Two Rex Makes #8 - Creative Destruction
What connects time travel, space combat, and a sweet factory? The answer is our first game design which has been through several Doctor Who style regenerations over recent months!
These are resurrections rather than complete restarts though, with each rebuild taking the strongest ideas from its predecessors, enhancing them, and adding new ones – creative destruction red in tooth and claw. The common threads connecting each attempt are the idea of creating and exploring a space; a polyomino placement mechanism; and a design goal of a fun, lightweight but strategically satisfying 30-minute experience.
What led to the changes?
The first was an interesting idea about building a time machine. This included a novel polyomino placement mechanic which we hadn’t seen in a roll & write before, but we couldn’t turn that one good idea into a more complete experience that was fun to play. It was also difficult to get the time travel theme to tie into any other aspect of the game in a meaningful way. Turns out that the implications and contradictions which are inherent in time travel are harder to master than we initially thought!
The second idea was about building a spaceship and was one that we developed for a long time. This had fun in abundance and was fertile ground for thematic ideas that tied into the gameplay, and as a massive fan of Star Trek it gave me an excuse to re-watch all seven seasons of Next Generation*. But we couldn’t get the combat mechanic to work in a satisfying way, and the genre was feeling like an increasingly crowded one with several excellent and high-profile entries being released. Really hoping we can return to this in the future as it was such good fun to play with.
The third idea is about building and running a sweet factory (likely to be rechristened as a candy factory, even though that feels strange for a Brit to say!). Whilst it’s been more than a simple re-skin of the previous idea, it took so many of the core mechanisms that it was much quicker to build out. We also chose the theme because it instantly fixed the biggest stumbling blocks of the space game, so we’ve already got a prototype that feels like a complete game, even if it is terribly unbalanced at the moment.
So whilst we can console ourselves with the fact that no idea is ever truly wasted, it was difficult to make the decision to move on from one design to another. We’re happy with where we’ve ended and whilst experience has proved that this may not be the end of the story, it feels like this may be the first game we complete. We look forward to sharing more soon, in the meantime here's hoping there’s not a sudden influx of candy factory themed games before Christmas!
* Favourite episode is the The Inner Light, closely & more controversially followed by Remember Me