Making games smartly on a small scale
Doing research about what works and having a strategy over having an idea.
Hallå pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
The response to last weeks devlog of Ploppy Weather was super nice! I’m really hyped to work on it and simultaneously a little overwhelmed whenever I open the project. It’s gonna be quite a beast to get it made all by myself. I do like the challenge though.
But this week it’s time to announce my new project! Something a bit more sane.
Making games smartly on a small scale
Now it might seem strange to start talking about ANOTHER game I’m working on. But that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And I have my reasons!
To start it seems highly unlikely that I’ll be able to ship Ploppy Weather any time this year. It might not even be ready next year. So while I will keep working on it and posting about it, I will not commit 100% of my time to it.
I wanna be a bit more strategic with my time and try to get something good out as soon as possible.
Chris Zukowski wrote a great blog post about what he calls “crafty buildy strategic simulation games.” It’s a mouth full so he shortens it to “crafty buildy games.”
He did a lot of research on the types of games that work best on Steam and found this common denominator across a lot of different genres. What defines these games is that they’re built with reusable content in mind first.
The way I, and many other starting indie devs make games is by filling a game with unique content (as is the case with Ploppy Weather). Just think of a huge open world map with lots of handmade quests, characters and things you might only encounter once.
Balatro is an excellent example of a crafty buildy game, full of reusable content.
Balatro is a roguelite deckbuilder where you play poker hands to score enough to pass to the next round. The rounds get progressively harder, in order to keep up you’ll have to pick between different joker cards and benefit from their attributes.
In one of my best runs I got a card that gave me a multiplier based on the sell value of all my jokers, then I found another card that increased the sell value of each of my jokers after every round. Which meant my hand leveled up a little by itself every round.
That sort of “synergy” (is what the cool kids call it) comes out of designing with reusable content in mind first.
Every single card in Balatro adds to the possibility space of the game, there are uncountable ways this game can play out because every piece of content (card) is designed with this in mind.
If you design with reusability in mind you get a lot more BANG out of your effort as a developer.
I could spend 16 hours making a quest for an open world game and that quest will be played once. Or I can design a couple of cards for a deckbuilder, if done right all these cards will add to the depth and variety of the entire game.
The goal is for variety and depth to spring out of varied configurations of the game’s content.
I’m not saying quests are not worth making. It’s just not as cost efficient as making a systemic game (that’s also what the cool kids call it).
I do have ideas for systemic stuff that will go into Ploppy Weather. But it still has a lot of handmade content that is not reusable.
Crafty Buildy Prototype #1
SO! I’m making a systemic game. And I’m not doing this alone. My friend Daan is in a similar situation as me and we both liked the idea of making a game this way. So we decided to try out this strategy together.
Last week we got together at my place and came up with as many game ideas as we could. We made some paper prototypes, we strolled around, we mostly talked (and I introduced him to Balatro).
We are prototyping the first one of our ideas this week.
I drafted up this description to try and answer some of the most important marketing decisions we will make.
Tend to the Loopy Folk in this chill idle game. Strategically place buildings and plants along the path, collect resources and sacrifice them to the HOLE. Behold as the barren wasteland blossom into a lush forest.
The questions I tried to answer here was: Who’s it for? What’s the genre? What’s the player fantasy?
It’s for wholesome players, it’s an idle game, the player fantasy is to restore/care for nature. We might end up tweaking it a little or rephrase that sentence along the way. But it feels promising.
Three months was the timeframe we initially aimed for with this entire collab. I never stop being surprised by how long it actually takes to make a game. After estimating the dev time for two of our ideas one ended up 7 months and the other 12 months. We tweaked their scopes a bit and managed to reduce each to 6 months. It’s crazy how long it takes to make even simple games like these.
We will be sharing builds of these prototypes over on the Indie(Jon)Games discord channel in the coming weeks. Feel free to join if you wanna test or just shoot me a message somewhere!
It’s the first time I try to be this rational about a game project. We will see where it goes and whether it pays off!
Also, Daan wrote about this in his own newsletter, I read it after writing this and I gotta say he said it much better than me. Haha
Panel of the week
I reached quite a milestone with Space Deer last week! The 100th strip! It’s a special one in full color, a bit longer and it’s about the robotic fella Roblo.
(from Space Deer)
Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.
Take care and have a creative week.
Congrats on the 100th strip of Space Deer! I love this idea for the new game and completely understand working on something in the meantime because of how long a games development process can be. Loving the premise of a loop and restoring nature. NAIAD is a game I loved that sort of has that premise, but less of a exact loop and more of the loop of the gameplay. I highly recommend it!
Good luck! It sounds pretty compelling to be able to watch nature grow and spread.
I had the run of all runs in Binding of Isaac recently. By getting enough discounts or something in the store, I suddenly reached a point where everything was 0 cents. This, combined with items always being renewed, meant that I could just stand on the item and endlessly farm them as new ones kept replacing what I had just gotten. I ended up with an all-consuming army of familiars that would pretty much kill anything in a room the second they entered. lol.
Synergy can be great fun!