LegacyWorlds Beta 6

One of the most important and tricky aspects of Beta 6’s design is the creation of formulas. This series of posts (don’t ask me how many will be written, I really don’t know) will try to explain the process.

In this first post I’ll present the different types of formulas that need to be written in order to create a game such as Legacy Worlds.
(more…)

As the second part of our series around design objectives, I’ll present here the limits we have to put on our imagination to design a game which we can actually write and why this limits exist.

First of all, why do we have to put limits? Some ideas we’ve come up with or some suggestions made by the players community either in the game forums or here in the blog’s comments look very cool and fun. However, accepting these ideas means they’ll have to be integrated into the game’s logic. Internally it means objects will have to be represented in the game database, that is as some row in a spreadsheet-like format with column headers representing object properties and each object having its specific values in each cell of its particular row. It means these values will have to be used to compute a particular effect which means a particular formula will have to be defined for each effect or set of effects. Some of these effects might appear transparent to the player: population grows without him having to interact with anything. However some imply management by the player. The burden we accept to place on the player has to be carefully weighted if we want to cope with our “not too time consuming game” objective.

(more…)

From the experience gathered while running previous Betas we can extract a few very important goals which we intend to keep in mind while designing Beta 5. At the same time we have to cope with a set of limits that we have to put on our imagination to design a game which we can actually write. It is the first aspect which is introduced here, as background knowledge around the underlying design context. The second one will be presented in a later post.

What we had in mind when working along the LegacyWorlds line after Chris released his uni project was to keep on developing a very simple game where a player could manage his empire in a very short time. However what we achieved is flawed.

(more…)