I thought I’d share a little more about the awesome space 4x game I’m building. As part of the more traditional big-picture 4x game, there are going to several mini-games. My goal is that each mini-game needs to be fun enough that the player will look forward them, not just view them as a “grind” with the true reward being the true goal.
When a player colonizes a planet, they get a small starter colony. Eventually they’ll need to explore the planet, locate minerals that they need, and place a mine. Once they place a mine, there is a fun configuration puzzle where they arrange pipes to get minerals to the surface for transport back to their colony for refinement and production. The productivity of the mine depends on how well they configure the mine. If they solve the puzzle completely, the mine has maximum productivity. Here’s a short gameplay video of the current iteration.
One of the frustrating and time-consuming parts about building this game has been the number of times I’ve built something that I thought was going to be fun, but it turned out to not be fun. The mining mini-game is a perfect example of this. Here is what version 1 looked like. I watched my wife try it, giving her no hints, and she was totally confused. In retrospect, it was unnecessarily complex. I also thought I could get away with “place-holder” art, but it turns out a reasonable level of completion & polish is absolutely necessary for a someone *else* to understand what is going on.
In game development, there are no points for something that is not fun, and so one of the tricks is to keep iterating until it’s excellent. I took the original idea I was aiming for, and tried to distill it down to the core gameplay … arranging tiles to solve the puzzle. I also made it more immersive and intuitive. I added animation, improved the art, and added the tooltips my wife kept asking for.
The current version of the mining mini-game is much simpler. I was worried that making it simpler it would make it too easy. I was wrong about that. It apparently doesn’t take much to ramp up the difficulty from “trivial” to “nearly impossible”. I was surprised. It’s weird that some of the harder puzzles took me 30 minutes to solve, even though I know exactly how the puzzles are generated. I watched my daughter solve sequentially more difficult puzzles, and she didn’t want to stop even when they started taking 15 minutes to solve. I think this mini-game is probably finally “good”.