Field of possibilities and how we produce design items at Babel
Sometimes, one may want to produce more variants of a thing. Like "Oh I would like to make new ennemies" or "new items" or "new abilities" or "new levels" or pretty much new anything of a given type. In order to do this, I've often used one Framework I've inherited from my game design teacher. We call it "The field of possibilities".
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I'm first going to showcase the framework with a generic example, then I'll show an actual example from Babel.
A generic example
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The idea of the framework is to create archetypes. First, we need a type of thing we want to make archetypes from, let's say ennemies. Then, we need design variables, i.e. values that may vary from one enemy to another. For the example sake, let's say health and damage.
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Now, we want to push our variables to extremums, and wonder what object would fit. This can be represented with a plot.
At (0,0) we find the weakest enemy, the creep. At (1,0) we have high health, low damage, which fits the tank archetype. At (0,1) we have a fragile damage dealer, which fits the assassin archetype. And finally, at (1,1) we have an enemy that has everything, that could be our boss.
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This 2-axis version doesn't bring much on the table, but things can snowball pretty quickly. What if we add a third axis for "speed" ? Here's a 3D interactive interpretation :
By adding a third axis, we double the number of archetypes, and we can start see the real strength of the framework : It raises questions, which answers are inside the game ! Consider the assassin archetype. We now have a "slow assassin" and a "fast assassin", but what does it mean ? The answer depends of the game :
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A dungeon crawler : The fast assassin can be a strictly better version of the slow one. How will I integrate this stronger enemy to my level design ? Is speed something relevant to test the player about in my game ? How quicker should this enemy be ? Is there an intermediate medium speed enemy ?
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A MOBA : All characters shall be balanced. If my slow assassin seems weaker, does it have a hidden power my graph doesn't highlight ? Maybe it's a mage who kills from ditance ? Should I Add a fourth axis for range and double the archetypes ?
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Questions flow. And as we answer them, one will learn a lot about their game as well as making new design items.
An example from Babel
Context : In Babel, you build a city in a desert landscape. But at some point we've stated desert only is boring. Both visually and gameplay wise. So we decided to hit two birds with one stone and use the field of possibilities to find ideas of landscape elements that could be used by players.
Our plain landscape
The goal in Babel is to build a a city sturdy enough to survive huge sandstorms. The only way to survive was to evolve a building and bring it water. Since we want the landscape to be interactive, this gives us our two first axis : Helps Evo and Helps VG
Evolution
Vegetalization
The third axis we've chosen was "Annoyance", which is pretty much how much space the landscape asset takes.
We've got the following ideas from the framework :
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Mountains could protect buildings right behind, since the sandstorm is directionnal. This would exempt both evolving and watering, thus being considered a bit of both helps. It also inspired us a new building , the wall, basically a playable mountain.
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If we really want to block players, we could use chasms, definetely cannot build upon but don't block wind either.
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We can have oasis, basically the same as if a well had been played on the map by default. Yet it could be graphically enhanced even further by hand when designing levels.
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We can leave survivors after the intro cinematic - a showcase of the sandstorm destroying a pre-existing village. They would teach what survives the sandstorm and what doesn't. Then, they would be usefull to start a new neighbourhood, and would help with evolution.
Results
Babel game design is currently on stand-by since we are focusing on polishing the existing experience. However new levels are on the way. They'll be updated as soon as they're ready.