Hey everyone,
This blog post is the second of a series focusing on the creation process of our upcoming Umbral Choir. We will be covering the game design aspect, then the art, and if everybody's on their best behavior, finish with a G2G vote or two! Ever wondered how the secret sauce was made? Here's your chance!
Today, we are stepping into a game design meeting and looking at how decisions are made.
The stakes for this meeting were pretty high: in the balance, the main gameplay attributes of the Umbral Choir. The ES2 Game Design team had created two visions of the faction, both ambitious and bold new designs, but each had its drawbacks. Today's meeting was about which vision the team would eventually go for, with Spacetroll making the final call. Let's take a closer look at them!
Vision 1: The Hidden Approach (Umbral Choir's Ghillie Suits)
The hidden approach is about playing as tall as possible, kind of like Endless Legend's Cultists. To achieve this, it uses features like:
- Population merging, allowing the Umbral Choir to keep "growing" while remaining withing the confines of a set system
- This set system is their unique system, hidden from the rest of the galaxy. In case of emergency, this system can be evacuated
- The faction relies on a mix of "haunts" (all names between brackets are placeholders), which are systems secretly settled by the Umbral Choir but appear empty, and "traitors" that siphon resources off of the systems they have infiltrated
Vision 2: The Disguise Approach (Umbral Choir's Enemy Uniform)
The disguise approach is about pretending to be another faction, and blending in with them. To achieve this, it uses features like:
- The ability to disguise its systems & fleets like somebody else's, and mess up diplomacy
- Systems that start in a "virtual" state and need to be disguised into somebody else's to become "physical" systems
- Fleet construction is only possible on systems that have a physical presence
- Otherwise normal number of systems and economy
At these stages, the two visions sound amazing and we can picture the way they would play out. When you can picture yourself picking up this faction and defeating your best frenemies? That's when you know you've struck design shinies. Not all that glitters is gold, though, and both of these have drawbacks, either in terms of gameplay, or in terms of production. Some of them are more significant that others. Remember: if it's a cool idea but it's almost impossible to make, it's not a cool idea, it's a cool dream.
Let's play a game, you and I. Grab a piece of paper, or open Notepad. Put on your thinking cap. Look at each vision above, and find a couple of pros and cons for it. We'll see under the break below if you've found the same reasons why each design can work, and can be problematic, as our designer team.
Here is a picture of Jhell holding a bunch of knives, just so you don't see our answers by accident.
He looks so happy!
Happy with your answers? Alright, let's look at what you got. Well, sorry, we can't *actually* do that, share your findings in the comments if you want to compare notes. Here's what we found for each vision.
Vision 1: Hide-&-Seek Superchampions
Pros:
- Great non-military approach for the faction (no need to expand!)
- Strong asymmetry
Cons:
- Gameplay: Risk of rather passive gameplay overall
Vision 2: Masters of Disguise
Pros:
- Cool as heck, high potential for "wow" moments
- Economy is easier to handle for non-expert players
Cons:
- Gameplay: Another "agressive" playstyle
- Production: Very high reliance on a huge amount of AI work for success
As you can see, each proposition had pros and cons. The first one was very innovative, and the designers really wanted to try and design a tall faction as this is a recurring demand from the community, but the inherent "hidden" nature of the gameplay created other risks, like passivity, or a lack of interactions with other players.
On the other hand, the second approach was way more agressive in the playstyle, in a subtle way (not Hissho or Cravers-like). However, this came with other constraints that didn’t allow the faction to have a very asymmetrical economy, and with the risk of having a high AI dependency for this approach to succeed. Therefore, we decided to try our hand at innovation and go for the hidden approach!
The next step was to tackle the identified problems: how do you make a hidden faction confront others and hold territory on the map? The answer came naturally with the feature we’ve chosen for spying, and that we hope you’ll like. We can’t give away too much, but we can at least let you know it will mainly take place in the scan view. It’s totally possibe that the UC’s territory will be more prominent in scan view than in galaxy view… but we still have a lot of work and testing to do before we can tell you that for sure.
More on gameplay in a few months... and more on the Umbral Choir next time, with a blog in which we'll show you how we created the art of the faction!
Now, don't be shy, show your notes to the class...
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