Hi, welcome again to my design blog. I'm Vivian Overbey, lead designer on Entoworks, a lightweight strategy/tactics game about steampunk mechanical bugs. for a bit more context you can check out my first design blog. You can check out the fourth production blog to see what got done by the rest of the team, this post focuses on the game's design and how it changes through development. 

Sprint 4 has finished out, some major changes to the game's design were made. The main goal of this sprint from my perspective as designer was to adjust the design of the game to be more in scope, taking into account what we can more or less guarantee will get done by the end of the semester (Sprint 7).  Working with my producer, we figured out how much of the different elements of the game could be completed.

We came up with -

• 3 Biomes (Grassy Plateaus, Crystal Caves, Abandoned Metalworks)
  • Biomes include 3D environment assets, and small sets of levels
  • Each biome also needs a 2D illustration for level selection
• 3 Unit "Species"
  • Unit "Species" each need a 3D model, and animations
  • Each Unit "Species" also needs a stat block, and these need to be carefully balanced

Other assets such as general 2D assets, audio, or VFX are unlikely to cause issues, so not many of those are planned to be cut, though the reduction to 3 game environments cut a lot of miscellaneous work people needed to do to, which helps with keeping in scope. 

The main bottleneck of scope for Entoworks was programming. The team has 3 programmers, and creating a strategy game like Entoworks takes a good bit of programming.

 The main issues were these -

• Strategy/Tactic games are fairly complex to program
• Programmers have little to no experience with this type of game, and relevant systems
• Pre-production code made for project intended to speed up production took awhile for programmers to understand

These 3 factors, and how they interact, meant that not a lot was getting done in terms of programming relative to the rest of the team. The primary goal of the changes written out this sprint was to streamline and simplify the design to take some work off of the programmers, and simplify the tasks that needed to be done.  This included the removal of a substantial part of the game loop, the upgrading and managing of units, and some other combat mechanics. Some other features of the game has to be adjusted and simplified around the removal of these mechanics as well. 

What got cut (features) -

• "Upgrade Loop"
  • Resources
  • Crafting
  • Team Building
• Special Attacks

What got simplified (features) -

• Player Team 
  • Now set to levels, similar to advanced wars, the player is given a set of units, and plays through a scenario
• Unit Stats
  
  • No more upgrade loop means units stats have been simplified. units no longer have cores, levels, or upgrades, so stats are determined solely by their "Species"
• Game UX
  • No more upgrade loop means there is no more need for a complex menu for upgrading and managing units. the player will now be presented the game's level select map in place of the upgrade loop's menu, which contained the level select map. this drastically simplifies UX as the upgrade loop was the most complex component of the UX. 

With these changes made, the game is a lot smaller and simpler, but should feel more complete. The philosophy has changed from making a full game with tons of biomes and bugs, and all the things, to creating a polished small game, a "vertical slice" of what a larger Entoworks would look like. 

Overall these design changes make the game easier to envision, and design for in terms of specifics. While its never fun to have to cut content, being able to have a much more specific vision of what the final product will be is nice, and I'm looking forward to seeing the progress over the last few sprints. 

Thanks for reading, there should be a build attached to this post you can check out if your interested.