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[Dev Blog] How Much is too Much Sim?
3 years ago
Hey everyone,
Thought I would try to start blogging about my adventures and discoveries while making games. I've tried to in the past, but well it was one time.
Anyway~
Topic for this blog is how much should you simulate before it becomes untenable? How much do you worry about the sim part before the game is less focused on the actual game part? This is something I've been struggling with on Bigger is Better since starting the game. I came in with lofty expectations and ideas of simulating everything about the character. Body weight, height, capacity with how much they can eat, time, etc...
I never really asked the question of whether or not it would be fun. I just knew I *needed* to track of these things because that's what a size vore game *needs* to track. They need to be tracked to the letter and not deviate from the hard math. At least, that's what I thought.
As time went on and everyone started to play the game (thank you!) I started to see feedback and questions on capacity. At first my answer was pretty much, "the math says this" which while true seems extremely disconnected now. I couldn't give concrete answers as to why the math was that way and what made it "fun". Fun being very subjective, but as you play something you start to see what isn't fun. Fighting, eating, reading the text: fun. Keeping track of how much a small creature's mass will add to your available capacity before someone starts to notice: not fun. There might be some individuals out there where keeping track of hard numbers like that is fun, but they are few and far between. I myself am not one of them.
So, what's a pile of sentient code to do? How about, and this is just a wild idea, we DON'T sim all the body math? What if, they were just static values from a chart and stayed BELOW 50 so you can at least do mental math? Crazy right? Well maybe not so much. Gamification of numbers and the ability for quick maths go a long way to keep game flow going. Think about if after every turn in D&D you had to calculate what the impact of fighting was on your exhaustion along with wounds? As a player, having to do more than subtract one number from another would be miserable to do every single turn. Anything harder than extremely basic arithmetic would keep me from wanting to play more.
The solution for capacity? Whole. Numbers. No more body mass calculations and decimal values. Micro character = 1, Macro character = 9. Full stop. Is it realistic? No. Is it substantially easier to fix if it stops feeling fun? Very yes. Since we are also not having to do extreme math to keep that in order, we can have some additional fun. Why not hold onto characters that were consumed until they are actually digested? Have the ability to write about consumed characters moving around occasionally? Maybe even add events for one of them trying to escape? With reducing complexity we can add more fun game ideas with less maintenance.
Alright, I think that's done. There is more to be said about this topic, but I'm still on the journey of understanding. Honestly this all comes down to game feel and what feels fun!
I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts on the matter in the comments below! Do you think simulating everything is the way to go or do you think some things can be gamified?
Thought I would try to start blogging about my adventures and discoveries while making games. I've tried to in the past, but well it was one time.
Anyway~
Topic for this blog is how much should you simulate before it becomes untenable? How much do you worry about the sim part before the game is less focused on the actual game part? This is something I've been struggling with on Bigger is Better since starting the game. I came in with lofty expectations and ideas of simulating everything about the character. Body weight, height, capacity with how much they can eat, time, etc...
I never really asked the question of whether or not it would be fun. I just knew I *needed* to track of these things because that's what a size vore game *needs* to track. They need to be tracked to the letter and not deviate from the hard math. At least, that's what I thought.
As time went on and everyone started to play the game (thank you!) I started to see feedback and questions on capacity. At first my answer was pretty much, "the math says this" which while true seems extremely disconnected now. I couldn't give concrete answers as to why the math was that way and what made it "fun". Fun being very subjective, but as you play something you start to see what isn't fun. Fighting, eating, reading the text: fun. Keeping track of how much a small creature's mass will add to your available capacity before someone starts to notice: not fun. There might be some individuals out there where keeping track of hard numbers like that is fun, but they are few and far between. I myself am not one of them.
So, what's a pile of sentient code to do? How about, and this is just a wild idea, we DON'T sim all the body math? What if, they were just static values from a chart and stayed BELOW 50 so you can at least do mental math? Crazy right? Well maybe not so much. Gamification of numbers and the ability for quick maths go a long way to keep game flow going. Think about if after every turn in D&D you had to calculate what the impact of fighting was on your exhaustion along with wounds? As a player, having to do more than subtract one number from another would be miserable to do every single turn. Anything harder than extremely basic arithmetic would keep me from wanting to play more.
The solution for capacity? Whole. Numbers. No more body mass calculations and decimal values. Micro character = 1, Macro character = 9. Full stop. Is it realistic? No. Is it substantially easier to fix if it stops feeling fun? Very yes. Since we are also not having to do extreme math to keep that in order, we can have some additional fun. Why not hold onto characters that were consumed until they are actually digested? Have the ability to write about consumed characters moving around occasionally? Maybe even add events for one of them trying to escape? With reducing complexity we can add more fun game ideas with less maintenance.
Alright, I think that's done. There is more to be said about this topic, but I'm still on the journey of understanding. Honestly this all comes down to game feel and what feels fun!
I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts on the matter in the comments below! Do you think simulating everything is the way to go or do you think some things can be gamified?
The changes that I've made to capacity amounts has fixed a lot of the issues of instantly getting over capacity when consuming smaller enemies, so more fixes may not be necessary. *shrug* Right now your character starts with being able to consume 1 size smaller than themselves before being visible. This also leads to being able to consume more smaller characters as well. Then from there the benefit of max consuming is that your capacity will go up 1/4 your max. Eat more to eat more.
As long as the code for revealing actual numbers is implemented in such a way that is automatically handled, it isn't too much of a lift to add that kind of feature in. I've got great ideas to not make my life a nightmare for having a hard number skill lol.
The thing about realism is that you need to know when and where to apply it. It’s something a DM of mine was playing around with. What he found was that people RPed less with certain rules active, but the opposite when he was trying to create and balance a rule where severe injuries happened if you got hit hard enough all because what players were considering differed from everything he tried to change. If you change certain management things it causes people to interact with the roleplay aspect less because they have to be more open to stopping and managing more. If you change certain things that change the way two characters interact then they are more likely to RP because they have engagement, they have stuff to consider. A character’s leg gets broken by a brutal axe hit? The character has to be role played as limping or crawling and interactions between the injured and the cleric change.
My personal rule is that if it’s for flavor, realism is the way to go sometimes. Like when you go to the micro gym in BiB it’s a bunch of items like thimbles they’re using to work out. That’s awesome and makes me enjoy the world more and want to continue to interact with it, and it makes me slow down and not consider the numbers for a bit. When it comes to mechanics though, you’re walking a very fine line. Like the capacity thing, but in that case it was the opposite of my examples earlier. I didn’t try to learn it because everything I thought I knew made no sense when I was applying it to that and just instead interacted less with the mechanic and ignored it as a whole and based when I slept off of HP instead.
Thanks for sharing your insight and experience! Always appreciate it!