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.
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