![]() "There's a lot of efficiencies when you work by yourself," he says. Nevertheless, he's an advocate for working solo, because it's both less complicated and more liberating. It was like 1am before they went home."Īlso, much like Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld is largely the work of just one person, though Sylvester says he's "slowly learning to delegate" and has help with some of the art and sound. I thought it'd just be a twenty minute thing, but I couldn't get them to stop playing. I knew that because I had three or four friends test it. About three or four months later it actually became functional. I think I went through five or six of those and it coalesced into a colony simulator around February 2013. I began with a series of prototypes, just looking for a game concept. I guess that's when you can say I started on RimWorld. "Through that summer, I worked on my book, then I started working on game prototypes. "I quit Irrational Games in early 2012," Sylvester says. It's a story we're very familiar with by now, one of a successful Kickstarter campaign, of being Greenlit on Steam and of several years of slow, gradual development at the hands of a single person. Much like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld is also growing feature by feature, that growth careful and deliberate. It's more than enough for a tiny team of marooned humans to handle, particularly when they're already struggling with day-to-day survival, mining for resources, scavenging for supplies and hunting for dinner.Īs you might expect, Sylvester cites Dwarf Fortress as a muse, placing RimWorld amongst the many other games inspired by this complex and still-growing subterranean simulation. These can be anything from raider or pirate attacks to disease or lost refugees. Beginning with a handful of stranded, would-be colonists, each of whom has their own skills and personality traits (anything from optimist to cannibal to nudist), the game constantly introduces random challenges. It's dense with ideas and, should you still be unsatisfied, there's an impressive collection of mods that add even more to the game. It's difficult now to imagine a distilled RimWorld. I think that core is really what makes the difference between a good game and a bad game." I wanted to do that first and then build up around it. One collection of mechanics or one single mechanic. "I think you can reduce most things out of a game and come down to something that's really compelling, just at the centre of it. ![]() "Part of my design philosophy is really trying to find the the essential core," he says. ![]() While RimWorld is a game of many, many moving parts, with its distinct and individual colonists, resources, objects and crafting, Sylvester says that it grew from one such "spark." He began its development by distilling down to a seed of an idea that he has been slowly growing since. They're not necessarily doing bad work, but it's wrapped around something that just doesn't spark." We've all had our digital children sleeping in an unfinished house at some point. "To me, the diagnosis is almost always the same. "I've seen a lot of tragic game development processes where someone has a game that they're committed to, they keep working on it and working on it, but it's just not very engaging," he explains, over a Skype call. And, he adds, it's a far better practice than others he has seen. You can't have emergence without coherence.īut what if it wasn't just the events in your game that were unpredictable, but its development? What if you didn't know exactly how it was going to grow next, where its design might take you? That's how RimWorld designer Tynan Sylvester sees his work, as he develops his ever more complex sci-fi colony simulator. Things should develop organically, but should always make sense. The player doesn't know what will happen next, where the next challenge or threat will come from, perhaps finding that an element overlooked or insignificant in one game is absolutely critical during the next. It can endlessly recombine its many elements to produce new surprises and new situations. The idea behind this ideal is that your game, almost always something of a sandbox in its nature, has all the ingredients required to constantly cook up original, spontaneous and unplanned events. Whether you call it "emergent gameplay," "emergent narrative," or simply "emergence," the idea of undirected and even unforeseen events happening in a video game has always been something of a holy grail for a certain flavour of designer.
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