Adding fun to in-progress simulation game

Some of you may remember High Frontier, the space settlement simulation game for which we ran a successful KickStarter last fall. We're following the incremental release model (c.f. Minecraft, KSP), and are currently on version 0.15. Things are going swimmingly.

But... I don't think people are actually playing the game very much, because it's strictly a sandbox at this point. You can design a colony, build it, then lay zones and paths inside (as well as place a couple of municipal buildings), and watch buildings develop in your zones. You can also do a bit of landscaping (raise/lower land, add water and trees). But that's it. There is no goal, and no budgetary constraints on what you build.

We know that eventually we're going to have a "career mode" where budget constraints are very real, and you have to start small and bootstrap your way to solar system dominance. But according to our current plan, that won't be until version 0.25, which is still quite a ways off.

So recently a discussion has started about whether we should try to increase the fun factor sooner by:

• rearranging the roadmap to add Career Mode much sooner?
• adding an achievement system?
• adding a simple cost model without full-blown Career Mode?

It's also possible that we combine these; for example, adding costs could tie in nicely to achievements, since we could have achievements of the form "build a colony capable of supporting X residents for less than $Y."

What do you think of these ideas? And, are there other relatively easy ways we could increase the fun that we may have overlooked?

Thanks,
- Joe

 

I think most people that play these types of games are quite happy to enjoy the sandbox without necessarily needing a fully fledged career mode.

Perhaps adding the cost model first is the way to go?

This way you immediately introduce choice / consequence and an element of challenge through resource management. I think this would lead to a more rewarding experience!

 

It's not so much about career mode for me. When I'm addicted to a sim, I always want to play just a little bit more to see how big I can make the system (city, theme park, etc.) while still keeping it running smoothly. It helps to have sparing use of random events (e.g., earthquakes) and increasing challenges as the system gets more complex. I agree with the post above; the cost model would have a big effect on making decisions about growing the system.

 

I see your point. One of the first things my users did was bring the game to its knees by designing a gargantuan space colony much larger than I thought any sane person would try to do.

OK, it sounds like a simple cost/revenue model, even without career mode, would be a big step up. I'll see about prioritizing that.

How do you guys feel about the idea of achievements in a game like this? Worth the effort or not?

 

Yes, achievements are fairly easy to implement and don't require much in the way of art assets. But they're something extra to encourage the player to make the system more complex.

 

A tutorial?

I couldn't figure out what was going on. I put a few basic geometry shapes together. Then there wasn't much else to do or see. I feel like I missed stuff, but I pushed every button there was several times to see what would happen.

 

Not wanting to sound mean, but I have a few points to raise just from initially looking at your videos.

I feel like your game is lacking a personality / style. Incremental games that you have mentioned beforehand like Minecraft and KSP had a good art style and personality to them (mostly the kerbans ). Maybe get some colonists to give some sort of feedback. I would defiantly work on a art style as well. (but not that urgently).

Other than that it just feels a bit empty.

 

Yeah, you definitely missed stuff. We have some tutorial videos at http://highfrontier.com/help/. (Though these are a couple versions out of date now; they mostly still apply, but I will probably redo the management-mode one at least after version 0.16.)

The colonists give loads of feedback — the Squawker feed is a continuous stream of it. So I'm not quite sure what more you want there.

As for art style, I think it is developing nicely:


...but I agree that there is more that could be done here. There is currently very little animation within management mode (other than moving the camera around, of course). It will feel more "alive" when we get people and/or vehicles moving along the paths, animals moving around in their pens, etc.

However, all of that is window-dressing, which doesn't impact the actual gameplay. I'm more concerned at this point about gameplay, and what can be done in this intermediate stage of development to improve that.

Based on feedback here and elsewhere, we've decided to rearrange our roadmap a bit to make room for a simple (per-colony) finances model, and an achievement system.

 

Window-dressing of this sort does impact gameplay. We're bombarded by so much text throughout the day that we've been conditioned to tune it out. We'll read text that we intentionally pull from sources, but we ignore popup text that's pushed out to us. So it's as if the Squawker doesn't exist (except for when we intentionally pull from it), which gives players the impression that the game doesn't provide feedback.

I'm looking forward to seeing more animation for feedback. It'll really make a difference in gameplay. Some might argue that this is "dumbing down," but I think it's the opposite. Since an animation or popup icon can convey information more succintly than a block of text, it actually allows you to provide the player a higher density of information at a faster rate.

On an unrelated note, I don't think I've mentioned it before, but I like the way the architectural art style is going. It's neither hyper-photorealistic nor mobile-style cartoon bubble art. Just a nice, happy balance. More light and shadow distinction in the future would be nice. The UI art could use a little more juice (in the future -- I know that's not the focus of development at this stage). So (my opinion) stay on course with your art style!

 

OK, that's a fair point. One thing we considered for the last release (but skipped because we were short on time) was finding a way to turn the grass and trees brown if your CO2 levels are getting too low. Instead, we have people squawking about their wilting plants... but I totally get how seeing your colony's greenery turn brown would be a far more noticeable (and visceral) way to convey the same thing.

Now, some animations really are mere window-dressing, in that they don't convey any information. Animals milling about in a farm plot don't tell you anything more about the simulation state. They're cool, but they're a level of polish that (I feel) shouldn't be at the top of the priority list right now.

But other animations (and graphical effects like the browning of the grass) certainly can provide feedback about the simulation state. I'll give more thought to what we can do along those lines.

Thanks, I appreciate that feedback too.

Best,
- Joe

 

Perfect example! More of this, please -- as time allows of course.

 

Okay I went back and redid these. There was stuff I missed.

 

People are always going to do this. I've seen well known youtubers do this to kerbal space program xD I also see it happen to cities : skyline frequently.

Maybe define some build zone rules so certain process/memory heavy buildings cannot be constructed within a certain distance of another such that a world made out of 100% of those buildings would not dip below 30fps on your target minimum specs.

Or maybe reduce the maximum size of a city, but let users build on multiple worlds / regions. Some combination of this and my previous suggestion might stop people from borking the game

 

Hmm... my display looks nothing like the screenshot you posted above...



The interface is consistent with the one in your screenshot but I am out in space watching ships occasionally fly in, dock briefly then fly out again. I did notice the game window is not fully visible on my desktop so there might be something below in that cut off portion that I need to see. I will change my desktop resolution later and try it again. Currently it is 1280 x 720.

 

That's the outside view... you would click one of the "In" buttons, if you had one, to switch to the internal view of one of the habitable parts. The fact that you don't have any "In" buttons indicates that none of your parts are habitable (probably because they're not spinning at the right rate to produce livable gravity — check your Analysis panels in design mode).

You're not the first to get stuck on that... it's become clear that I need to provide more feedback in the design phase, to help people make a habitable design. A tutorial would help, too, of course, but many people skip tutorials. Achievements might help guide you to making a livable design.

But come to think of it, if your design isn't habitable at all, we should probably stop you right at the Build phase — this would be very easy to do and avoid a lot of confusion. I'm putting that on the list for the next release!

 

@JoeStrout wow, so the inside screenshots you posted were the interior of those things? Brilliant! That pretty much solves that issue we were discussing before haha. Just need to spread out the zones to cover the interior of that... life sphere[?]... and then you'll always get stable fps from people building stuff.