Refining Complexity

By Softmints on Aug 25, 2023.

Image

Hi folks, Icon for the High Water Mark Counsel.

We've been doing lots of concept iteration with the game this summer. Let's share one of the lessons from our process!

Complexity and Depth

For any new lane-pushing game to find success in the market, we believe it must satisfy three properties:

Be fresh — enough to attract new players
Be accessible — enough that they'll bring their friends
Be deep — enough that expert players stick around

This is the minimum requirement to "sit at the table" in our genre. There are many other ingredients to success — but today I want to touch on "depth".

In terms of philosophy, achieving depth in Causeway can be done most elegantly through well-crafted complexity. (For more on that topic, do check out my favourite article on the internet.)

We feel that on our imaginary ruler📏, Causeway's complexity (the number of mechanisms, and how tightly they interact) should rest a notch or two above that of Heroes of the Storm, and a few notches below Dota 2. This is intended to let us stay accessible, while also allowing for a rich level of mastery.

Tailoring for a 'Medium' Fit

Knowing where we want to arrive — I have leaned towards adding "medium complexity" mechanisms to the game, in anticipation that their combination would produce the right result.

It came as a surprise that this hasn't worked out so well!

For an example, one mechanism in Causeway's alpha is 🍟Chips. A Chip is a semi-permanent debuff. It stacks up to 3 times, increases damage taken by 5% per stack, and is only cleared when visiting your base.

It's hard to apply them quickly, so they're part of a longer-term attrition game. Several Counsels (our twist on items) have bonus effects when the target has 3 Chips. One character has a permanent Chip on their shoulder (yes, it's a term we use playfully!)

However, Chips aren't quite a big enough part of gameplay that players wanted to allocate attention to them. Since the underlying idea is "a long-term debuff whose impact you can shape with your build", we didn't want to simply buff them into relevance.

Perhaps more importantly, they were tied in with another medium-complexity mechanism. We were giving players competing priorities before they might even begin to think about Chips.

Personally I enjoy designing a medium-complexity armour system and shaping characters to fit it. But sometimes a 'neat idea' is really a solution looking for a problem! We are learning, slowly, that starting simple and building up seems to be the better approach.

As one of our community members reflected...