15-05-2004 08:02									#1
	Jounral Entry #1 - Basic Design Decisions Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

Design Diary Entry #1 – The Basic Framework

Many, if not most of those who have been keeping up with our progress know the story of our beginnings, and for those who don’t, I’ll recap here briefly.

The long and short of it goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a thread in the Civ3 fora all about “who you’d like to see” working together to produce Civ4, and the usual suspects immediately floated to the surface. Sid and Brian topped the list, with other notable designers being added to the chorus. It was a regular “who’s who” of game designers of renown, and that was as it should be.

What pleasantly surprised me then, was to see my name on that list. To be mentioned with the giants who made me fall in love with gaming in the first place…that was a fine day, let me tell you!

But then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was just that. A dream. There was no way these hallowed Titans would ever let me NEAR their stuff, not even a side project, much less the greatest turn based game of them all. Just wasn’t gonna happen.

And frankly, that ticked me off! I’ve been designing games for years, and I believe I’m a pretty fair hand at it. Not computer games, it’s true, but the principles of design are generally the same, or at the very least, highly similar.

So that got me thinking, and as often happens when I get myself worked up into a lather about something, I spoke before I really thought it though, and said something to the effect that I’d just go off and make my own damned game then.

Me.

The guy who knows ZIP about art, and even less about programming.

I made that post and went to bed.

Got up the next morning and realized just what I had gotten myself into, and logged back on to ‘poly to delete my post, hoping that nobody had seen it.

What I found when I arrived at ‘poly though, was….a miraculous rescue.

True, *I* didn’t know beans about coding or art or any of the other gazillion things I’d need to make a game fly, but suddenly there were LOTS of people coming out of the woodwork offering their time and talents to make the game I proposed a reality.

That’s when it hit me that we could really DO this thing!

Trouble was…I said it before I even had an idea in my head what the game might be.

So…given that I had lots of people riding to my rescue, I decided that I’d better get busy, so I turned my attention to the one thing I DID know a lot about, and that was telling good, compelling stories.

That, I know how to do, and it struck me that THAT would be my single biggest contribution to the effort. I could build us the game world with words, and if those words were vivid enough, then perhaps those who knew about art and coding and sound could take those words and breathe a different sort of life into them.

And so….here we are.

Now, for those of you who know me, this won’t come as any great shock, but I got my own ideas about how to do things, and sometimes, those ideas are a bit off the beaten path.

That can be both a blessing and a curse, cos the sheer unorthodoxy can sometimes cause people to question even the most basic underlying assumptions, which can lead to lots of ultimately needless questioning. And, there have been times, its true, when that unorthodoxy has bitten me in the arse. So there are downsides.

On the other hand, you don’t ever take anything to the next level by simply plodding along predictable paths. If you want to make something that really stands out from the crowd, then you have to take a path that’s different from the rest, and that’s what we did, and continue to do, and there will be ample evidence of that in journal entries to follow.

Basic Design Decisions

Five is a beautiful number.

Some might argue that it’s the PERFECT number, in terms of game dynamics. Seven…too many. Good, but a bit cumbersome for my tastes, and too ambitious for a first try. Three….not enough…but five…ohhhh, now that’s magical!

So right off the bat, I knew I wanted to have five…somethings in the game. I didn’t even have a design yet, but by God, I knew there were gonna be five playable groups in whateveritturnedouttobe.

Fantasy.

I love fantasy, so that’s where my brain just naturally turned to when searching for a game.

Okay, check. We got five, and we got fantasy. Good start.

So what else?

Well, fantasy…that’s good, how about some stresses then. Diametric pulls. Church and Magic. That’s a good one. Knights and Outlaws. Yep…that’s another good one, and sort of a “muscle and steel” parallel to the priests and wizards. Good deal.

Civ-Style, which means 4x and turn based. Check.

I also knew that whatever world we played in, it wasn’t gonna be some warmed over rendition of someone else’s work. I tell stories. I make worlds up with words. That’s what I do, and our game deserved a world all it’s own, so I set about making one.

All original. No borrowed creatures and critters for us. No sir.

