Ages of Cataria
Ages of Cataria is a village story generator in which you watch your villagers live our their lives over real world weeks. Players will develop their villagers' stories as they grow old and pass away, all while creating a thriving village for ages to come.
Achievements:
- Fully funded on Kickstarter in under 10 hours
- Featured at the OTK Game Expo, taking 7th place out of over 600 submissions
- Was in Top 1,000 most wishlisted games on Steam
My contributions to Ages of Cataria:
- The sole Game Designer for the studio
- Maintained the integrity of the Creative Director's vision while translating it into player friendly systems
- Designed all systems and mechanics
- Responsible for constructing the GDD and all other written design specs
- Created the core gameplay loop and a fully diegetic progression system
- Developed simple prototypes of minigames such as archery, wood chopping, etc.
- Implemented all SFX and music into the engine
- Created all animation blueprints
- Collaborate closely with other disciplines to ensure a cohesive design language
- Aided other team members with problems/tasks as necessary
Gameplay loop
Designing the core gameplay loop for Ages of Cataria was one of my first tasks when hired by Third Pie Studios. As someone who wasn't very familiar or fond with city building or management games, this was initially a challenge, one I tackled head on.
I began researching the games that inspired the creative director such as Rimworld and played and studied them to discover the intricacies of their design. Their gameplay loops had many intersecting paths that allowed for more emergent gameplay than a more more structured loop one would see in something like an FPS.
With this new information and experience, I crafted a core gameplay loop that allows players to feel as though they can play the game however they wish. The core loop consists of first villager management, then resource collection, and then village growth. Within this loop, however, there are many ways for players to experience each aspect of the loop. For example, resource collection is affected by both villager wellness and the expansion of the village. A villager who is happy have a productivity boost and a building with extra upgrades can produce more resources. Each part of the loop is dependent on the others, which allows players to progress around the loop in whichever order they wish.
Diegetic Progression
Something I care deeply about is having diegetic systems in games I work on wherever there can be. I feel this is one of the best ways to create an immersive experience for players. In Ages of Cataria, I revamped the entire progression system to ensure it was both immersive and fun for players.
To do this, I looked at the systems we had in place and created a new building that was integral to the player's progression, the Research Lab. Since a large part of Ages of Cataria is building up your village for future generations, having a building tied directly to the progress of the village itself felt like a perfect fit and was an immediate hit the team.
At the Research Lab, villagers create blueprints to use in the construction of new buildings and building upgrades around the village. It is introduced by the villagers guiding the player with their thoughts about wanting to further expand their village and start living instead of just surviving. It creates a seamlessly integrated form of clear, tangible player progression that is tied directly to the player's visual feedback of their village's growth.
A challenge we came across with the progression system within the game in general was how to provide the player with enough structure to give the player a clear and fulfilling sense of achievement while allowing them to play however they wished. To solve this, I designed "checkpoints" within the system that marked the transition between each game state: early, mid, and late game.
Each stage the progress to unlocks new major mechanics that are both required for further progression and open up new optional styles of play. For example, when transitioning to mid-game, the player unlocks the ability to create a new type of all resources, leading to their ability to further upgrade some buildings and construct others. They also gain access to the option of building a school, which allows for new ways to increase villager skills and knowledge.
Interactivity
Something I felt was important to inject into our game was a high degree of player interactivity with the world and villagers. Many city building or management games are mostly interacted with through UI and I wanted players to feel as if they were able to have more of an impact on the outcome of certain things in the game.
The first step to achieving this was designing minigames for each of the main production buildings. For example, instead of watching their villagers smack trees and collect wood, players can play a wood chopping minigame as a villager that, based on their results, has a tangible effect on production for that villager. This gives players direct contribution to an otherwise automated system through a fun and replayable experience.
At the heart of Ages of Cataria are the stories generated by the villagers. They have their own lives, thoughts, relationships, etc. They live for a maximum of 12 real-world days, meaning players will have a lot of time with each generation of villagers. I wanted to give players the opportunity to get to know each of their villagers on a more personal, individual basis, and so I designed the 'check-in' system as another piece of interactivity.
By double-clicking a villager, the player is transitioned to a camera positioned in front of the villager. The villager gives them a wave before continuing whatever they were up to. Here, the player can see a detailed description of that villager's skills, current wellness, status ailments, and personality traits. They can assign them to different jobs, change their personal schedule, or see what's going on inside their head. It has become a key component to the emergent storytelling within Ages of Cataria.