Hey guys,
This is the first in a series of developer diaries being written by our lead game designer Alexandr Soloveyko. Alexandr will be sharing his philosophy of game design as well as the brass tacks of the work he's doing here on CrimeCraft as we roll out this blog series.
--KevinB
Hi guys,
This is my first developer diary, so I would like to start by introducing myself – I am Alexandr Soloveyko and currently I’m the lead game designer for CrimeCraft. This is the first in a series of diaries that we will use to share our experience developing the game: what were our plans, what we successfully implemented and where we failed, and what our plans are for the future. In each post we will reveal a story about developing some element of the game and we are going to post such stories a few times per month.
In this first post, however, I would like to focus on more general things and talk about the overall direction of the upcoming expansion.
All you guys know that our game population isn’t that high – we don’t have enough customers who pay us money and you guys don’t have enough opponents to fight against. And while some believe that this is due to a lack of game promotion, we still think that there are a lot of game aspects that can be improved that will help us bring more players to the game.
As a game designer, I spend a lot of time analyzing CrimeCraft and looking for ways to improve it and increase our population. What can I say about our target audience – first of all we are targeting players who like shooting games and I believe that we have a really good shooting mechanic at the heart of CrimeCraft. I believe that all other aspects of the game – crafting, abilities, equipment, the economy – must support shooting.
But here is the problem – the secondary elements become mandatory in CrimeCraft if you want to compete at the highest level. If your goal is win matches and tournaments, you have to understand how the combinations of weapons, abilities, boosts and clothes bonuses work, and you should spend hours and hours getting enough in-game cash, recipes and mats to get the right items.
A lot of our players love CrimeCraft because of these game play elements, but as a game designer I know that most shooter players don’t want to deal with that. Even equipping items from the backpack to the paper doll is more than some of these players are willing to do. The craft mechanics, character customization and economy is what makes CrimeCraft different from all other shooters. It’s what makes us unique, but it also serves as our curse.
So here is our dilemma. Shooting is at the heart of CrimeCraft, but a lot of shooter players won’t play CrimeCraft. And here is the moment where we, as developers, need to make a choice. We don’t want to lose all those players. We want them in CrimeCraft and we believe that our current players want them in CrimeCraft too. More cannon fodder is always a good thing, isn’t it? But on the other hand we surely don’t want to kill all those juicy details of the CrimeCraft design – we want to keep crafting in the game, we want to keep the myriad combinations of abilities, boosts and weapons, we want players to trade, gather loot and improve their characters and go from their initial baby steps to finally winning tournaments.
Building a game which will fit both criteria was definitely a challenge. In our upcoming expansion we decided to create a system where any player will be able to jump right into combat and be competitive without bothering himself with all those details; but we will still have a game that has all of our advanced game play elements and the players who like them and who play with them will feel well rewarded.
We’ve been working on this new system for several months now and we’ve got it to the point where we’re ready to get your feedback on it, so we’ll start beta testing soon. I can't wait to write a second post and let you guys know about the design solutions we implemented to make it work.
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"Community Mgr."
Hey guys,
This is the first in a series of developer diaries being written by our lead game designer Alexandr Soloveyko. Alexandr will be sharing his philosophy of game design as well as the brass tacks of the work he's doing here on CrimeCraft as we roll out this blog series.
--KevinB
Hi guys,
This is my first developer diary, so I would like to start by introducing myself – I am Alexandr Soloveyko and currently I’m the lead game designer for CrimeCraft. This is the first in a series of diaries that we will use to share our experience developing the game: what were our plans, what we successfully implemented and where we failed, and what our plans are for the future. In each post we will reveal a story about developing some element of the game and we are going to post such stories a few times per month.
In this first post, however, I would like to focus on more general things and talk about the overall direction of the upcoming expansion.
All you guys know that our game population isn’t that high – we don’t have enough customers who pay us money and you guys don’t have enough opponents to fight against. And while some believe that this is due to a lack of game promotion, we still think that there are a lot of game aspects that can be improved that will help us bring more players to the game.
As a game designer, I spend a lot of time analyzing CrimeCraft and looking for ways to improve it and increase our population. What can I say about our target audience – first of all we are targeting players who like shooting games and I believe that we have a really good shooting mechanic at the heart of CrimeCraft. I believe that all other aspects of the game – crafting, abilities, equipment, the economy – must support shooting.
But here is the problem – the secondary elements become mandatory in CrimeCraft if you want to compete at the highest level. If your goal is win matches and tournaments, you have to understand how the combinations of weapons, abilities, boosts and clothes bonuses work, and you should spend hours and hours getting enough in-game cash, recipes and mats to get the right items.
A lot of our players love CrimeCraft because of these game play elements, but as a game designer I know that most shooter players don’t want to deal with that. Even equipping items from the backpack to the paper doll is more than some of these players are willing to do. The craft mechanics, character customization and economy is what makes CrimeCraft different from all other shooters. It’s what makes us unique, but it also serves as our curse.
So here is our dilemma. Shooting is at the heart of CrimeCraft, but a lot of shooter players won’t play CrimeCraft. And here is the moment where we, as developers, need to make a choice. We don’t want to lose all those players. We want them in CrimeCraft and we believe that our current players want them in CrimeCraft too. More cannon fodder is always a good thing, isn’t it? But on the other hand we surely don’t want to kill all those juicy details of the CrimeCraft design – we want to keep crafting in the game, we want to keep the myriad combinations of abilities, boosts and weapons, we want players to trade, gather loot and improve their characters and go from their initial baby steps to finally winning tournaments.
Building a game which will fit both criteria was definitely a challenge. In our upcoming expansion we decided to create a system where any player will be able to jump right into combat and be competitive without bothering himself with all those details; but we will still have a game that has all of our advanced game play elements and the players who like them and who play with them will feel well rewarded.
We’ve been working on this new system for several months now and we’ve got it to the point where we’re ready to get your feedback on it, so we’ll start beta testing soon. I can't wait to write a second post and let you guys know about the design solutions we implemented to make it work.