So I started writing. “Flight and Founding.” “The Story Weaver.” “The Remarkable Life of Jacob Dunn.” And from those stories, the world began to take shape. They are, in a real sense, our history, and that history was enhanced as other talented writers began pouring themselves into the emerging world. Now it was no longer one voice, but a chorus. There was a guiding voice, yes, but a tapestry was being woven together, and from this tapestry, the mechanics that drive the game world was being derived.

If that sounds a bit backwards from the norm, it is. Generally, the design experience revolves around establishing the game mechanics and then making a story up to fit in and around them.

Not so here.

We created the world first, and the world itself has been informing us of the mechanics needed to adequately display it on your computer screen.

In other words, the world is teaching US, and that difference in approach will be telling, I think.

One of the goals I had in mind for the game at the outset was to create a living, breathing dynamic world in which players could become active participants in….to help write the next chapter in the history of the Kingdom of Candle’Bre.

To that end, this is very definitely NOT a “God Game” in the same way that many other 4x games are.

The turns are doled out month to month, meaning that it would be rare indeed for a game set in a world with but sixty provinces to extend beyond the lifespan of a single ruler of the period.

And, you, as the player, are certainly not all powerful. You have to answer to a lot of different voices. Your people, your nobles, the Church, and sometimes, the Fates themselves. True, you have vast, far-reaching powers as player, but make no mistake about it. God, you’re not.

Another goal from early on: LOTS of in-game tensions and dynamics. The struggle between Church and Wizards (in game, this became Influence and Magic), the tension between noble knights and ruthless outlaws (in game, this became Honor and Infamy), and all the subtle variations that brings with it.

Add to that five playable factions, each with unique strengths and weaknesses, and put all that into a living, breathing world, and you get a dizzying array of choices.

Choice.

That’s another big thing that hit me right off the bat. It was my goal, at the outset, to create a game where there was no way, aside from blatant milking the game, that you could do everything in a single sitting.

It will take literally months (or longer!), of playing repeated games to see all the Fate Cards, to research every tech in every tree, and to try out all the different paths to victory, and that is as it should be. That’s the way it would be in a real, living, vibrant world.

I wanted to create a system where you simply had so much stuff to do, so many possible things to spend your resources on, that there was no way you could do it all in a single time playing through.

To help with that, we established early on that provinces (which are the building blocks of the game) could only “hold” a limited number of buildings, and then of course, I went on to make many more buildings than that limit. So right there, you’re hit with tough decisions. What do you need? A temple to curry favor with the Church, or a Tavern, from which to recruit spies.

On top of that, I’ve added in building dynamics, such that if you build one thing in a given province, certain other things are excluded (ie – can’t build a Focusing Sigil, which increases magic, in any province containing a religious building).

More choices. How do you want to play the game? That will inform you of the types of buildings you should gravitate to.

So provinces aren’t “cookie cutter.” You simply can’t build every building in every province. It doesn’t work that way. Provincial improvements are powerful, and strengthen your playing style and strategy for the current game, but to get the most out of your strategy, it requires thought and careful planning. Tradeoffs and sacrifice. What can you do without, in order to further your chosen strategy?

And of course, there are mechanisms in-game to shift gears. As you add more provinces to your realm, you can change your build focus. You can rip down old buildings and replace them with something else if your current strategy isn’t working.

But of course, that takes time, your most precious commodity.

In game choices should MATTER. You might not be God, but your choices made in-game should heavily influence the way the current game plays out, and this is done in a variety of ways. Most obvious to the eye is the exclusionary nature of building patterns inside provinces. If you build a temple here, then you can no longer build a tavern, which means you have CHOSEN influence with the Church over espionage, at least in the short run. So be it, now make the most of your decision!

Another way this can be seen is in the Acts of Fate (which will be covered all on their own in some future installment). Some of these are “always on” and can always appear, and others have no chance of appearing unless decisions YOU make for your chosen faction bring them into being (ie – building X number of markets and banks triggers an event pool called “Fiscal Events” that cannot occur in-game unless you meet the pre-requisites). In these and other ways then, your decisions heavily color and influence the WAY the game plays out. It’s flavor. It’s character and texture. Your decisions drive that.

