Collaborative Design and Character Progression

During a game design meeting this week, one person brought up giving gear to the main character.  While I generally I love gear for characters, it initially struck me as out of place for the game.  As I'm apt to do, I quickly pointed that out.  I chose some aggressive phrasing though and ended up saying something along the lines of, "What will it add to the game aside from pushing around numbers?  I don't think gear alone will add any interesting mechanics to the game."  The team lead thankfully stepped in before I trampled anyone else.

He brought up a Flash game he had played in which you run a games studio.  As you make games, your stats increase, even if your games are not that good.  The gameplay keeps you playing because you constantly see improvements in different areas.  The effect is a positive feedback loop, and you feel attached to your progression.

While the positive feedback loop made me wary, I had not considered character progression.  I had been focused on prototyping gameplay mechanics at a single state in the game so I was not seeing the larger scope of the game.  This is one of advantage of working in a creative group: when your views narrow, someone else can come open the shutters.

In my current implementation, the player has all his abilities from the start.  The gameplay stays fresh by changing the landscape and how the player's abilities work in each environment.  My hope was that the player would feel progression as they got better at the identifying the best ways to use abilities.  In my mind, I can envision the gameplay and it feels right -- but as a game designer there's one manta to recite: "I am not the audience for my game."

Even though it's a short, indie game, explicit progression adds broader appeal.  Not everyone wants subtlety, and we wouldn't diminish the spell mechanics by adding a separate, clearer type of progression.  I'll a careful eye on balancing any kind of progression added to the game, making sure that whatever we choose, armor or otherwise, it makes sense and keeps the play rewarding, fun, and interesting

In the end, we settled on keeping the concept of armor upgrades on the table.  It's not a high priority, but I agree now with them that it's one route to adding some character progression to the game.  We came up with some cool ideas for the implementation.  Additionally it makes the artists happy because they get to add cool new assets.  Everyone wins -- especially the player.