Have you heard of the "wiener" game design pattern? It involves making a possible future state of the game visible to the player. For example equipment that costs a 100,000 tokens, but your character only has 10 tokens - this is a wiener. It shows "if you play long enough, you'll be able to afford this cool thing".
Another example is the Disneyland castle, which draws people to walk in that direction because they want to see the castle up close.
Sword Of The Stars II and Over-budget Technology Research
Over the weekend I bought a 4x game (called Sword of the Stars II). The game is somewhat unfinished, had lots of bad reviews, but it was on sale and had enough youtube video evidence that I'd probably like it, so I took the risk and bought it.
Like most 4x games, you research technologies. Like some 4x games (Master of Orion), research can finish ahead of schedule. To describe research progress, a progress bar shows 0 to 100%. You could hover over the progress bar to see how many turns before it would reach 100%. At 100% a notice would come up that the technology was now available, and sometimes this happened early.
Fine. Everything is just as I've seen before in other 4x games.
What I didn't know, and which the UI didn't reflect at all, was that some research could go over-budget! So I'm playing along innocently minding my own business, and eventually see the progress bar fills to 100% and no new technology is available. Nada! I think "oh just an off-by-one bug" and go to the next turn. Still nothing! 2 more turns! Nope! I was completely convinced the game had a bug in it which wouldn't let some technologies be unlocked - which essentially was going to shelve the game for me.
What a rip-off!
After consulting the forums - I got a gentle rejoinder: "RTFM". Now whenever I hear "RTFM" - I think: "that's fine if we're talking about programming." RTFS. Okay I'll read the source code. I'll do whatever work it takes to get the job done.
But this is a game. I'm not being paid to do this. Someone else was paid to make this experience "fun" - and instead all I got was that "what a rip-off!" feeling.
So this feeling of "what a rip-off" led to the idea of an anti-wiener.
Anti-wiener
With an anti-wiener, the game has hidden a future possible state from the player, so that when that state comes up, the player is surprised and traumatized (especially if they feel they just bought a broken game). This is probably unintentional, unless you really hate your players.
In this case, the progress bar implied that 100% was the edge condition for research, when actually the edge was beyond 100%. The design for SotS2 is actually 200%: an over-budget project could take up to 200% before completion, and at 200% that technology would be considered unavailable (i.e. just too hard).
[The solution I that finally came to me was the edge condition should always be clearly shown in the UI. The bar should really show 200% as the full scale, with 100% being somewhere in the middle, and what players would usually see when doing research. This becomes a wiener pattern again, because the player will wonder "can research go beyond 100%? It looks like it can with the progress bar." Then there's no surprise and no RTFM - it's an intuitive design again.]
Research projects can be completed anywhere between 50-150% progress, with the project being completed on 150% at the latest if it was available to you. The project will continue until 200% otherwise, but you will not unlock the tech.
ReplyDeleteBefore you research a non-core technology, you must do a feasibility study. This will come back with the liklehood that you are able to complete the project. If this is unlikely, the in-game pop-up, which you must click out of to proceed, warns you to keep an eye on the research progress so that it does not go on too far.
The progress bar will fill in the missing spaces form the first 100%, giving you a quick indication of how far you have come past 100%, and whether or not you have passed the 150% threshold yet.
I believe that the game should have a tutorial to explain these features of the game play, but I disagree that they have taken an 'anti-weiner' approach. First of all, I am disappointed in the emergence of a culture wherein it is believed that manuals should not have to be read. I don't blame you for this. In a more related manner, being simply armed with the knowledge that the actual end point for a project is some where in 50-150% shifts the expectation of the end point to 150%. Changing the progress bar to account for this defeats the purpose. Sometimes research takes longer that you would have expected, just as sometimes it concludes faster. In extending the progress bar, this sentiment is lost. I believe that there should be a notification that your research has gone over budget at 100%, that the player should have at least skimmed the important parts of the manual, and that there should be a tutorial. I mean, they put a lot of work into the manual, pictures and background lore. You paid for that. Why wouldn't you at least look at it?