Likewise, with honor and infamy. Behave honorably and it opens up whole new vistas of opportunity for you. Likewise, behave in dastardly fashion, and you will not only see the world around you growing darker, but we’ve even been toying with subtly changing the color and texture of the interface itself as you continue down the “dark path” to reflect your increasingly evil nature, and as with the honorable side of the coin, infamy has its own powers and rewards.

Combinatronics.

I’m not even sure if it’s a real word, but it’s the one I use to describe what we’re doing.

Candle’Bre is an onion. There are layers upon layers here, and as you peel them away to discover the treasures beneath, it only leads to yet more layers and new things to discover. True, we will only scratch the surface of this thought in order to bring the game to life, but that’s the real magic of the system. Once we GET a playable game out, we’ll be looking to YOU, players and hopefully complete Candle’Bre addicts, to tell us how to mold the game from that point.

So, that’s the path we’re on, and the thinking that went into getting us there.

-=Vel=-

	15-05-2004 12:27									#2
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Very nice! Thanks for putting this together, Vel. Is there any chance of getting your first Designer Diary entry added to the official site as a feature? Then you would be able to control the presentation appearance and make it more userfriendly than a forum posting -- not that this isn't great, too. It would add that extra professional polish.

What exactly do you mean by "muscle and steel"? Are there beasts in this game? If not, perhaps there should be

Also, are you still taking suggestions for features in the game? I'm not sure how far along you guys are.

If you're still accepting suggestions and random brainstorming , here's a suggestion for making the "muscle" units to contrast the "steel" units of soldiers -- animals!


1) Each province can have a slightly different environment -- swamp, forest, plain, etc. Thus, you have to make strategic choices of which provinces to conquer (or defend!) for it's flora/fauna. And this environmental layer is another onion skin that can be useful for those pursuing this strategy or ignored by those who aren't.

2) Different environments will enable different beastiary buildings or maybe the same beastiary building that produces different units depending on the environment of the province. A falconer's guild (I'm thinking carrier pigeons) would allow faster messaging between provinces, and thus a boon to espionage and/or commerce. Or perhaps a particular environment will enable the production/taming of War Leopards/War Elephants/etc.

3) Perhaps these animal units regenerate/heal slightly with each combat turn, unlike soldiers. They would be immune to bribery. But soldiers can benefit from tech upgrades or gain experience, but war creatures won't.

4) Perhaps you can have hero abilities like beast taming/beast mastery/animal husbandry that would increase the effectiveness of warbeasts in combat. Or a particular faction could be made more distinctive by having a special advantage managing creatures (use to operate the royal beastiary?) or special weakness defending against them (superstitious fear of animals?).

5) Perhaps the use of warbeasts would open up new play options like terrorizing enemy morale or pacifying citizenry with them? But using them in this manner would incur loss of honor.

6) Tying the production of particular types of animals/buildings to specific enviroments that are different for each province adds an extra layer of strategic complexity and hopefully fun. It makes not just the location of provinces of strategic interest, but the nature of the province's environment as well. It makes the provinces not just background gold producing resources, but more of an active component in strategy.

7) You can go beyond warbeasts or falcon assisted espionage. Perhaps some provinces have environments that are especially conducive to magic and increase the amount of mana generated by any sigils built there. Or perhaps certain locales are good for serene meditation and give more influence for any religious buildings constructed there. The key is to make the environment of the province an active factor that influences other game systems.

Adding environmental considerations adds variety, more strategic choices in game play opening up for different environments, and makes the environment of a province a strategic consideration when defending or attacking. Perhaps you really want to conquer that forest province to be able to open up new espionage options with falcons. Or you really must defend this jungle province because it's the only one you have and you would lose the ability to produce war leopards if you lost it. Or if you see your opponent massing war elephatns, you try to take out his special provinces that allow him to create those troops.

For more strategic complexity and fun, you can even give the creatures special combat bonuses if they fight in a province of their native terrain type.

Just random thoughts. I have a few other random thoughts and suggestions on other gameplay elements, but I'm not sure how far along you've progressed and whether you're still open to cockamamie ideas being floated at this stage in design. (And to think, all this was sparked by your line "muscles and steel" !)

