I should have done this ages ago.
So, Disquiet is pretty dead. It has been for a while. The reason is honestly pretty simple: I really hate game development. After two years of on again/off again work, this is an unfortunate, but important, discovery.
See. I like design. That stuff? Blood fantastic. It is fun. It is engaging. It stretches your brain. It lets you explore awesome concepts. I'm also a huge fan of writing. Crafting stories is something I adore doing. I even love playing around with words, mincing them, breaking them down, building them back, and all the other minutiae of writing.
But actual development? Holy shit is that a drag to me. I can't stand scripting. I loathe coding. Mapping is the worst thing ever. I found absolutely no joy in any of that nonsense. Which brings us to the first point: unless you really love everything about building an electronic game? Independent game design is probably not for you.
Independent projects are efforts of love. If you don't love them, your chances of actually finishing them diminish greatly. If you absolutely can't stand large swathes of the work required in an independent project? You're really unlikely to finish it.
This isn't to say you have to love absolutely every moment of what you're doing. I mean work is going to be work eventually. That's how things work. You just need to like enough of it to keep your motivation high. Because, when it comes down to it? Most of the project is going to be riding on your back.
Which brings us to the next point: help. Everyone on Disquiet was fantastic. They did great work. No joke. But ultimately, they all had their own things going on. They had jobs and lives and all that sort of nonsense to concern themselves with, which meant that I couldn't necessarily rely on them to do everything I needed or when do it when I needed them to. And that bypasses the complications that stemmed from only being able to work with them online.
It just isn't easy to always be on the same page when you can't be in the same room.
Speaking of groups. Design by committee sucks. You end up with a lot of disparate elements since everyone has their own agendas, ideas, vision, and the like. This isn't to say you can't have input from other people. That's always good. You just need to have a leader, a central arbiter to really guide everything. You shouldn't really be throwing stuff at people and going “you got ideas on what to do here?”
I cannot stress this enough. Projects need strong leadership and strong vision, otherwise you end up going every which way. I think trying to con people into working by acquiescing to their designs isn't the right way to approach this sort of project. People need to be involved because they want to be involved.
Tangentially, working with like minds is somewhat important. Let me get this out there now: echo chambers are bad. You should never surround yourself with mindless Yes-folks. At the same time you shouldn't surround yourself with folks who disagree with everything you want to do either. It just isn't helpful. You end up sparring too much over individual decisions and waste a lot of time.
Woof. I think that's a pretty good breakdown of on the people front. What about the game?
Well, first and foremost, I still find pure turn-based games to be problematic on the design front. It is just hard to create really interesting game decisions in pure turn based games. There just aren't that axes to operate along. Each character gets a turn and the choose a skill on it. That's all. You have to rely entirely on skill effects to create interesting gameplay, and skills can only do so much here.
This is compounded a bit by enemy design. Without being able to develop more complex AI, you're stuck with two options: rely on randomness to generate challenge or rely on reliable patterns to generate challenge. Both have their own issues and neither ends up feeling quite satisfactory. In one case you risk the player just getting wrecked on a guess, the other creates a fight that is solvable. Both are kind of suboptimal.
A lot of this comes down to issues of visible information. Creating interesting decisions relies on players having real agency in their decision making. If a player doesn't understand what an action will actually do, then they aren't really making a decision. Unfortunately, we still had a lot of that going on: damage, status, oh... and Dexterity.
Dexterity was our biggest mechanical flaw I think.
First, and foremost, it is way too central a stat. Functioning both offensively and defensively means that it is incredibly centralizing. You can't range it too far or you'd spread damage values out immensely. We saw this happen with Erastus who, despite being relatively durable on most fronts, was actually incredibly squishy thanks to a low Dex.
The ingame effect was also incredibly lackluster. It had been intended as a way to make equipment options more interesting (by offensively altering Dex), but the lack of feedback kinda defeated this. Players had no way of knowing how much switching a weapon would actually change anything. I feel we could have achieved a similar desired effect by simply giving weapons a swing trait. Simpler, easier to balance, and more immediately understandable.
So, given infinite freedom, what would I have done differently? We'll save that for another post.
