SFEOS Game Design (Part 3 - Breaking Down the Core Game Loop into Nouns and Verbs)

Part 1 - From Blue-Sky to Spreadsheet Specific
Part 2 - The Grand Idea
Part 3 - This is it...

If you are not already aware, SFEOS is a turn based game being built to eventually run on the EOS platform. EOS is a platform for developing distributed apps (Dapps). Games are stress free ways for people to build mental models around things they might not fully grasp right away. You can read more about my thoughts on EOS here, and follow their announcements at @eosio

So we have a decent idea of what the grand idea is. We understand the game's core loop in a general way. I'm going to switch gears here and try to conceive of what an MVP might look like. In other words, let's try to think about the core loop in its most basic form. If you have not heard the term "Minimal Viable Product", it's the absolute minimum we could create to start play testing the core loop, to decide if it's at all fun for the players. On the way we are going to start to build a spreadsheet of terms.

From the last post we defined the main core loop as follows:

...the core loop consists of the player traveling around the universe (nodes connected by connectors) in their ship.

The universe is abstracted into nodes and connectors. We can model the universe visually with a very simple image. Now these images don't have anything to do with what the game UI will actually look like. It's just to help us visualize ideas and get us all speaking the same language.

Now when I say Node or Connector we both should be thinking of the same thing.

Let's expand this a bit. The players ship can travel from node to node by the way of connectors. Each jump between nodes costs an action to perform.

And again from the grand idea post:

While they travel they are gathering limited resources (cryptographic assets) and probably crafting things (more cryptographic assets) out of those resources, to use or trade with other players. This trading takes place either directly or through the use of space ports that are located throughout the nodes of space.

So along with these very simple visual representation we can start to build a spreadsheet of game items. These can be either nouns or verbs; What exists and what players can do.

Node	Noun
Connector	Noun
Ship	Noun
Jump (type of Action)	Verb
Action Count	Noun
Resource	Noun
Port	Noun
Gathering or Collecting	Verb
Crafting or Producing	Verb
Trading	Verb

In order to craft things we know we will need some kind of recipe, that will tell us what and how much of something we need to create the item we want. Also in order to trade things there will need to be type of market. Each of these things will need to be figured out, and that means a lot of brainstorming and play testing and tweaking with what the industry calls "knobs and levers".

Recipe	Noun
Market	Noun

What am I missing? Would this be enough to play test the mechanics of a single player version of the core game loop? The early testing version can and should be a very simple thing to create. We need to get something out to some development play-testers and start iterating on feedback loops as soon as possible. Without a feedback loop, we make lots of assumptions (i.e. guesses), and more than likely we are going to be wrong. They say, "Nothing survives first contact!" and we shouldn't think our game is the exception.

Now that we have some basic details, we need to define each noun and verb more. That will probably be the subject of the next post (I say probably because we have some things in the works and I want to post about them as soon as they drop, so that might happen first. If you're really interested in the fun and want to join us, join the Discord).

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Thanks,
To be continued...