Refine the endgame, tweak costs, explicit goals
When creating games, Irrational Games developers mentioned "the purpose of a game is to create an economy, where you invest costs and see returns." In essence, this game is even more an economy.
Initially, the economy makes a lot of sense, you barely have any food, the drought is coming, and you want to survive. The water management mechanic is a lot of fun and forms a good key gameplay loop. The natural extension of this economy is to allocate incredible resources to dam the river with a huge basin. I was able to do that on various maps without robots. The beavers were happy, healthy, and had 40 happiness.
This is really where I feel the economy falls apart. What next? I am capturing 100% of the water that comes in through the wet season, if my beavers die I don't feel like it will be my fault. I have barely used any metal, haven't touched robots, etc.
In Factorio and Subnautica, I'm trying to leave. In Roller Coaster Tycoon, I have a scenario, Is there one giganticdrought coming?
Comments: 1
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02 Dec, '23
Christian(continued) I logged into the game recently and just sat there feeling "ok, so now what?" It's a fairly disheartening endgame if you're feeling like there's no reason to continue.
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In my opinion, the best endgames harness the key aspects of the economy and create large costs for the ultimate gain: winning. Perhaps there is a drought because the core of the earth overheated, and you can use (tons) of metal to create a closeable shaft to the earth's core, then open it to have water gush in. Once you send enough water to the core, a huge amount, the droughts lessen. The key thing here is that you don't have nearly enough water during one wet season to fix the problem, and you have to really carefully balance how much progress you're making toward your end goal with survival of today.
Something that is centered around the water mechanic, that uses metal, science, and/or bots and generates significant costs would be more conducive to gameplay, I think