DevBlog: Design Insights of Fate Tectonics

From Andrew Traviss, Co-Founder, Golden Gear

Sometimes when you're working on a game for a very long time, a particular design problem keeps coming back no matter what you throw at it. I believe the one we've been facing is a fairly common one; Fate Tectonics is open-ended and lets players do their own thing for the most part, so it's not often clear to many what is expected from them. This leads to lots of other problems; those who were playing just fine would tell us afterwards that they thought they were doing terribly. How can you rate your own progress in a game if you don't even know where you're going?

Our first shot at a solution was to add a story, to flesh out the Fates themselves, and give the player a better idea of who they were plus how they fit into the game. This started off as a digital comic book and eventually became more of a storybook. The game was better for it; people at least stopped asking who they were, and mostly seemed to understand if something good or bad was happening. Yet many failed to see the big picture or grasp any direction in the game. The book has since become central to the game in a lot of ways, but it didn't solve the problem we originally set out to solve with it.

This occurred again and again; we’d make attempts at solving the bigger problem and instead pick off several smaller problems connected to it without making a dent in the big one. As it happens, our final solution ended up coming from an entirely different problem we were dealing with at the same time.

People at conventions were becoming super engrossed in the game and playing a lot longer than they meant to. Sometimes 45 minutes or even longer, which is a good problem to have! But we didn't want to take up so much of someone's day when there was so much else to see. We also wanted more than six or seven people to play the game in a day. To solve this, we added a time limited Demo mode, which ended with the player destroying the world. People loved it! Destroying the world was a lot of fun, and it was immediately clear that this feature had to be in the full version of the game somehow.

http://i.imgur.com/aGVxuDf....

Another thing that happened was how less and less people were asking about the long-term goals in the game. Once the doom timer appeared, the player’s interest in what was going on and what could be done before time ran out would increase exponentially. It took a long time to realize it, but our convention demo had become more compelling than the full game. Most of the pressures in Fate Tectonics are very situational; they come in bursts with long periods of calm in between. We needed some kind of pressure to fill those gaps, and the demo's time limit was doing the job quite well. So we then had to ask ourselves: how can we implement thiss throughout the game?

We couldn't just slap a time limit and call it a day. Any single number we picked would lock some players out of the late game and be completely irrelevant to others. The time limit needed to matter at any skill level while still allowing most to see everything the game has in store. So we took a cue from old-school arcade racing games and created a time extension system based on their accomplishments. The new Fate Ragnarosa judges your world after a set amount of time, and if you haven't reached the final goal, it is deemed unworthy. Which necessitates your world's destruction and the need to start over. Ragnarosa's sister Fortuna awards achievements that extend your available time for all future attempts. Once that Age comes to an end, you see a summary of what you managed to accomplish and get some suggestions for what to try for next.

http://i.imgur.com/mhHHM1e....

By doing this we take one of the game's soft structures, the death and rebirth of your world, and turn it into a much clearer story with a beginning, middle, and end. It's clear that destruction is supposed to happen, and that losing everything several times along the way is just how the game is supposed to be played. By recording the results of each Age in the storybook, you can look back and see the evolving story of your progress through the game's challenges. And if you make rookie mistakes at first, it doesn't really matter. After all, it’s all going to get wiped away anyway.

Day 28 | Golden Gear