EMPIRE's Beta Challenges – The Fun Part!

This blog was reposted from EMPIRE's official blog, over at empire-game.net.  If you want to know more about what the game is, check out this post for a quick introduction.

EMPIRE’s Beta has been a strong success so far, with very active participation from a lot of great beta testers.  Many of them were also fantastic testers largely responsible for getting AURO into the balanced, tight and interesting little gem that it is.  Good testers are pretty much *as* important as a good designer, and we’ve definitely got them for EMPIRE.

So let me fill you in a bit on what we’ve been working on.  This is a pretty highly detailed game design journal for the game, so I hope that it’s interesting, and please let me know if you have any thoughts.

The Game Designer’s Favorite Phase

Right now, we’re still in the phase where we’re making rather significant changes rapidly, trying new ideas, re-arranging stuff, and even removing/adding subsystems where needed.  For a game designer, it’s quite scary and stressful, particularly for one like me who is always treading new ground.  However, it’s also the most fun and interesting work a game designer gets to do.

At the start of a game’s development, it’s definitely fun to “imagine” all these ideas for how the game will work.  As a kid, this was always my favorite thing to do, because the game in my head was always way more exciting than reality.  However, as you get to be a more experienced game designer, you start to realize that fact a bit more, and that really drains the fun out of the initial “thinkin’ stuff up” phase.  So that phase is still fun for me, but it’s a bit diminished by the feeling that I know 70-80% of what I think sounds good now will have huge problems in reality. 

Then there’s the implementation phase, where you and the team really start putting stuff together, building a prototype / alpha version.  This is where the things that seemed cool and exciting to you at the start begin to reveal themselves as either not interesting or outright broken, and you go into a sort of panic mode of trying to fix stuff so that it at least sort of works, without having to upend everyone’s progress.

Eventually, you get to the phase we’re in now.  I’m not sure what to call this phase.  It’s something like an equilibrium of that classic design loop:  Design – Implement – Get Feedback – Redesign.  This is where testers come in super handy.  Spending a good few months in this phase at least is crucial for producing an interesting, deep game.

While there are definitely challenges ahead, I’m really confident that EMPIRE is going to make huge leaps and bounds in the next few weeks.

The Difficulty Challenge

“Difficulty” is always something hard to nail down in games, but it’s particularly annoying at this stage.  The problem is that we can’t really spend too much time “honing” the difficulty, when the way entire systems work is in flux.  So what we’re sort of stuck with is having to playtest game versions that are constantly out of balance, difficulty wise.

In my view, it’s actually always better to err on the side of slightly-too-hard, if anything, although the game has currently been going the other way.  Combat tends to be a push-over right now, since your army and that of the opponent tend to be similar in size, yet you have tactical cards and the opponent doesn’t.

The solution, I think, is to simply increase the quantity of monsters slightly.  I don’t want monsters to have “AI” (as AI is really a pattern that the user learns and exploits quickly).  It’s better if they are totally predictable, but simply outnumber you.

In fact, this points to a larger game difficulty problem, which is that of monsters simply not multiplying enough in general.  Currently, a good player is able to keep them completely at bay, on the defensive, and even to basically wipe them out completely.  In fact, we’ve had two of our best testers “solve” the game (for lack of a better word) by creating and endless monster-beatdown loop where they are never threatened again.

To solve this problem, we’re trying a few ideas.

One possibility for this last item might be something like:  Every turn, one monster is highlighted, and it passes on.  That one monster does something special.  Maybe he’s invulnerable for that turn, or maybe he doesn’t attack but moves twice, or something like that.

Of course, this extra rule might be completely unnecessary, and we might be able to achieve what we want with the other things (which I’m thinking is the case).  I just thought it might be interesting to share such a thought with you to let you see more of the process.

Early Game Challenge

We’ve said before how one problem with the Civilization games is that they’re super interesting in the beginning and then taper off quickly in the mid-game.  Well, EMPIRE also has a bit of the opposite problem, where the very early game is actually the most boring part.

This is because monsters don’t get at all threatening until ~30 or so turns in, once you’ve started to suck some of the resources out of the land.  It’s also because you just don’t have that much to do.  There isn’t as much of the Civ-style “choosing from a ton of buildings” and micro-mangaging lots of little units.  So we have some solutions to this problem.

So anyway, this is just a part of where we are in the development.  There’s also big considerations for cards, how terrain works, and how to represent some things in combat.  However, that’s not to say that nothing is working.  The game is actually already quite fun, despite the horrible imbalances, and testers feedback has been very positive and reassuring.

I hope that reading about these problems was interesting for someone other than myself!  Let us know if you’re interested in helping us test the game over at the forums.