Always keep in mind that the game should be fun to play. A great pitfall of really complex strategy games is that you might design systems that model your world instead of making gameplay features that are fun and challenging. Paradox explained that you should "never do a feature without first thinking about how to visualize it and why its fun for the player. In general, we feel that the fun of a strategy game usually comes from having a bunch of simple systems that interact in complex and interesting ways, rather than having any single system that's complex on its own." Are there ever times where things are removed for simplicity's sake that you then, later, wish could be added back in?īoth developers had useful information for indie devs.
And with our approach of 'adding complexity incrementally,' we usually dont fall into this trap. "In general, if somethings too complex, it can become un-fun pretty quickly. You recognize games that get this wrong its the games that you really want to like because they have such great depth and complexity-but for some reason, you never manage to play more than an hour or two."įiraxis agreed. "When you make games like ours, you have to separate between gameplay that you would like in theory and gameplay that you really like to play. "Things that are too complicated are, in general, not fun," Johansson reinforced. If something gets cut because it was too complex, it's also usually because it wasn't entertaining. While the developers usually had differing approaches to game design, both totally agreed on this point: complicated things usually aren't fun. "And right after we ship a title is a critical time to listen to fan feedback, and try to make adjustments based on peoples experiences with the game." We also have a dedicated team of external beta testers that has been around for over a decade, commenting on and contributing to each of our releases," we were told by the developers. "The internal team is always playing the game and bringing their feedback to the designers, even from the earliest prototypes of the game. When you've been doing these games for so long, both us and our fans develop a common language.you need fresh eyes to see whats comes natural to someone who has played some of the previous games, and someone who has never seen one."įiraxis has been taking this approach for a bit longer. "It's something I see us doing a lot more of in the future. Johansson said that Paradox has ramped up its use of playtesting, especially when developing its latest title: Europa Universalis IV-"particularly when it comes to the tutorial and the multiplayer," he explained.
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