	15-05-2004 12:50									#3
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Okay, I thought about it a bit, and I think adding different terrain types would be a bad idea. It sounds like it wouldn't work thematically, since the Candle'Bre region looks to be fairly homogenous in terrain across provinces, judging from the map screenshots. Adding terrain types might mean reworking the maps, which would depend on the added value of any changes. So ignore whatever I just posted, Vel

Last edited by ApolytonGuest on 15-05-2004 at 12:57

	15-05-2004 16:48									#4
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Hey man, thanks and g'morning!!

And we can certainly get the design diary thing added as a feature! Good plan, that!

Now, to answer what in my mind was your biggest question first....we are ALWAYS shopping for new ideas for the game! Or put another way, there will never be a time that we're not, and here's why:

Our plans for Candle'Bre are not "release, support for six months, and forget."

Nope.

We're doing that differently too. As a living, breathing world, Candle'Bre will be constantly changing and evolving and improving. That means then, that we'll release the core game and then immediately start shopping for expansions and improvements from the fan base.

A perfect example of this will be that the economic angle of the game will be largely abstracted during the initial release (no trade routes or resources...all that stuff is just abstracted for the moment), but it's coming, based on ideas given right here in this forum. Likewise, combat will be strategic in nature, rather than tactical, but that's coming too....again, thanks to discussions held right here.

And there's nothing that's off limits.

New Fate Cards, Spells, Warbeasts (we'll call them "special military units" to broaden the category for the moment), resources for the economic model, provincial improvements (we get enough of these and we'll be expanding the number of builds that a province can "hold" in order to maintain balance), and other stuff.

Combinatronics will ensure that we never run out of stuff to add, because there are, for our purposes, and infinite number of combinations possible.

Examples to get the wheels turning?:

1) Build a barracks in a province and you can recruit troops. Build a temple and you can gain influence with the Church. But what if you have a barracks (and give some kind of upgrade to it), AND an upgraded temple (Cathedral)? That's a combination that could provide some added benefit. Maybe a new kind of unit....the Templar (make it available to honorable players only, and oh...I dunno, make it cheaper to perform intercessions in any province containing a Templar, or somesuch). And of course we'll need some kind of something for the Infamous side now, but that'd be easy enough to come up with. An Inquisitor unit, mayhaps? That has an x% chance of blocking spells from being cast on the province he's in?

So....never too late!

Now, to those other questions:

Muscle and Steel was mostly a reference to the fact that the tensions between knights and outlaws was sorta the nonmagical equal to the tension between the Church and the Wizards, but the war beast idea is a good one, and in fact, has a place in Candle'Bre. Again, drawing on our body of fiction as a guide, we see that War Mastiffs and Falcons ARE in fact used by the military, but they're not yet represented in the game, and that's a loss. So yes, I think we'll definitely need to kick that one around! Unlikely to see it in the game's initial release, but there's very definitely room for it! And along with that concept, we can have some new provincial improvement types, definitely some new combat units (War Mastiff, Royal Falconeers, Rock Badger Cavalry?, Reindeer Cav, who knows!? ), and perhaps a few other elements as well (in fact, animal husbandry could even become its own tech tree if we develop the concept enough, a thing that may yet happen to magic, by the way....not for the initial release, but down the line...sure!)

So how's that?

-=Vel=-

	17-05-2004 09:51									#5
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As interesting a read as ever.

	27-05-2004 18:10									#6
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Sounds good. I just might start a thread of random wacky suggestions

Thanks for clarifying the "muscles and steel" reference. I really like your idea of combinatronics.

The whole warbeast/special units thing stemmed from the commingling of two strategic elements.

One was the creation of alternate unit systems. For instance, in MOM, you had constructed units supported by gold/food vs. summoned units supported by mana. And in SMAC, you had regular tech units vs. psi-combat native units. Having two separate types of unit/combat systems allows for choice and variety. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches -- the key being to give the user interesting strategic dilemmas and alternative directions to pursue.

Second, I wanted to tie unit production to fixed, non-user createable, province specialty. This makes the possession of provinces strategic, because of limited special resources -- you can't go out and create them, they're seeded into the map -- creating a strategic framework for the game . This element of special resource scarcity is seen in the Nutrient/Mineral/Energy bonus tiles in SMAC, and the Adamantium tiles in MOM that allow the production of Adamantium troops.

