Focus

What's the purpose of my current game development project? Do I have a clear focus, or is it more like the focus of a lightbulb? What's my feature list -- don't I want every feature imaginable?

I recently started work on a long-standing RPG side project. While working on it, I've done "research" into other indie RPGs, and played some roguelikes.

Roguelikes are great indie game developer fodder. The devs can release a new version whenever they want without worrying about people currently in the middle of a play-through. The major branches (NetHack, Rogue, Moria, Angband) and the vast majority of their derivatives (excepting the elephantine Diablo) are open source, so the dev can see what everyone else is doing. And the standard UI--a text-based console display--is trivially simple to code for.

One consequence is that any roguelike can borrow code from any other roguelike. (Mostly.)

So let's say you're developing a tile-based RPG with a simple UI and simple combat, but not random levels or permadeath. Or let's say that I'm developing one. What features do I include?

In the major roguelike branches, development is never finished. There's always new creatures, new weapons, new dungeon generation algorithms, new player races and classes, new skills, and on and on. But that's not me. My goal is to finish a game and push it out the door. My game has a story, which would kill a roguelike. Imagine playing through Tetris and having to listen to the unfolding of some complicated plot. After a few games, the early bits of the story would get horribly boring. After a few days, you'll want to turn it off. After a few weeks, you'll stop playing the game because that story (no matter how well-written) has become impossibly repetitive.

But story isn't the only reason to reign in features. I want to release the game and have it be done; I don't want to endlessly add new features to it. Bugfixes are fine, but new features go into the sequel. My goal with this project is more to release a finished RPG than almost anything else. I've never finished this "project", though it has changed forms and been restarted so many times that it no longer resembles the idea I had back in high school.

Do roguelikes require focus? I don't think it's necessary. They're a very different product. Does a word processor need focus? Not really; Office has grown so gargantuan that it does everything now. You can imbed spreadsheets, graphs, images, links, columns, whatever... It doesn't have a fixed feature set. Like an arcade game, it's used in small sessions, almost constantly. I've read of many novellists who use some arcane word processing machine or application on a historic old PC because they like it and they're used to it, but for the rest of us -- we can install the latest Word and get right to a new session. No focus here; who cares? There's no single feature that's a unique selling point for the product.

Focus isn't just a feature for small products. World of Warcraft has a focus (i.e. combat), and that's a huge game. Most console games have a very clear ending that serves as the focus for the player. I think the best games have a focus that helps them provide an entertaining experience without taking forever to develop. To me, the worst games¹ are those that try to do too many things. Sometimes that means trying to do just two things, like being both an RTS and an FPS, but doing neither well.

Focus is what lets me push off some cool feature til the sequel. Its what keeps me from spending another day searching the web for cool background graphics. Its what tells me to stop when I try adding more features to the combat system.

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1: actually the games I hate the most are those where I can't express myself because of some dodgy UI design, whether it's sloshy controls or control lag or a useless camera. I don't care how awesome your mechanics are, if the controls frustrate me I'm just gonna throw the disc away.

Related reading:
Andrew Doull's post on the Game Development Arms Race