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Gameplay and design philosophy
See DESIGN for official guiding principles.
Below are some unofficial musings:
"Getting stuck" should be normalized as a possibility in the game, especially since we have a dedicated button to restart the scenario. Unlike some other games where it might be quite frustrating to "lose progress" involving feats of precise manual timing, our progress is stored in code and can be recalled from the REPL history[^1].
"Classic" mode is the "canonical" way to play Swarm.
In Classic mode there should always be the "carrot" of the next progression step in the game to motivate completion of the current game phase. E.g. why grow a farm? So you have resources go out and explore cities.
In part due to technical limitations, the goal in Classic mode will not necessarily be to harvest ever-more resources or satisfy some paper-clip maximization function.
Rather, progress may look more like a Queen Bee moving on from her old hive to stake out a new one.
The pseudo-graphics of the TUI have an appealing aesthetic to many. It also serves as a liberating constraint in the game design.
However, it does make some things harder/less appealing. There are a few ways that we could compensate for the confining nature of the TUI:
Movement and animation (generally, dynamism) can be Swarm's strength that makes up for graphical shortcomings.
The resolution may be low, but the scale of maps could be made very large.
Getting the most out of terminal color capabilities can spice up the world view.
We may consider adding support for sound effects. This, however, should probably be opt-in and not necessary to play the game. A possibility that aligns with the TUI aesthetic is simple support for the terminal bell.
[^1]: See discussion.