Overall I had a really great experience working on this project. I think system games are the first kind of game that comes to my mind when I think about video games, so the opportunity to make one was really exciting. Choosing a digital medium was certainly ambitious of us, but I think we were able to really take advantage of the medium, and create a game that could only exist digitally. I think digital games like this one tend to sort of snowball as you get further into development, and I definitely think that happened here as well. Once we got to a point where we had decided on the features we wanted, we were able to really accelerate on a technical level just because of the foundations we built for ourselves. From a game design perspective I think this is also true. The different features in a system game like this one, multiply the complexity and strategy possible within the game. When I added the improved inventory system I just thought it was a quality of life improvement that allowed for players to eat stored food. Once we playtested it though, we saw that it added a whole extra level of depth to the game though. Through this change workers gained a much more accurate depiction in the system, since they could add food which our player could then themselves eat, freeing the player up to forage for sticks or seeds. One player who playtested the game with this feature enabled, started talking about saving seeds for winter since so much grass would die, again, something we hadn’t thought about at all! I think the idea of a digital “game of unintended consequences” is uniquely fun, because it doesn’t just apply to the player experience, but the developer one as well. During one playtest, I noticed a region of the map overrun with grass. For a moment I was worried there was some kind of bug with the world generation, but after I looked more closely at it, I saw there was a hawk den in the middle of the field. After thinking about it I realized that this grass was here because the hawk was scaring away the rabbits, and they in turn weren’t eating the grass, which allowed the grass to spread further than would occur normally. This moment of realization was incredible because we never designed it, we never sat down and thought “oh around predators there should be more grass.” Instead, we merely abstracted our system, and it was able to produce behaviors we never imagined or conceptualized. I actually CANNOT WAIT to keep going and add more features that add more depth to the system because it genuinely feels like magic seeing unintended consequences that we as creators never intended.
