I spent the day trying out numerous dueling scenarios to get a feel for how the game mechanics. After designing a succession of better units, I think there is likely room from improvement in the game mechanics. I’ve also decided that investing a lot of effort in tweaking the game mechanics with only the M2 feature set was not wise, as based on my experience today I think about half of the features I have planned for M3 really need to be implemented to get a more solid handle on how the game mechanics will play.
When I re-planned M2- M4 after re-designing the game mechanics at the end of M1, I left M4 empty and M3 had very little in it. Since that time, M3 has had a couple more features added to it in addition to a number of engineering tasks, while M4 has remained empty.
Currently, I’m thinking I’ll move the other half of the M3 features, which do not appear necessary to tweaking the game mechanics, off into M4. I also need to weigh the cost of the engineering tasks against their immediate benefit. Although a number of the engineering tasks will help with debugging and the time it takes to understand the impact of a tweak to the game mechanics, but I’m not sure the time saved will be offset by the cost in the short term (long term sure, but there may not be a long term for this project if the game mechanics prove fundamentally flawed).
So my next step is to generate SWAGs for the engineering tasks.
Filed under: Game Development | Tagged: Project Wellinghall
