[Design Journal: Terra Machina] Crawling Through the Mines

I’ve been working on Terra Machina for a while now, and I’ve been privileged to have a great group of playtesters helping with this project. The last time we playtested this game, we did a trial run of the game’s Adventure Mode. The mission I’m testing right now has a group of heroes delving into crystal mines where the mechanical drones have been reprogrammed by terrorists to attack the former owners. Overall, the game went well, but we ran into one major problem: the mission takes too long.

Shortening Things Up

So, the problem is that the mission just takes way too much time to play through – in the neighborhood of 4-5 hours. That’s way too long for a single mission, even with 6 players participating. I need to find a way to shorten it.

The mission basically consists of moving through a series of rooms until you reach the boss room and defeat him. Along the way you’ll encounter other minor enemies. You don’t actually have to defeat all of these enemies, but you probably should so that they don’t cause problems for you later. It seems like all this moving around and clearing out the enemies is what takes so long.

One option would be to reduce the number of enemies in each room. Right now there are four enemies in each room. Doing this would allow you to clear the rooms faster. To me, though, I think this might make the rooms feel kind of empty. Less enemies in each room would also mean less variety in the encounters.

Another option would be to reduce the number of rooms. Right now there are a total of five, including the boss room. Three of those rooms are preset, meaning they’ll be the same every time you play the mission. The other two are drawn randomly from a small selection of rooms. Reducing the number of rooms would make the mission more predictable, because you would have to remove the rooms that are drawn randomly. It would also mean that the mission would cover less physical space. That, to me, would make it feel very small.

So, the solution I’m going to try to use is this. I will first reduce the number of enemies in each room by one. Then, I will replace the two random rooms with three random corridors. Corridors are half the size of rooms, and they will only have two enemies each. This will allow me to maintain a good amount of randomness to the layout of the mines, and keep the mines a good size. At the same time, it will reduce the overall number of enemies in the mission by four. Also, the remaining enemies will be a little more spread out, which should help players to dispatch them more quickly when they get to them.

I’ve drawn up maps for these new corridors. This possible solution will need testing to see if it works better. I’m looking forward to testing this in the near future, and I’d be curious to read any thoughts you may have in the comments to this post.