CS247 – Sketchnote: Loops & Arcs

A game I enjoy is Hatch Dragons, a single-person simulation and collection game where the player helps Liv the elf to summon and hatch dragon eggs and raising baby dragons into adult dragons to repopulate the forest. One core game loop of this game is summoning, where the player asks Liv to create a dragon egg, either at random or based on some magical items that the player accumulates, which hatches into a baby dragon after some period of time. The player then moves the baby dragon to a spot in the forest and completes the game loop of feeding the dragon 5 times (with a waiting period between each feeding) to get an adult dragon. The dragons eat fruit which is automatically generated by the forest per period of time according to the game rules, and players need to repeat the game loop of clicking on fruits to harvest them. The player’s actions of collecting resources (mainly fruit but also magical items that randomly appear in the forest) and summoning, hatching and raising dragons through waiting and feeding form the main loops of the game.

These game loops are pretty straightforward and become rather tedious over time through repetition, and Hatch Dragons mainly appeals to me with its long-term arc of discovering new dragons and learning about them. When you have multiple identical adult dragons, the action of “merging” them will reveal some new information to the player, such as the classifications and backstories of the species. To keep players interested, Hatch Dragons is on a content treadmill and routinely releases new species of dragons, and is also trying to encourage people to make friends through the game (though I have not explored this aspect yet and thus cannot comment on it). The game architecture most closely resembles parallel arcs, since the player is motivated to keep completing the same gameplay loops to progress through concurrent arcs of collecting knowledge about different species of dragons.

My forest, with two havestable fruit trees, Liv the elf using magical items to summon a dragon egg, a baby dragon asking for food, and various adult dragons