Aartform Games Blog

How do you get from A to B in a world that has its heart set on your unpleasant demise? That is the challenge that faces travellers on the Spice Road every day whether their journeys be for trade, justice or adventure.

The two major dangers are the environment and other people. Mountains and Deserts have fairly obvious environmental health risks both to men and to their animals, while Forests and distant wildernesses are favourite spots for ambushes by your human opponents. Another factor to consider is the travel speed across different terrain – the longer you have to spend travelling through a region to more risks you are exposed to.

So, to work out the best route we need to compare times and dangers from alternate routes and pick the best comprimise. The usual way to calculate paths in games is the A* (A-Star) algorithm. This is a good method of finding a shortest path – and can be modified to work out the quickest path by modulating the cost of travel between a pair of cells. To work out the safest path the cost between cells can be made more for danger zones – in proportion to the level of risk multiplied by the time spent travelling through.

For the player the task extends to party design too. If you want to travel fast you will need horses to ride over the hills and wilderness, but on occasion a small on-foot troop could make better speed with a shortcut over the mountains. For desert trade routes camels are essential where horses and wagons would simply run to a halt and die.

This all makes for quite a complicated pathfinding process – but to simplify it Spice Road has a simple route optimiser that will get a suitable path for long journeys depending on your party’s design, strength and alliances – as well as avoiding well patrolled areas if you are on a smuggling run. If you want more control you can either make your own route exactly, or set route preferences to tell the pathfinder your priorities over different land types and risks. You can even upgrade your pathfinding with perks to your caravan leader and scout classes.

After a years design work the Spice Road design documents have spread to several notebooks and massive piles of densely worded papers. There is far more material and ideas than should ever be crammed into a single game.

Most ambitious games go through a phase of design sprawl and ambitious planning only to be cut short by schedules and shipped as half-games with noticeable holes around each unfulfilled feature. So to save the desperate tradelands of Spice Road from this disappointing fate I have decided to cut back to some carefully chosen core mechanics, simplify the additional gameplay elements to serve the core, and then add depth to the core areas rather than sprawl out with ever shallower sub-game activities.

I gather together a lot of ideas and sort them into a balanced structure using note paper or filing cards.

Linear systems like text documents and spreadsheets don’t suit game design refactoring where you have to work in many dimensions at once, and see interconnections between a wide group of game elements at once. On the other hand a simple pile of papers with a couple of headline words on each lets me spot new groupings while working out how much of the gameplay should be spent on each area.

The image above shows the early stages of this process, there are a few core gameplay elements and important sub-elements below each, and they are all closely linked so each improves and develops the others. Now I can fit my larger collection of gameplay ideas and mechanics into context of the core and ruthlessly remove or tame anything that does not fit in.

So what have I kept as my Core?

Leadership – of Party and Settlement

Travel – Trade and Adventuring over a World Map

Conflict – Troop battles and Town defence

and to glue these elements further together and provide an interesting context for leading, travelling and fighting…

Plot – Story missions and Faction mission trees

Progress – Building personal Renoun and party member Skills

Activities – Sandbox play along the Spice Road

Of course this simplification brings cutbacks and losses to the wide complexity of the game concept – but at the same time I think it will make the game more accessible to a wider range of gamers and also will let me deepen the variety and longetivity of the core.