"losing" a game and the design intentions around abandoning timelines

[Pwease no steppy]

I have found myself at the first obsession. mine is dismantling the slums. I feel as though some of the things I've done have put me too far behind so to speak. I was curious if this is a game where unwinnable situations arise from unfortunate decision making and I should restart and take more care with my options, or a game where you can come back from serious structural and network losses?

like if I were to lose all but my network tower can I come back from that? is it worth trying to? am I supposed to? I imagine the answer is yes because there's no clear way to abandon a game in progress, but I'd love someone with more knowledge to weigh in thank you!

P.s. this game rocks thank you so much for making it!!

[Frogon]

There is an amazing safety net in this game. The post-apocalypse story gives you everything need to start opening new timelines, if anything you are doing takes that long. That said, the slums should be clearable. Remember, the Slumlords only get mad when you empty buildings. You can pause the efforts to build up resources and bots before pushing deeper into the slums, preferably with a Foundry throwing out Bulk units. Just remember to keep units near your infrastructure too.

Also, check the History tab. It is in the top right, and it has pretty much everything you might want to know in list form. It's less helpful during the obsession, but there is still good information.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

This is very much a game about "failing forward." I thought about this a lot during development, and in particular I was thinking about roguelikes, and what often bugs me about those.

Specifically, in a roguelike, you play a scenario multiple times, getting better and better equipment as you progress. But then at some point, most of the time, you make a few mistakes and you die. And then it's time to start over, from scratch. I thought that this was really frustrating and a wasted opportunity.

That never bothered me until it became so prevalent, and I've made some roguelikes in the past, so don't get me wrong. But I remember thinking "this is just when it was really getting interesting," and wouldn't it be more interesting to just make me sit with my failure and make lemonade out of lemons, as a player?

I then had a kind of snap back to strategy games, and realized that they are rooted, often, in the same thing. You have a scenario, you're playing some game, and then at some point you make a fatal mistake and it's over. Start again. I've made lots of strategy games that follow this mold, and it's very Chess-like. There's nothing wrong with this any more than there's something wrong with roguelikes, but I just was... bored of this. And I realized how much it is rooted in physical boardgames that are PvP. You and I sit down to play a game, we only are going to spend so much time doing it, and then one of us will lose, the other will win, and we both walk away.

PvE computer games aren't like that. There doesn't have to be a winner or loser per se, and there's not a cap on match time, or the need for fairness, or anything else. It's not about competition. It's about the experience and the emotion of the event.

I started thinking about Elden Ring (and by extension, Demon's Souls, which has been a fascination since 2009 for me). Basically, a surprising thing about those games, if you think about it, is that they cannot be lost. There is no point at which you can make a fatal mistake and jut get booted back to the title screen. There's no running out of lives or quarters. There's no point where you just start the game all the way over. Compared to early Mario games, where you have a fixed number of lives -- a certain mistake budget, if you will -- this is downright generous. Demon's Souls and Elden Ring, from that lens, are very easy games. You literally can't lose!

...but of course that's not the whole truth. What those games do is make it so that they use a rapid turnaround time to make things far harder than almost any other game that exists. "Okay," the game says, "you can't lose, but you probably aren't going to win, either." Losing a soulslike is, often, literally impossible. Winning a soulslike is, typically, very much more difficult than the average game.

That's very interesting, but I don't really want to make the soulslike of strategy games. Maybe at some point, who knows, but right now that just seems exhausting. So that got me thinking about immersive sims, and story through mechanics. You failed to be stealthy, and so now you're in a gunfight. You failed a gunfight, so now you're creeping around the edges and scavenging for scraps. Whatever. In all of those cases, immersive sims give you a sense of push and pull, where it's you unraveling something about a world, which is super interesting. You poke a prod it, and come up with ideas, and that leads to eventual victory.

...but maybe not the victory you wanted. So now you know more, maybe you go back, and you try it a different way, and you use your knowledge you gained before to do it "cleaner," or to do it in a different contextual or thematic style. This is where immersive sims start differing hugely from soulslikes, or games like Hotline Miami. You can fail some things, and those failures you just have to sit with, and you adapt your strategy for the future. You have the mental energy (no pun intended) to try different approaches to the same problem, because you aren't just scrambling constantly to stay alive.

Thinking about those sorts of games, in that sort of sequence, always makes me think of Dwarf Fortress and Colony Sims. I've made a form of colony sim before as well, and I wanted to do something a bit different, because it's easy to get into just the same pattern too frequently as an advanced player, or into spirals that take you nowhere. The approach that this game takes is a lot more work for me, but it's fun work, and is rewarding for myself and players, I think. Where sometimes you just fail and get to try again. And other times you make a choice that isn't a failure per se, but it's saying "okay, stealth is off the table here, or I can't be friends with that guy because he's dead," or whatever.

As Frogon mentioned, the final doom is kind of the ultimate out, where there's a whole other, smaller, game behind it. So if you "mess everything up," then you wind up going into what is actually my favorite part of the game in a lot of ways, rather than just having to start over. I thought that would be a lot more interesting. :)

[joshua.selvan]

Are there obsessions besides the "clear the slums" one? When you finish that quest, the resolution gives the impression that there is a very specific reason the obsession occurred which wouldn't really happen anywhere else.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

That is presently the only obsession. That said, if you've <spoiler>gotten divorced</spoiler> by a certain character, you can see where some others might wind up happening.

It's not something I plan on using a lot, because I think it's interesting a couple of times at most, but as a routine mechanic it would really bite. I found myself super surprised by how many people even walked into the first obsession, and how quickly.

[joshua.selvan]

The most surprising part of it for me was how rewarding the obsession was. It was an issue when a doom kills off 2 black market contacts in the background while you stuck in an obsession but you do get like 55 free inspiration points fro doing it - which is probably more then all the other rewards combined from a single timeline.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

The obsession was something I thought players would have a hard time finding, and it's a really fun scenario, and also long. So I wanted them to really be able to sink their teeth into it and get a nice reward from finding it and completing it, etc.

[Pwease no steppy]

Thank you for such an engaging, well thought out, and insightful response! I think when I heard about the timeline mechanic It put a sort of roguelike mindset in my head and that I think is what spurred my question in the first place. I wanna make it clear that I really like the obsession mechanic and I hope more get added. perhaps some with lower stakes and a smaller barrier to entry? My first immediate thought was something like if you lose a significant amount of robots in a timeline perhaps you become obsessed with making them more durable or something. I recognize though that that might Cheapen what your vision for obsessions are and I certainly wouldn't want that. I just think it's a cool mechanic that could be expanded on in neat ways.

thank you again for answering my question!

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

My pleasure!

Obsessions I think are mostly exciting if they are more rare and impactful, as I don't like taking away player agency without good reason.