Initial Gameplay

    Spent some time trying to make my hexagon earth rendering demo into an actual game. Still have a long way to go, but at least it’s starting to somewhat look like a game. Main design challenge is making it super easy to understand how to play, while adding enough progression to keep things interesting and engaging. My intent is to make it super super easy and intuitive enough that even grandparents can watch their grandchildren play for a few minutes and feel like, “Oh, that seems easy. I can help defend my grandchildren’s territories when I’m bored!” We’ll see if this is unrealistic, but I can at least try…

    A friend mentioned Universal Paperclips, that shows how even a super super simple text & buttons game can feel fun and engaging. It starts with just a button to make paper clips, then as you progress you start making exponentially more paper clips, and eventually even consuming most of the universe to make paperclips. (I somehow ended up finishing the whole thing…) It feels like the key is that exponential progress that makes it feel like you are achieving so much more than before as you progress. But I imagine tuning the parameters to make sure progression isn’t too slow or fast will take some trials and errors.

    Since Shovely World isn’t a single player game like Universal Paperclips, another challenge is making sure the game can be fun for new low level players, while also being fun for high level experts. I guess a common design is to basically have separate areas for low, mid, and high level players. For now I’m trying to solve this by basically making higher conflict areas become higher level areas. This too I guess will take some fine tuning to get things right.