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Mark Ivey’s weblog

Refining a Game Until it is Fun

I’m crafting an economy game using Python and Google App Engine.  Called Island of Naru, it is a simulation of a small society on a tropical island. The core design revolves around production and trade:

Because terrain affects production, the location of a town matters. A town surrounded by mountains, for example, can’t grow very much corn, while a town surrounded by corn fields can’t mine very much iron ore.  The disparity between locations is what drives the need for towns to trade with each other.  By trading with each other, our hypothetical mining camp and farming town can become much more prosperous than they could on their own.

The previous release of Island of Naru added simple trade: cities that were connected by roads could exchange goods.  The latest version adds simple production: towns near fields will produce food, towns near mountains will produce raw materials, and towns near factories will produce manufactured good.  This change is exciting because it means the core game concept is now playable.  In essence, this is the first version of Naru which actually resembles the game I set out to build.  Now it is possible to start experimenting with the game design, looking for the fun aspects of it and bringing those to the forefront. Much like a rough draft of an essay, the game needs rework and refinement to bring out the best qualities buried inside it. I’ve already done a little exploring with some changes I’ll talk about below, plus I have some half-formed, fuzzier ideas about where the fun may be hiding that I’ll mention at the end.

As soon as terrain-based production was finished, my first thought for improvement was to make the economy more complex by providing ways to enhance production and by adding another resource type: manufactured goods. Production of raw materials can be improved by digging mines in mountains, while irrigating fields increases the amount of food they will produce.  Manufactured goods are only available if you build a factory next to a city. These changes gave the game more depth.

Next I added exploration. I want the player to have to think about where they build their cities, especially the first one.  It should be beneficial to hunt around a little for an ideal site, and I think that with a little tweaking, this can be accomplished now that terrain impacts the city’s production.  I’m hoping that exploration will help enhance the feeling of landing on a new island and looking for a good spot to build.  The island starts out unexplored except for the beach where you came ashore.  You can then explore outward from there.  I tried making the player explore one tile at a time, but I found that it took too much time: most of the player’s clicks were spent exploring instead of building.  That’s not what the focus of the game should be, so I changed the exploration to uncover several squares at a time, which helped.  With exploration, the early game is more interesting because the player has to balance exploring with the need to start a town as soon as possible. 

Finally I tried to tweak the numbers behind the economy so towns could grow to larger, more realistic populations.  This change took more effort than I expected because it uncovered some problems with the way I was calculating demand and the happiness of the population.  Fixing it involved modifying the internals of the supply/demand system to allow more control over the minimum and maximum required amounts for each resource.  This not only fixed the problem, but also gave me more control over the balance of the game, which may be useful later. The new numbers don’t seem glaringly low, so the game feels more realistic now.

Even with these improvements, I feel like the fun is still buried. So where should I look next? I have three guesses. First, I suspect the game needs more depth. There are only three resource types at the moment, for example. The trade is also very simple. A more complicated trading network with bottlenecks and different capacities for different types of roads would be much more interesting to manage.  Right now, once a player connects all the cities with roads, there is nothing else to manage.  There’s no upkeep, improvement, foreign trade, or ports.  I expect adding these details will help a great deal once the game is almost finished, but they should probably wait until the bare skeleton of the game is a little more refined.  You don’t start decorating a house until after the walls are finished being built.

My second guess for making the game more fun is adding a goal. In its current state, Naru is just a toy, not a game.  Sure, the player can invent a goal for themselves, like “highest island population in 100 moves” or “biggest single city” but self-imposed goals aren’t very powerful motivators.  I think imposing some goals and adding a high-score table or two would help add a competitive edge to the game.  I may add a simple goal just to give some direction to the player and avoid confusion about what they are supposed to be doing, but fancier changes like multiple goals or score tracking need to wait until the core idea provides more fun on its own.  High score tables enhance existing fun, they don’t magically make boring tasks fun.

I think the biggest thing hiding the fun is lack of resource constraints on the player.  They can build everything for free, so nothing feels valuable.  For example, the player should have to agonize a little over the perfect location for their first city, but right now there’s no need: if they find a better location later they can always just build a city there.  Similarly for roads: the player should feel a sense of accomplishment when they manage to add a new city to the trading network but since roads are free this isn’t difficult and there’s no sense of accomplishment.  A typical game goes something like this: build a city in the flatlands, build a second city by the mountains, build 4 road segments to connect them, build a factory, uhh, now what? 7 moves into the game the player already has access to every resource. Each new city gets connected to the others in a handful of moves, and the end result is that the player doesn’t spend any time thinking about the trading network.

I’m going to try the standard solution to this problem: gold.  Make the player pay for building cities and roads, so they are more valuable.  I’m not sure what the mechanism will be for getting money in the world.  Sim City had taxes to raise money, Oasis let you search for followers in the desert, Civilization made you use special “settler” units that were difficult to obtain.  Any of these would work; the key thing is that the player has to make choices about what they want to build with limited resources.

If you want to play the game now, even though the fun may still be elusive, go to http://naru.countlessprojects.com.  Feedback is always welcome, of course. You can leave it below.  I’d be especially interested to hear any thoughts about refining game designs to uncover hidden fun within them.