Salvage
The Banished Vault Design Diary 12
Welcome back to the designer diary series for The Banished Vault! It's been a few months since one of these, yeah? I thought I'd have more time and mental energy to write one or two more as the game came out, but it's been a busy time and launching a game really takes it out of you.
Salvage
A large part of the design in *The Banished Vault *is trying to interrupt the player's natural tendencies to complete objectives as efficiently as possible. There's nothing wrong with this tendency, but it's something that as a designer you want to try and interrupt or destabilize in different ways. Sometimes this friction can feel unfair, and players have their preferred kinds of friction, but it is important for a game to have. Ideally this process also adds to the narrative and emotional experience of the game.
Friction and destabilization can take many forms. Both of those terms imply a negative value or punishment for the player, but frequently that's not the case at all. In the case of the Salvage update, we're introducing those elements by giving players something, an extra option to consider while they play through a solar system.
A long running idea during development to make solar systems more interesting would be unique 'events' that would occur when you arrive within them. The map itself would be recognizable, but some new element would occur to add an extra wrinkle to the player's decision space. This idea got pushed to post launch because a lot of our design and balance focus was spent on the maps themselves --- it could be a mistake to rely on a somewhat nebulous idea of events to make maps interesting without the map itself being a reliable source of variety in and of themselves.
Eventually, Julia (our other designer) and I whittled down the events idea to something more specific, what we're calling salvage. Salvage is pretty straightforward --- material has been left behind in the solar systems the player visits, and they can decide to recover it if they wish. This material can either be resources on planet surfaces as the remains of outposts, or abandoned ships somewhere in the system.
Enticing the Player
These additions are not huge, but will add some interesting decisions for the player. Currently the player's decision process is very much focused on survival and construction of a Scriptorium. A few other secondary objectives exist to try and destabilize those goals, trying to lead them astray so they can have an interesting experience in a solar system.
Salvage adds a large entry to those secondary objectives. On arrival at a solar system, a player can begin sorting the planets and locations of the solar system to see how best to achieve their primary goals. The current secondary objectives usually remain pretty secondary, but in the right context, salvage can become a pretty strong pull. A planet with salvage material on it might have valuable resources like alloy, elixir, or stasis, or highly valuable artifacts. A salvage ship is there for the taking, presuming you have an engine that can move it. These injections of materials could save a player a lot of time or extend their capabilities a good amount. If, however, the salvage lies off the path of the player's primary goals, they'll have to decide whether expending resources is worth the gamble.
There's other nuances here relating to the friction of the salvage, relating to where it's generated in the solar system. You could imagine a system where the game tries to place the salvage 'far away' from the player's objectives, like a Hallowed planet or a planet with favorable resources. This would maximize the impact of the player's decision, guaranteeing that it is a difficult choice whether to go look at what the salvage might be and recover it.
Randomization and Location
This is not how the salvage operates. The location is purely random, for several reasons. The first is actually knowing what the player's objective in a system is not as easy as it initially would seem. As the designers we can only speak in generalities --- usually the player is seeing a Hallowed planet, but not always. Sometimes they arrive in a solar system with enough Stasis to skip it, and due to the terrain of the solar system decide to m ove on. Or a player had a hard time in the previous system, and is using this system simply to rebuild a foundation of resources before time runs out. So the idea of putting our proverbial thumb on the scale to 0
make the salvage location 'far away' from a player objective falls apart quickly without a firmer idea of what the objective is.
Related to this is an even more nuanced concept of the player's understanding of the rules of the game's procedural generation. This is not a rule as typically understood, meaning an instruction for operating the game or communicated to the player in the manual, but more of a set of unspoken rules that the game creates solar systems out of. Over time the player will form a general understanding of these rules, which shape how they play. The simplest one is that a Hallowed planet is always the surface of a planet closest to the sun. Another one might be that asteroids always appear in groups distinct from other planets. In our salvage location idea, trying to create a rule that puts the salvage location far away from a player objective necessarily limits the potential locations that the salvage will appear --- as an example the salvage location might never appear on the first region next to the Vault, as this would be 'too easy' for the player to access. Ultimately this kind of rule is not something we want introduced to the game, it rather counter-intuitively adds complexity (the player has to know an additional rule) while also reducing the potential outcomes for the player (fewer locations for salvage to appear).
So if we reverse the idea, we'll say a fully randomized location is simpler for the player and has more variety for the player to experience. This manifests because the game is not trying to provide one specific experience (the salvage being far away), so where the salvage appears can mean many different things for the player. It could be right next to the Vault, in which case great! In one aspect this solar system is slightly easier for the player. In another case it might be down a deep gravity well behind three hazards, which makes it especially cumbersome to access. Or anywhere in between, perhaps right on the path to the Hallowed planet, or in orbit of a planet with otherwise nothing else of value.
Whether the salvage is easy or hard becomes something the player decides for themselves given the situation they're in. It also reinforces an element to the game's overall theme which is of a crude and uncaring universe. And ultimately, it has the best component of a good idea: it's much easier to implement as designers and programmers.