Stayin’ Alive: A Reflection
Working on Stayin’ Alive was an enlightening experience into the world of onboarding and complex systems. Although I’ve made many games in the past, this game involved so many moving parts that I had to consider balancing between every single playtest, just to ensure that there wasn’t one single “first-order optimal strategy”.
The mechanics in the game started off relatively simple, but mimicked more of a simulation game (which was, in itself, still fun to make). The player could press WASD and move around a tile-based system, with an imported A* pathfinding library to allow other animals to navigate around obstacles smoothly. But as our team realized that this wasn’t inherently a system, we started adding more and more mechanics onto this basic grid movement. Eventually, we had animals with different thresholds of hunger values that modified their behavior, different interactables that modified the ecosystem (bunny spawners, predator spawners, grass, sticks, ponds, etc), a breeding and worker-allocation system, and den management. And with every new mechanic meant more rebalancing. This ecosystem attempts to model a self-sufficient environmental ecosystem, where the player can manipulate the resources in the world which have downstream effects on their survival.
One thing that I like about this course is that it forces us to playtest, even when we know that our game isn’t very good. Even when the game barely had any of our planned mechanics implemented, we still went out into the world and had people try out our “system”, which initially got a lot of criticism due to its lack of interesting mechanics. It was very challenging trying to create a balance of simplicity and fun; with too many mechanics, the game would quickly become complex and confusing. With too few dynamics, the game would be too boring and easily guess-able (and also a game without any long-term consequences). This entire experience taught me a lot about the importance of playtesting; each time we had a new pair of eyes on the game, it seemed to completely evolve by the next day. Although I see my games as my children, I will try better in the future to let go of my perfectionism and playtest games more… even if it’s just a simple movement mechanic. (In fact, the game started as a drag-to-move, became a click-and-click-to-move, and then eventually just became a WASD-to-move.)
Now that Stayin’ Alive is at a point of completion, my opinion on systems games is that they are difficult to make and balance. But they are also very rewarding when completed; a good systems game may only take days or weeks to perfect, but due to the amount of interactions between objects in the system, they can create play that can last for months or years. (Not to say that people may play Stayin Alive’ for years… but you never know!)
Figure: An image of Stayin’ Alive near the beginning of development
