ARCHIBOTS
[ Personal Project ]
About
Archibots is a massively multiplayer online game focused on player collaboration and expression. Players take on the role of small, cute robots traveling across the galaxy, whose mission is to terraform alien planets in order to make them habitable for humans.
The core focus of the game lies in the ability to customize each planet by freely choosing the layout of buildings, collaborating on the construction of more advanced structures, and personalizing the appearance of those buildings to give a meaningful personal touch to one’s work.
The game was eventually developed into a prototype to test its main technical and game design features, but it did not find a commercial outlet.
GDD
A retrospective
Revisiting the project after several years of experience (besides being a bittersweet moment) has allowed me to reflect on some interesting aspects of the document, both in terms of its usefulness and how I would write them differently today.
- The template used is truly general-purpose and does not fit well with this type of game. If I were to rewrite the document from scratch, I would remove a series of redundant pieces of information (e.g., extensive narrative content), expand the sections dedicated to the core mechanics, and better structure certain foundational aspects (e.g., Rules) by dividing them according to their relevant content areas.
- In many GDDs I have seen during my experience as a teacher, sections such as the Vision Statement (as well as others with broad, high-level descriptions) are often overshadowed by lengthy dissertations on mechanical details. This approach, at the very least, helps maintain a clear overall vision of the project and prevents an overly mechanistic view of the game.
- The design history is often omitted, yet it is an excellent tool for drawing attention of the team towards changes (especially when the document begins to grow lengthy).
- The section on target audience and comparison with top competitors could have been expanded to delve more deeply into the gameplay dynamics that truly make Archibots unique.
- The Flowchart section, used here as a tool to describe navigation between the game’s macro-sections, should instead have been employed to compare the effort required by various in-game tasks, in order to understand which activities most effectively capture and sustain the player’s attention throughout the overall experience.
- The prototype, like the GDD, should have placed greater focus on the aspects of characterization and customization of Robots and Buildings.
- In general, the GDD should have more clearly included a discussion over the core gameplay loop, which consequently proved to be weak when it was implemented in the prototype.