This is a fairly general post.  I just got back into doing something that I get pretty excited about: working with numbers, formulas, all inside of a tidy little spreadsheet.  There’s been a lot of talk and questions on our Facebook page regarding larger design decisions of Guns.  While things like “will weather effect gameplay?” or “can you found your own town?” are all important parts of gameplay, what game design comes down to are not vague feature lists.  It’s diving deep into how these things work on a systemic level.  By examining what ‘play’ and ‘fun’ is, we can determine what is necessary in order to create games that people want to play.  In fact, ‘game’ is already a vague term.  The word we want to look at is ‘rules’.  A game is a thing that contains rules that we have to follow in order to play said game.  By following rules, we are given a challenge.  Accomplishing challenging tasks is fun.

The above screenshot is work I’m doing to balance weapon damage, rules for guns and how they’re used, in order to create challenges for the player.  If I made a gun way too powerful, a one hit kill machine, then there is no challenge and therefore no fun.  By adding recoil, reload time, bullet spread, and other attributes I can make weapons more interesting to use.  Some weapons may be more effective against this kind of component and bad for something else.  You can already imagine the kinds of optimizations and equipping strategy a player may go through when choosing guns for his or her ship.

The numbers tell me a lot.  I generated a lot of data before I could go into our game and shoot something, but after I could I realized that the game worked as I had predicted.  This meant that guns fired in a predictable and accurate manner–reassurance that the work being done with our code base is rock solid and performing to our expectations.  Now, I can further extrapolate other kinds of information and test more variables.  For example, the amount of time a gatling guns needs to take in order to destroy a zeppelin at 500m distance given its reload speed, rate of fire, clip size, and bullet spread.  It’s going to be a complicated equation, to say the least.

The big ideas, the features, are easier to grasp but the stuff that you don’t see are just as important.  An idea that I will talk about further in my own blog at some point in the future.