Robinson

What would you take with you if you had to survive on a deserted island? Robinson starts with asking you what you want to take, after which you begin the game as a washed up castaway trying to survive with those items as your starting inventory. Using your wits and luck your goal is to build a raft and escape.

2019 Retrospective

2019 was a challenging year for Robinson. Robinson's rendering system had just moved to a new component system, it got a 3rd party font support system to help out players with difficulty seeing, and I was ready to start cranking out features.

The feature I wanted to explore was item crafting. Robinson has had weapon crafting for a while. It worked like this: you know how to craft everything and if you have the right ingredients, you trade the ingredients for the item. Super simple, but not really much to it. Crafting can be a huge part of survival games and I wanted something unique so I started working on a redesign.

The first thing I do when trying something new is a bunch of research. I found games with loved crafting systems and spent time trying to figure out what made them tick. I knew that I didn't like the idea that the character knows how to craft everything, so let's take that out. I wanted some sense of random positive and negative events which could spell disaster or be cleverly avoided and what came to mind was a story tree. Something like this.

That's the direction I took it. I had these nice big story trees where the player knows the type of event, but not necessarily which exact event would be triggered. There were complications, enhancements, material requirements, item type questions, and remedies. The player could choose to go down a path at their own risk and reward. And in the end, it just wasn't that fun. The events didn't form a story and navigating the story tree wasn't very fun mechanically. The story and the mechanics were fighting each other.

It was a hard making the decision to scrap it and try again. I put a few months into the story generation, input handling, and behavior logic, but I'm glad I did. I took the harder path of pivoting to crafting as a chance to try out interactive fiction. Interactive fiction has an overlap with the roguelikedev community though you might not know it just by looking at this sub. I went back and read through IF papers and blogs and found some great resources. The saliency system in The King of Chicago was appealing so I took the next step in prototyping it out.

I tend towards systematizing content and took it as an opportunity to create a periodic table of weapon crafting events along with event interdependencies. This worked a bit, but it was still a little clunky.

Twine is a great tool for interactive fiction work so I spent the time learning it and constructing a prototype for the log raft building. I was able to work with play testing it and getting design feedback in the prototype stage rather than the implementation stage which made a huge difference. The saliency aspect made the stories start to click and that made crafting a whole lot more fun. I might still go back and re-work weapon crafting using the Twine prototyping approach.

The version of Robinson released just a few days ago contains both of these new crafting systems.

2020 Outlook

Even though I feel better about the direction crafting is going, it is still a challenging problem. It's easy for players to skip through text. I'm sure other game developers can relate. It relies on a skill that I'm not very good at right now - writing. Even so, I'm happy with the direction the design is going.

I keep a big list of cool ideas. So many of them revolve around crafting. Some of those that I'd like to explore this year are base building, traps, and cooking. Base building poses a new set of challenges both narratively and mechanically, but I'm sure the good folks of roguelikedev will have some great ideas and thoughts about that. Robinson is also nearly close to being able to support graphical tiles. I'm not sure exactly how to approach the asset side of tiles. Should I learn art? Collaborate? Work for hire? It's not exactly clear what the scope of that path is, but it's definitely exciting!

Links

Robinson hangs out on Itch.io @ https://aaron-ds.itch.io/robinson

I hang out on Twitter @ https://twitter.com/RobinsonSRL (and occasionally the #roguelikedev channel on roguelikes Discord).