Continuing on to game design

I've been trying my hand at game design for the past few weeks. It's been a massive context switch.

I struggled to even get a foothold. I had to take a step back and try instead to design how I design. I focused on structuring the concerns, the perspective I use, and my vocabulary.

Here's what I arrived at for now:

The way of the world is the end result of how all the stories players are telling interweave with each other. I'll need to figure out some of the stories I want players to tell.

A story is composed of experiences, which are built on top of mechanics.

I've realised I'm way more excited about designing the multiplayer experience than I expected - so multiplayer will definitely be a thing. 'Real' multiplayer (as in, multiple players in the same village) will be some ways off or maybe never. I'll have trade pretty early on and eventually players will be able to group into 'cities'.

I like that I don't need to spend much (or, any) time in-front of a screen to work on game design. Almost everything happens with pen and paper in a notebook. The other half of the time, I'm just playing games I really enjoy and trying to understand the experience.

There's not much else to add here for now, unless I just dump my design work-in-progress notes. I wanted to jot down more of the technical parts of the server side stuff, but I think I've mentioned enough here. The logical and physical simulations are separated, the logical runs on both client and server, the server just talks to a really simple 'physical' sim which handles the arrival/departure messages of residents.

Much of the design that I've come up with isn't very inspiring - with the simulation-builder hat on it's easy to think: "An always-on simulation with hundreds of things living in a world? Of course that's gonna be awesome!", but design hat is saying "yes they keep going when the player stops playing, but why does the player care?".

It's difficult to take the unique aspect of what I aimed for as a technical creator, and turn it into something actually useful as a game design mechanic. I had really awesome emergent gameplay vaguely in my mind to motivate building the system, and thought of ways to introduce as much chaos as possible to get a really lively looking simulation - but now that I need to figure out the game, I'm finding that the things I thought would become obvious aren't.

The whole village breaks down if the store manager stops going to the store to get the worker to buy food from the farm. I can't decide if this is awesome or something I need to fix.