Thus, I chose the province "environment" as the non-user createable, fixed scarce resource. And tied it to the creation of an alternate combat unit system of warbeasts.

But since it sounds like the terrain is homogenous in Candle'Bre, I'm not sure this idea is implementable. But you mention "special units." This sounds interesting.

	28-05-2004 06:03									#7
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Quite so....not a *whole lot* of terrain variation, but I think we can implement this concept in a variety of other ways and maintain the spirit of it. This can be done despite the relative "Sameness" of the prevailing terrain.

Mercenaries, for example, are a commonplace commodity in Candle'Bre. Essentially, they can be found in endless supply, and yet, take the province of Kell. Rugged, semi-independent land in the Kingdom whose main (sole?) export is....Mercenaries. And they thrive with that singular export despite the relative abundance of mercs, because theirs are just simply heads and shoulders better than the rest.

So too, could we extend this concept to warbeasts. Perhaps the Mastifs of Brom really ARE a breed apart....maybe it's the climate or the isolation....something, and we could simply make their Mastiffs non-relocatable, and voila! We've got it.

The greatest danger we face with the whole notion of combinatronics is to get utterly carried away, to the point where yes, we are creating different units ad infinitum, but they're really not markedly different enough to warrant a whole new class. Fortunately, I feel that we have extremely wide latitude here, and will probably run into the second danger (that the sheer NUMBER of choices will simply be unmanageable at some point) well before the first....but we're by no means there yet, and if/when we reach that point, it's easy enough to set in-game switches to enable/diable whole classes of combinatronically created unit classes. The need for such switches is almost impossibly far down the road, but should that day arrive, then Candle'Bre would truly be unique among games, having the ability to throw a few pre-game switches and end up with a radically different feeling game world.

I like that....

-=Vel=-

	28-05-2004 17:23									#8
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You make a very good point about how the user might become overwhelmed with too many choices that are not distinct enough. But this is where I think your exclusionary principle comes into play. When a player chooses to build certain buildings, other buildigs are prohibited from being built in that same province (e.g., focusing sigil vs. church).

So too could this principle be used on units. So once the player makes a choice of what direction to go in -- by pursuing certain spells, or technologies, or buildings, or societal social engineering models, or what not -- not only will the player enable choices, but suddenly disable and exclude choices as well. Thus, the player might find the bewildering potential of 100 unit types reduced to 50 in one turn, and reduced again by making another choice in the next turn.

This is possible by making the techs/building/spells/units not just enablers but exclusionary disenablers. If you possess one type of unit, you're prevented from producing another type (maybe they don't get along or something). Perhaps demon summoner magicans don't get along with religious Crusaders, but do with nefarious, amoral Church inquisitors.

	29-05-2004 04:46									#9
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Combinatronics in reverse? I like it!

-=Vel=-

	18-06-2004 06:38									#10
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quote: Originally posted by ApolytonGuest 1) Each province can have a slightly different environment -- swamp, forest, plain, etc. Thus, you have to make strategic choices of which provinces to conquer (or defend!) for it's flora/fauna. And this environmental layer is another onion skin that can be useful for those pursuing this strategy or ignored by those who aren't.

Another option would be to set up an actual tile-based system underneath, with the terrain inside of a province layed out. This would lay the foundations for a (dare I say it) "tactical minigame", but one that would have actual consequences for the larger game. For instance, you could pillage the farmlands surrounding the central city of the province in question, causing starvation in the province when you pulled out.

quote: 2) Different environments will enable different beastiary buildings or maybe the same beastiary building that produces different units depending on the environment of the province. A falconer's guild (I'm thinking carrier pigeons) would allow faster messaging between provinces, and thus a boon to espionage and/or commerce. Or perhaps a particular environment will enable the production/taming of War Leopards/War Elephants/etc.

Moreover, these could be in different tiles, allowing someone to damage or control some or part of the province (I really want to destroy your profitable Gold mines in those mountains, but I don't really think I can take or hold the province).