If there’s one term in my game design handbook that I would consider a curse, it would be “scope”, which is perhaps the only five letter word that is a four letter word. It comes up all the time at all levels of the game design process – “make sure your design stays in scope” and “we have to cut features and reduce scope” or “we can’t approve this game, the scope is too large”. Ugh.
OF COURSE scope has to be there – we don’t live in The Oasis of Ready Player One after all. We have technical, physical (time), and monetary limitations that we have to consider. So, as the lead game designer, when it comes time to kill my baby it’s my responsibility to choose what to leave on the chopping block.
That’s where we’re at with Kobold Tactics. The Capital Creative Showcase is exactly one week from the time of writing this. And we haven’t even completely got back to the place we were at before we reconfigured the codebase from GodotScript to C#. Now I get to decide what we can get done in time for the showcase, and what we have to leave out.
So, how did this happen?
Well, first the project scope was a bit big for our timeframe. I planned on a game where everyone would have as much time to dedicate to it as I did. Were that the case, we likely would have had no problem finishing my initial design within the time we had. However, that’s not the case at all – everyone (including myself) has had life come at them fast and hard over the past few months. Basically anything that could interrupt making a game – both good and bad, has happened to this team. Some of us were already short on time, and for others on the team these life events made what might have been ample time a lot less than we had envisioned. This is also the first game we’re working on together as a team and that particular type of game we’re making is especially challenging – not ideal for a first project, if we’re being honest with ourselves.
We’ve had a high attrition rate: out of 10 people who have expressed interest in working on the game, 4 of them have just sort of… vanished. For a game that is being made on a volunteer basis, that’s to be expected. Attrition rates for game jam games are always high. But, every time someone leaves or simply stops showing up, they take some skill with them. We then have to try and scramble our already thin resources to cover the areas they were supposed to be working on. More than one of those areas are places where we’re going to have to cut out content we thought would be finished.
We’ve also had some technical setbacks. Moving from Godot 3 to Godot 4 put us into an Alpha version of Dialogic – the system we’re using for character dialogue within the game. Then, moving from Godot Beta 13 to Beta 14, Dialogic had some issues leading to the need to remove it from the codebase altogether. Now that we have a stable version of Godot 4, and what should be a stable version of Dialogic, we have to reimplement the addon to reenable our dialogue systems. Of course, putting it in and taking it out has required effort – usually @jonathan sitting down and putting in the time to fix it.
The plan has always been to have a vertical slice ready to go for this Capital Creative Showcase. The complete game up through the first level – main character creation, buying items, recruiting units, and completing the first battle. Now, a week out, it’s clear that’s unlikely to happen. Items are nowhere near ready to implement. The system we have for randomly generating units for recruitment are likewise not ready for showcase. To my knowledge the main character creation screen has not been completed. In short: we will hopefully have combat fully functional in time for The Showcase, but likely that will be all.
So, where does that leave us? Well, obviously we can’t put in the features that aren’t ready. That’s a lot of game design that people aren’t going to get to experience. We can only hope that what we do have is enough to drive interest in the game. It’s been hard to make the decision as to what gets in and what has to be left out. There’s been things I’ve vehemently disagreed with, such as cutting recruitment and other things that members of the team disagreed with. @andrew has made several wonderful scores for the game that will end up being cut for the showcase. It’s been hard at times not to constantly ping people telling them to work more (sorry Jonathan for hassling you so much over the past couple of weeks).
Unfortunately in the world of game design that’s just the way things go. You’re never going to get every little piece of the game you want in and have it work 100% perfectly all the time. It hurts to cut pieces out of your game – to hack up your baby until it’s a shadow of what it was. Sadly though what is there to be done and what is there to say except: c’est la vie?