating that I mean no disrespect at all with any of the following, and I’m hesitant to even respond since I feel like if I say anything that might disagree with you is essentially asking for a massive influx of shunning from the rest of this community. I read that post earlier, and thought of responding to it, but I got caught up this last week, and was trying to figure out the proper way of saying that I disagreed with the founder of this site and company in a manner that would still convey my utmost respect and admiration without getting my head chopped off and banned before deciding that it wouldn’t be worth the drama or time to figure out the finesse of it all.
Preface over.
I didn’t include Don’t Starve and FTL because honestly, SS resembles them the least in terms of how the player interacts with the systems. It looks, feels and plays more like Pirates (especially) and the rest I mentioned (generally) on the list, especially if you keep the semi-recent update to Pirates in mind rather than the original. I could be pedantic and talk about the economy of FTL and how there’s plenty of trading that goes on there, but trade in that game is far more about resource accumulation before strategically deploying savings to ward off against risk (so, to Sigred, yes, I do differentiate between what a "trading game" is, and it isn’t "just has shops").
Look, Alexis, (if I’m be too familiar here with first names I apologize in advance), whether you meant to or not, you’ve made a game that can be considered "a trading game", and unless you want to rework the code, that’s just what it’s going to be. To me, and to others that play it as well. At least in part.
I get that this was something purposefully de-emphasized. I saw the note on the development progress bar that confirmed that. I get that this wasn’t the direct intent. Your words above confirm that if you could have replaced the markets with something else you would have. Despite all of that, trade is a HUGE part of your core gameplay loop.
Goods have prices at port A and differing prices at port B and this creates margins of profit. Considering there is a general distance to profit margin relationship - i.e. I can sell wine for some profit at Venderbight on a short haul or try to increase my margins a lot more getting over to Godfall or Khan’s Heart on a longer haul - and this profit-distance (with greater distance generally meaning higher risk) relationship holds true rather evenly throughout the entire game . . . yeah, you’ve got a pretty standard trading game. Heck, go play the also Early Access Cosmonautica and take a look at how similar the system is to the one in SS in terms of basic economic relationships. Buying low and selling high is important in SS, and it’s this importance more than anything that makes the application of that genre (one of many SS inhabits) as applicable as any other.
And thank god it is. Because it’s one of the most reliable ways for the player, especially new players trying to find their footing, to help figure out how to mitigate the many and varied risks you’ve also got in the game (and please don’t ever mitigate the risks, the risks are what make the game). Trading for profit is how I found any real progress in SS while Port Reports would have just kept me barely hanging "above water" so to speak.
It’s basic. It’s de-emphasized. It may not be your intent. But it’s there, and it works and it’s not a bad thing. It could be a better thing, but I get that you don’t even want it to be A thing, so I’m not really pressing the point other than as a mild intellectual exercise.
I suppose "content budget" is one way to put it, but to me it seems more like an issue of "scope/vision alteration over build iteration" and the "too many refrigerators" problem that comes up in game design (fairly often I’ve noticed, but usually on larger projects). You had a system for how you envisioned the game at one point, and later you didn’t like it, but don’t want to go back and change everything because you don’t want to overturn the tea table entirely. I get that. You don’t want to throw out all the working code to get rid of one thing related to it. Fair enough.
But so much can just be done with value changes (which unless your code base is just positively spaghetti [and I assume it’s not because I have faith in your team’s skill], should be relatively simple to alter) that I still don’t see why if you really wanted to ensure that SS not be considered a trading game, even in part, why you don’t make that more definite then?
I mean if you really want the effect of SS to not be a trading game, set all prices to be equivalent at all ports. Get rid of the profit margins. You have the power to do that. That should just be a pretty simple set of value changes, if tedious. Plenty of games AREN’T trading games because ultimately the markets (even when there are multiple of them) don’t present the player with opportunities to make money moving goods around. I can’t play a Final Fantasy game and sell my armor in one shop or another to get money back, for example. The internal economies of Skyrim or Fallout aren’t conducive to trading for profit for the same reasons.
