![]() No clue if it's interesting to anyone not in my very narrow field, but it's endlessly fascinating to me. You touched on a part of the development process that I happen to have a bit of understanding of, and I guess I let my eagerness run away with me. My own conclusion, based on being involved with those two projects, was that there is a significant, and almost untapped, audience for exactly first person building and management games, but that delivering less than a "full" experience causes too much backlash from the disappointed to ultimately be worth it. And when presented with the premise of being allowed to build and grow a town that was inhabited by simulated citizens, the testers responded poorly to what they perceived to be unreasonable restrictions to what they were allowed to build. ![]() I know next to nothing about that area, but as it was explained to me pathfinding calculations rapidly surpassed the processing power customers could be expected to have access to, which in turn limitied the game to only small colonies. I've personally seen two projects of that kind shelved because of performance issues. From the perspective of personal experience, the hurdle for 1st person management and building projects doesn't seem to be that they're alienating the target demographic (quite the opposite actually), but rather mechanical constrictions. The attraction to the basebuilding elements in first person games like "Conan: Exiles" and "Ark: Survival Evolved", and the popularity of server rulesets that exclude the Player VS Player gameplay, that was intended as the main draw, seems to support the hypothesis that players value immersion on the individual level when it comes to games that allow for creative expression. That particular question was in relation to immersion in simulation and roleplaying games, but there is a large enough overlap between demographics that I feel comfortable extending at least some of that to base-building and -management games. A significant amount of the participants rated it as "important" or "very important" to "feel like a part of a living world". It was a moderate sample size only (~1100) but it strongly indicated that the ability to observe creations from a 1st person view, while seeing it "lived in" (this second point is extrapolation on other data) was strongly desired. I have not conducted research on that specifically, but one questionnaire had several facets overlapping with the topic of first person view in games, as it related to immersion, frustration, and satisfaction. Of course, the first person view still stays an important part of the game! The top-down perspective is an optional tool, we're not suddenly dropping the first person gameplay.īut eventually concluded that it would complicate things unnecessarily, and might actually alienate some management lovers The same holds true for blueprint builders and multi-block jobs. But this task will be easy to accomplish from a top-down view. You'll either have a gap where monsters spawn, or you'll have overlapping areas that waste some of the safe zone from the second banner. Properly alligning the safe zone of your "extension-banner" with your first banner will be extremely difficult from a first person view. Secondary banners to expand the safe zone We've been thinking of a couple of features for a long while now, and think they're very hard to accomplish smoothly in a first person perspective. Instead of using the mouse to move the camera and physically navigate your character, players can use it to hover over UI elements to get tooltips, and to easily expand and close certain menus.īut it has more benefits than merely making the game clearer and easier to play. We described the benefits of this perspective in last week's blog. I think one reason you don't see a lot of games with this format is because it doesn't work very well - and game designers move away from it at some point during development. If you are willing to bend your idea of the "colony management" aspect a little bit, there are games like Stardew Valley and Graveyard Keeper that are character-based with some building aspects. ![]() Modded minecraft might be able to add enough of the colony management aspects to satisfy you.Īs far as I can tell, FortressCraft Evolved looks a bit like Minecraft and plays a bit more like factorio. It sounds like you are asking for factorio with character progression and some friendly NPCs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |