Designing the details news

Hi all, okay, after talking about caves four weeks in a row, I'm going to spend this blogpost on something completely different. A little detail, actually, but I think it's a good example of one the 'rules' I believe are very important to game design: every detail is likely to have enormous consequences, so get every detail right!

The detail right now
The detail I spent last weekend on, was the way you create guns and buckets. Long ago, guns were created like this:

But, as a friend suggested to me, this is actually not realistic at all, because a small gun would never take that much wood; at the time, building a small wooden house took four, while a gun took three! Three planks, so one 'item' of wood, should be enough. He suggested to do it like this, as long as people had a tool in their inventory, and I agreed:

Furthermore, you could also click on 'Craft into gun' in the menu that appeared when you either clicked the wood or the tool.

This worked fine, until I wanted to add buckets. For the menus you got when clicking the gun or the tool, this was no problem; I simply added 'Craft into bucket' to the menu, and everything worked.

However, for the combine window I had a problem: using the same reasoning, I could only use one 'item' of wood, but using one wood already resulted in a gun. 'Oh well', I thought, 'there are two good ways to create a bucket (the menus), so let's forget about that third way.''

The consequences

A little detail, you might think (as I did), but I was horribly wrong. People are used to using combine window for crafting, but suddenly they are forced into using another system they have never seen before (the menus). On top of that, there is no way for them to discover this system other than by accident.

You can already see [Deadpepper struggling with that here], but I have hard evidence: of all these hundreds of people that have tried the game, only nine completed the achievement to make paint (for which you need a bucket)! Nine! Apparently, the stupid little detail made it so unclear how to create buckets, and as a consequence of that the whole painting mechanic in the game, which I spent several weeks on, was not used or even discovered by most people.

So again, as many times before, laziness backfired, and I've learned to get every every every detail right.

The detail in Olvand violet

Here's how I fixed it in the next version, Olvand violet:

The menu options are gone, and now all crafting is done in the same way: with the combine window. In case one crafting recipe can lead to two results, little arrows appear. Much cleaner, much clearer, much better. Let's hope this makes people paint!

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