For my critical play, I played Raft Survival: Multiplayer, a cooperative survival mobile game where you and your team drift on a small raft in the middle of the ocean, collecting floating debris with a hook, crafting tools, and trying to stay alive while a shark circles nearby. I chose this game because it initially felt similar to Rock-it!, the game we are building, since both involve limited shared resources and a tension between individual goals and group survival. In Raft, you gather raw materials like wood and metal into your personal inventory and eventually use them to craft items that help you survive, while also managing hunger and thirst. This is similar to Rock-it!’s structure, where players individually take resources from a shared pool, trying to meet personal and group survival objectives.
A similar weakness that I saw in both Raft and Rock-It is a misbalance between resource accumulation and loss. In Raft, the premise is high stakes, as there is a shark circling the raft, and you have to survive. However, in practice, you mostly just accumulate resources, so the only time of scarcity is in the very beginning. The only mechanics where you lose items are when you die via falling into the water and getting eaten by the shark or by neglecting food and water, but I never felt the aesthetic of urgency because of the dynamic where everyone just stays on the raft (which is easy), and you only eat/drink when necessary, which is not often. Because of this, there’s very little pressure shaping player decisions, and the dynamic becomes low-stakes accumulation of resources. This reminded me of an issue we’re seeing in Rock-it, as, if a player takes a lot of resources early, they build a safety net that can’t really be taken away, which leads to strategies like “just take everything in the first round.” In both cases, the lack of meaningful loss or redistribution mechanisms weakens the intended tension around scarcity. I think this could be improved by introducing chaos, such as the shark sporadically attacking the raft and depleting resources, or sinking the entire group if their raft doesn’t fulfill certain requirements. This would lead to the dynamic where players work toward clear goals and hurriedly fix damage, leading to the intended aesthetic of urgency.
Playing with my two brothers, I saw two player types for Raft emerge: crafters and gatherers. Erik, who is more of a gamer, became a crafter, as he quickly figured out what we should be crafting and what resources mattered. Steffen and I mostly defaulted to just gathering as much as possible under Erik’s leadership. Without Erik’s previous crafting game experience, we would have gotten stuck and left pretty quickly, as the main issue with Raft is that the game doesn’t provide enough structure or guidance for players to understand what they should be working toward. There’s a progression system for materials, as they go from raw to refined to useful tools, but it’s unclear what the overall goal is. There’s no clear win condition, no checkpoints, and no strong sense of what you’re building toward beyond vaguely “surviving.” There is a level-up mechanic for both your raft and individual players, but it’s very unclear what the levels unlock, so it’s hard to feel motivated by it, and we simply ignored that mechanic. Perhaps both Raft and our game could benefit from clearer group objectives and checkpoints.
This lack of clarity became especially frustrating when we spent a long time pooling resources to craft a motor, thinking it would be a big step forward, only to realize we had no idea how to use it. I even looked up a video tutorial and still couldn’t figure it out. Normally, the craft mechanic would allow for the dynamic of gathering and pooling resources to achieve a goal, which leads to the aesthetic of satisfaction from a work and reward payoff system. However, the lack of clarity led to misinterpretations, which ended with the aesthetic of frustration instead. This shows how the same mechanics (resource gathering and crafting) can produce very different aesthetics depending on how well the game communicates goals and outcomes.
In contrast, Rock-it! is much more structurally focused, with a clear core idea: players are incentivized to take from a shared pool, but if they collectively take too much, everyone loses. This should create a strong sense of tension that Raft lacks. However, in its current form, that tension doesn’t always sustain across rounds. Because players can secure an early advantage that isn’t threatened, the game can feel front-loaded, where the most important decisions happen at the beginning, and the rest plays out predictably (read: boring). I think both games could increase their tension by introducing sporadic chaos and conflicting individual objectives.
Comparing the two games made it clear that scarcity alone isn’t enough to create tension, as every choice needs risk and reward to feel satisfying. Raft tries to induce feelings of danger, but the mechanics fail to produce the strained dynamics necessary, leading to low stakes, which is similar to our current issues with Rock-It!. Playing Raft highlighted the importance of clear objectives, meaningful feedback, and mechanisms that prevent players from becoming too comfortable too early. It also reinforced that for Rock-it! to work as intended, it needs not just scarcity, but systems that continuously rebalance power and keep both individual greed and collective survival in tension throughout the entire game.
