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 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. 

This is the final design blog, meant to get it out a bit sooner, but better late than never. the game is done! the final build is available for free in this log and on the main page

The last couple of sprints went fairly smoothly, the game really came together quickly at the end. The last two sprints aren't really the time to make large design changes so there is not a whole lot to talk about.

Thanks for reading :) 

... This post is kind of short ... uhhhh, guess I can go over how the design changed through the project

Entoworks had a summers worth of pre-production done for programming and tools, and a semester before that for the base concept. going into development the plan was to create a simplified form of games like XCOM. there would be a simple crafting/upgrade loop and a combat loop, with progression like what we got in the game on Itch right now.    

This is a lot to ask of a team of 17 over the span of 14ish weeks. the first half of production was really slow, especially in terms of programming. The first of two major design shifts happed when we realized that the upgrading/building of units would take too long to implement. there were too many stats. we suspected certain aspects of the upgrade loop wouldn't make it in from the beginning but it began seeming like more of an issue as production progressed.

The main changes settled on were the simplification of unit stat blocks. initially units had 12 different unique stats, but this was reduced down to 8. this change was implemented and communicated around sprint two. this change while sounding small impacted a lot of the games other systems, overall making them less complicated to make. the combat needed less features and the upgrade menu needed less components. for more specifics you can check out design blog 2.

These changes reduced the games complexity and scope. Personally I feel that even if we had infinite time to made Entoworks, this change would have been good, as the simplification of stat blocks supports the games accessibility to beginners. These changes wouldn't be enough to bring the game into scope, and more cuts were made in sprint 4. 

The main changes in sprint 4 involved cutting the upgrade loop entirely and completely focusing on combat. other mechanics that weren't essential were also removed, such as special attacks. we also settled on exactly what units would be in the game, and what biomes (level maps) would be in the game. for more details you can check out design blog 4.

the changes made in sprint 4 were enough to allow us to make what was produced on Itch right now. there were a lot of other smaller changes through production, such as small updates and tweaks to the level editor, or documents like stat sheets. After sprint 4 there were no more large design changes. 

Overall the main driver of design changes was scope, as we couldn't get a build that had the core loop until very late into production. This didn't leave us a whole lot of time to playtest and iterate. Ideally the main driver of design changes would be player feedback. Scoping down early is the way to go if you want to iterate based on player feedback and not your teams ability to churn out complex work fast.

Thanks for reading, The games done! its free! play it! please!