Things are coming along well, constantly working towards my next personal goal - when it’s good enough to be called “a game”.
You see, Engineering Faith has quite a few features now, and it’s continually improving, but there there’s a certain magical point that it’s not quite at yet. For me to consider it to be “a game”, it has to:
- Have multiple viable strategies
- Keep the players engaged through its course, and
- There must be a way to win.
The strategies are starting to take shape. In order for there to be multiple strategies, there has to not be one strategy that is obviously superior. While that sounds easy, it’s actually extremely hard. In Asylum for ages, Advisors were so good, that it was dumb to not focus on them. Over the next month I’ll be focusing more on balancing features, trying to figure out which strategies are overpowering and which are too lame.
There isn’t enough to do yet, but I think I’ll be able to solve a lot of that shortly. I’ve implemented some of the ways to spend big money (sending missions, starting wars, commissioning expeditions) but am working on a system that’s something like Asylum’s Technologies feature that will let players use their disposable income for the good of their faith.
You still can’t win yet. Believe it or not, that’s not a big deal at all - not very much of players’ time is spent doing it. I’ll probably throw endgame into the mix in the next couple weeks.
As for actually being fun… well I’ll worry about that once it’s a game. You guys don’t care if it’s fun, do you?