[Discussion] How to bring an investigative mindset to players, stonehearth style

[nikosthefan]

Hi, welcome to the discussion,

So in another thread the following topic came up:

Let’s say we eventually get a game that looks like Dwarf Fortress, but in the style of stonehearth. Say your town falls thourgh an emergent chain of events caused by some of all the interlocking systems that stonehearth will have. How do you prevent the player from blaming the game for their loss. (when the game is not to be blamed.)

For the sake of convenience of discussion, let call an event genuinine when it was the result of the many interlocking systems, and thus events that you want to have in the game, and let’s call it ingenuine if it is not genuine, and thus the result of unbalanced game mechanics.

In short : How does a game like stonehearth prime the player to expect events to be genuine, instead of ingenuine, and how do you spur the player to investigation to check whether it is.

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First a few quotes that led to this discussion:

@Hieronymous

See, e.g., Boatmurdered: Dwarf Fortress - Boatmurdered . If you look at what happened in that Let’s Play, the eventual fall of the fort was a multi-step process:

1. Raids by enemy goblins and swarms of feral elephants become too much for the fort to handle via standard combat
2. Player designs an engineering system to flood the outside world with lava when a lever is pulled
3. That in turn starts fires which accidentally get out of control
4. the out of control fires cause a mood spiral which causes everyone in the fort to go insane or berserk

@BrunoSupremo

Too sad to think that most people would see this as:

1 Mob invasion is unbalanced, game is too hard.

2 - 3 Mechanics are broken, things are not working the way I intended

4 Ai is dumb

@Hieronymous

Yeah, in some ways DF’s interface gives it an “advantage” in that

1. the developer can add infinite new layers of detail without worrying about things like “bugs” or “graphics”, and

2. anyone who fights their way through the interface isn’t going to be fazed by unbalanced or difficult mechanics; it’s a self-screening design.

Stonehearth’s more accessible, so it needs to be more accessible, and clearly explain and indicate to players what’s going on behind the scenes, etc.

[nikosthefan]

@Hieronymous

Stonehearth’s more accessible, so it needs to be more accessible, and clearly explain and indicate to players what’s going on behind the scenes, etc.

The thing I worry about is that the game already tries to do that (indicate to p), showing everything you can do to influence anything, but that is on a system to system basis, not on the scale where multiple systems influence each other. That’s why I think some investigate aspect is necessary in the game.

[Hieronymous]

I think the biggest answer is clear signposting and alerts. Like, if there’s a fire, have an alert go off; if something is making people dramatically unhappy, make sure the player is warned; etc.

The other answer that you seen in DF is inculcating a “losing is fun!” mentality: i.e., making sure players understand that sometimes things will spiral out of control and that’s ok if it makes a good story happen in the process.

[Golden]

Personally, I don’t want to see Stonehearth go that far down the Dwarf Fortress route. And the devs of Stonehearth don’t seem to want to do that anyway.

Total unhappiness in the hearthlings doesn’t head into destructive behaviors.

[Hieronymous]

Yeah, full on “embrace annihilation” might be a bit much, but – think of SimCity; everyone who’s ever played SimCity has, eventually, destroyed their city in a cataclysm of godzilla attacks. There’s a point where tearing things down can be as much fun as building them up, and the possibility of a “lose state” can add a lot.