The Problem
I’ve been having a lot of difficulty designing the Dive/Mission system. The challenge lies in the idea that Missions and Dives are two different, but deeply entwined components of the game:
- MISSIONS are quantifiable goals that some person in Foundation gives the player
- DIVES are procedurally-generated strings of encounters that a player chooses to undertake — generally with the purpose of progressing a mission to completion.
The nature of this relationship makes designing their intricacies and details inherently complex and confusing — especially if I care about their impact on the players’ experience. I need an starting point, but which should be designed first? Mission structure? Dive generation? Both at the same time? That’d just be insanity.
The idea of Dives came to me first, as the more standout mechanic. Because the session-to-session gameplay is undertaking and completing at least one Dive. Missions were a presumed layer on top of the main mechanic, as that’s usually how these things are structured; figure out the mechanic that’s fun, then assign goals/objectives that make use of that mechanic.
It’s important to note that this design takes goes beyond typical game design determinations. The technical design of Dives is a challenge in itself, as Dives need to be procedurally generate based on the available map data in a given zone. And while Dives are conceptually seemingly randomized, Missions can only be completed if the Dives contain encounters that are relevant to missions. For this game, it’s important the player never feel like there’s nothing to do. Some Dives may be for farming resource collection, but the opportunity to progress a quest cannot be left to chance.
This means that Dive generation must consider the Missions (quests) currently available to the player. At the same time, the number of Dives available at any given time must be respected.
Solution
The technical design of Missions will have to go beyond just defining a quantifiable goal to be met by the player; they will also have to define its own set of Dive generation requirements that some Dive generation engine can reference when generating Dives each round.
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