1.8 KiB
Here are a few general guiding principles behind the development and design of the game.
Fun
The game should be fun! (But it's OK if it's only fun to a certain kind of nerd.)
Programming
The game is, first and foremost, a programming game, and it should promote the exploration and use of various sorts of programming abstractions. In other words, it should reward finesse in writing sophsticated robot programs, as opposed to e.g. throwing a ton of robots at things by brute force (though it's OK if some brute force is required as well).
Composability
Don't provide complex built-in features; instead, provide simple, fundamental, composable pieces out of which users can build the complex features themselves.
Open World
There should be multiple viable paths to upgrading and building more abstractions, and multiple avenues for exploration. In other words, we don't want a linear chain of achievements, where you must enable language feature X in order to obtain resource Y, which you need in order to enable language feature Z, which you need in order to... and so on. Some of this will probably happen organically; it would probably be impossible to enforce a strictly linear chain of achievements even if we wanted to. But it's worth reflecting on explicitly.
Discoverability
Ideally, everything in the game, including both entities and programming language features, should be discoverable just by playing.
Balance
The activities of adding more programming language features, adding new kinds of entities and recipes, and adding new things to the generated worlds are all inextricably linked, and should be done deliberately. It will probably require a lot of experimentation and tweaking to balance things so that gameplay is interesting and challenging but not overly difficult or tedious.