Designing

Above is the Game Design Document

Back when Busharium was refered to as just Hexes of Creation, we spent a lot of time in those first couple months going over and iterating and expanding upon gameplay ideas we had. My favourite change was doing the opposite of a similar game "Dorf Romantik" (which was presented in the original pitch). In that game the player has a limited supply of resources, but an infinite world space. I wanted the opposite. This laid down the idea of the player needing to pursue some objective inside this limited space to both expand the area, and also introduce a puzzle element.

I thought of this idea because the Artists very early on wanted to do something based in fantasy, which evolved into nature. The main selling point of our game became clear in that first couple weeks of Pre-Prod because most top-down stratergy games were about building settlements and controlling armies, ours would be soley on bringing back the enviroment. That's what led to me to the idea of having the "corruption", so it would be an opposing force to the player. This however later on in development simply just became a fog-of-war for the playerunfourtantely, as the artists and progammers had more important aspects of the game to work on.

At it's core, the main gameplay loop we settled on was placing tiles to create combinations, that would either give the player different scores, or create a habitat. Habitats would give you new tiles, a higher score would give you more playable space. This ideally was to get the player thinking more strategically about what they were doing. But what we failed to recognise was the identity of our game needed to be cosy, and that reflected in the playtests. People didn't care about the environment they were creating, and most people would spam tiles.

This then led to Alicia's idea of having some old lore book that the player would have, and discovering tiles would give you hints as to how it might benefit from other tiles.