Fighting Contrivance

Rogue Deck Builder is a game that belongs to the Vampire Survivors genre. You are a hero under constant threat by hordes of enemies. In my case, the game is a play on words. The enemies are your neighbors and hordes of building inspectors who don't want you to build your deck the way you want.

True to the genre, I have started to answer the core question for a game of this design: how does the player lever himself up to a point where he can seriously take on the ever-increasing hordes of enemies?

I originally envisioned this happening through the drawing of special turrets with bonuses that relate to the way you build the deck.

For example, I would have something like "Fast W Turret," which is a turret that gives a faster fire rate when you place it on a wider deck panel. This initially gave some results that scale as you build wider and wider deck panels for them to sit on. It's fun to see your turrets getting more powerful as you build wider and wider deck panels, and it's really easy to program this kind of thing in. You just calculate the width of a deck panel, and that's the fire rate.

But now I believe I must say goodbye to this design and move onto something that's much more relatable. I want to create the impression that how you build the deck determines the bonuses you get. If you choose your abilities wisely, and you use the terrain properly, you will be rewarded. 

However, tying the turret bonus directly to the deck panel leads to a design language problem. How do you create a design language that communicates the bonus? What happens when the game has a hundred other weird and esoteric bonuses you need to communicate in some kind of iconic or symbolic way?

For example, how would I say that a turret gets a bonus when you build a really long rim joist that doesn't result in a panel? How do I say the bonus depends on the surface area of the panel? Literally what icons do you draw? It gets really confusing and abstract, like trying to draw the concept of obsequiousness. 

This is the trap of contrivance. I'm just making up bonuses without relating them back to the natural truths of the world I am building. I've gotta stop doing that.

So the game must be redesigned to get rid of the contrived turrets. Given this fact, what new shape could the game take?

I must go back to the fundamental truths I have noticed about this particular kind of deck building.

For one, there is the truth that the player can only build the deck as far as he can shoot. If your shots don't reach the furthest posthole in the expansion you are planning, you won't be able to stop the neighbors from taking it down. This isn't something I made up. It's simply a truth of the space. Play the game and you will notice it within a few turns.

There is a natural risk/reward tradeoff which arises from this truth. If you can defend the expansion, you get the reward. The more you put yourself out on a limb with your deck build, the more you stand to gain from that investment later on.

The new direction could reward you for this through special kinds of buildings which use up an entire panel. For example, I am working on solar panels which power a base station that electrifies a portion of the deck. The greater the solar power, the more powerful the electrification and therefore the defense bonus. This is just one example. You might also have laser towers which derive their power from solar panels.

Instead of tying the bonus directly to the turrets, the bonus comes from using all of the space on your deck. It comes from taking risks and building larger more aggressive deck panels which are more difficult to defend from a distance.

This is just one example. Here's another. Instead of resources which are only used to build turrets and other structures, there could be a resource like gasoline that you hook up to a flamethrower through pipes you place on the deck. The location of oil matters for the defense of your deck. If you make the right choices early on, you will have a highly defensible deck because you won't have to route piping across the thing.

This solves all of the design language problems. I don't need to try to come up with some kind of icon to explain that the turret gets a bonus when it's on a wide panel. Instead, it's obvious because I made a large solar panel which increases my energy output, and a high energy output lets me build more laser turrets which increase in power as you connect them to a network.

It is my hope that if I continue down this path, it will lead to more emergent truths which will become the basis for further ways to climb the ladder to powerful, all through natural risk/reward tradeoffs which are inherent to the game's possibility space, not contrivance.