All of that seems like has to do with values, not UI or art assets or most of what would cause any real headaches in a content pipeline. So why not change it?
I’d hope the reason is because you know that it would make your game worse. It would make traveling the zee just more frustrating and less alive. But it would hammer home the intent.
As to the other post:
Honestly, I guess I just don’t understand your point of view very well.
While I agree that the art of design is in finding that just right spot of not needing to either edit out or further add, and agree with the general sentiment of how addition of features can pile up and lead to confusion, I feel like the choices you’re defending with these points are so small that they’re not really applicable.
I mean sure, yeah, adding too many features can spoil the broth. Agreed. Why does that matter when speaking of surgeons as Pages trainers? That suggestion is about balance, consistency, and replacement. You wouldn’t be adding a new feature so much as replacing a feature that already exists with one that would make more sense on multiple levels. I could see it as adding a feature if Surgeons didn’t train the player in anything at all. But switching what they train the player in is an equivalent exchange, not an addition.
I also really don’t understand the worry over too many fiddly features. If there’s an area where this is of concern in SS it’s in your weapons and equipment on ships, not in whether or not Hearts has an outside combat effect. In general, I have a tough time seeing many other "fiddly" parts of the game, especially compared to FL (where the multitude of currencies all equal in pence value is the definition of what I think of when I think of "fiddly"). The differences in gun damage values and the amount of weaponry available when there is marginal difference between damage output in the gun progression is fiddly. Noticing "huh, I wonder why Hearts doesn’t have an outside combat effect" doesn’t seem fiddly, it’s just a moment of realization that an apparently ordered system isn’t as ordered as it was presumed to be; a fridge moment. That can be ameliorated with the gaming equivalent of lampshade hanging: more direct signaling to the player the intent behind Hearts being meant to be less impactful (such as how Fallout signals to the player that their Luck stat is relatively less valuable than their other S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats right at the beginning of character generation by not assigning major skill boosts for raising it).
If it’s about preferring untidiness or asymmetry, then fine, you got me there. Because that’s about aesthetics and what individuals value at the end of the day. I disagree obviously, but there’s no right answer on aesthetics. If me pointing to brain science on the value of symmetry is unconvincing on that point, there’s not much more for me to say.
There is a niggling point on "untidy asymmetry in design", because that seems like your confusing visual design and systems design in a categorical sense. I could point to all the classic games - Chess, Go, et cetera - and how symmetrical they are. That asymmetrical game design is better served for multiplayer and only applicable to single player if you take a view that single player games are games between the designer and player and yadda, yadda, yadda.
But in the end I get the sense that the only particular philosophical road that leads down results in arguments over angels on pin heads and sophistry, so let’s not go down that way.
Ultimately I guess I just hope you know that my stance in all this is that I want the game to be better. Not because it’s bad. But because OHMYGOD sometimes I wonder if you realize the potential you’ve got here.
SS is SO CLOSE to being the game that defines the very narrow genre it inhabits for all time. The thing holding it back is the same thing you talked about in your post-mortem - the conflict between it’s nature as, as you put it, "CRPG and Roguelike". I’ve been defining this conflict differently, because I view games as having three main parts - Context, Core, and Craft - and thinking of it as the conflict between your Context and your Core. The real issue being that I feel the game favors context over core, which results in great mood and tone, but kind of an "eh" experience on the more traditional gaming stuff.
But that’s actually great! Because most people don’t know how to make a good context for a game at all. They can’t figure out how to craft an interesting world or characters. You have that covered. Making the core game match up is just a matter of more iteration, and beefing up the core features so they feel as deep as the story and setting.
In fact, that’s probably it.
If I had to summarize, I think you’re erring on the side of caution too much. Worrying about too many features when SS could probably use a dozen more of them just seems like you’re playing it safe too much. Which, from reading that one statement about the storynexus awhile back, I understand too, but man . . . I guess I just don’t want the next game to be the masterpiece when you’re a hair’s breadth away from making this game exactly that.
But then, obviously, this is all just my opinion. You should invoke the Law of Thelema.