1.8 KiB
A few principles to guide the development and design of the game.
-
Above all, the game should be fun! (But it's OK if it's only fun to a certain kind of nerd.)
-
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).
-
There should be multiple viable paths to upgrading and building more abstractions. 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.
-
Ideally, everything in the game---including both entities and programming language features---should be discoverable just by playing. (This includes the possibility of having an in-game tutorial to teach the basics first.)
-
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.
-
Don't provide complex built-in features; instead, provide simple, fundamental, composable pieces out of which users can build the complex features themselves.