Exceptionally Uncaught

I tend to enjoy sandbox games - the ones where there's this big world and while there might be a main storyline or two, you can happily ignore it all and just do your own thing. I like them because you can jump in and have some fun even if you can only play for a short time, and because they usually have pretty good replay value even after you've "beaten" the game.

There are a few things you need for a sandbox game. Specifically, you need the sand and the box. The "box" is the setting - it's the world that gives all the gains of sand some context. It's all well and good to earn 5 million neoyen, but unless you know that's just enough to buy yourself a dual-blade mono katana, it's all a bit meaningless (kind of like how if you don't know what a dual-blade mono katana is, you don't really know why someone would pay 5 million neoyen for it).

Once you've got your box, you then need your sand - the various bits of the world that the player can gather together to do interesting things with. The easiest type of sand to deal with is money. All you really need to do is give the player a few different ways to get money, and some different areas to spend it. The standard way to get money is through jobs (or missions or quests or whatever you want to call them). There needs to be a balance between easy to do, low reward missions and difficult or time consuming but very profitable missions, and a split between independent (as in it doesn't matter what else you've done in the game) and storyline-related missions. Equipment serves both as something for the player to spend their money on, and a way of making the player's life easier. Better weapons, more efficient tools, stronger defenses, etc.

The logical progression for the player to follow in the game is that doing missions gets them more money, having more money gets them better equipment, and better equipment allows harder missions to be attempted. Of course, that gets pretty boring pretty fast, and has a definate end point ("okay, I've got the best item/finished the hardest mission in the game now"). So you need to mix things up a bit - you need special items that the player can only get by doing a specific mission, you need missions the player can only attempt if they have a certain amount of money, and you need items you can directly use to get more money.

But even that's not enough. Each point of the money->equipment->jobs triangle should also lead to itself. Some items the player can only get through other items, there should be a way of using money to directly make more money, and some missions should only be attempted after the player has succeeded at (or failed) other missions. There should also be elements outside the core triangle - for example groups the player can befriend, or equipment the player can design.

So, once you've got all those elements in place, you've got the beginnings of a potentially fun game.

Labels: projects