Design principles

[Tong Shen]

Recently I've been thinking about the Design Principles of HoTK. The question is, what is good design, what is bad design? I've come up with the following temporary conclusions, and I will redesign HoTK according to them. 

A game has four layers of quality. Or four steps to achieve perfection in design:

1. the game has to be fun;
2. the game has to be good;
3. the game should be able to transform players;
4. the game should be able to stand the test of time.

The game must achieve the previous quality first in order to achieve the later ones. I'll explain each of these quality in more detail.

A. The Game has to be Fun

• the design must revolve around a particular game experience tightly. The question to ask is, what experience is our game trying to deliver to the players? Focus on it.
• the design should eliminate all unnecessary complexities not relevant to our experience goal.
• the game should have one or more of the following quality: humor, challenge, immersion, able to evoke certain strong emotion (revelation, move to tears, extreme anxiety, fear, self-assuredness, etc.)

B. The Game has to be Good

• respect the player
• the game must have the right motivation
• don't motivate players to repeat themselves, do tedious things, etc.
• don't motivate players to waste their time.
• respect the player's emotional matureness and personality
• assume players are mature and noble
• assume players are able to understand everything we are trying to express
• give player choices that have consequences in game, not fake ones
• give player challenges that requires real skills, not fake ones
• don't put artificial obstacles to interfere with players, such as lock part of the content
• don't waste player's time. automate tedious tasks.
• limit the addiction
• don't encourage player to play more after they have mastered the game
• don't encourage player to play continuously for extended period of time
• don't provide player with fake psychological satisfactions:
• titles, ranks, etc
• collections, unlockables, etc
• overused character leveling up, character nurturing, etc
• really challenge the player, without challenge, the game has no soul.

C. The Game has to be able to transform players

D. The game has to be able to stand the test of time.

These two quality are rather lofty, I myself am not totally sure about these things. So let's focus on the first two layers first.

According to these principles, there are several urgent tasks at hand:

1. remove/modify irrelevant elements: culture, barbarians, research

2. remove/modify unnecessary complexity: similar units, buildings, technologies, army system, hero attributes, similar promotions

3. speed up the game: try to reduce the number of cities, units and still maintain the same level of challenge

4. design the game around challenging goals: the initial survival, attract,keep and use heroes throughout the game, fight with strategy, manage provisions, deal with natural disasters, enemy alliance, nomadic tribes, peasant uprising, political factions, etc. These things must have a coherent design.

Our goal with this game should be: to deliver an experience of really being the faction leader. (the fun, the challenge, the danger and responsibility part of the job)