Mining Your Own Design - GDC 2020 Design Talk
Co-presented a 2020 GDC design track talk with Aaron Biddlecom titled Mining Your Own Design: Crafting the Crafting System of Astroneer.
Aaron and I began discussing this talk shortly after Astroneer launched from Early Access to its 1.0 release. I worked as a gameplay programmer at System Era, and Aaron worked as a technical designer. We found ourselves frequent collaborators on design work for the game. A few months prior to Astroneer’s full release we worked on an extensive overhaul of the game’s crafting system and resource set, which naturally is very core to a crafting/exploration/base building game. This update was extremely successful, driving some of the best engagement numbers we’d seen to that date, and set the game up well for its post-launch updates.
Aaron and I did not wholly agree on the direction that the crafting system should go. I thought it lacked depth and complexity, which was the root cause of players dropping out of the game after a few hours. Aaron thought it was already too opaque and unwieldy, which caused players to become bored and drop the game. Up to this point in time, “simplicity” was an explicit pillar of Astroneer’s design, which I felt ready to dispense with as it didn’t truly capture what the audience found appealing in the game. Aaron maintained that this “simplicity” was indeed essential to what made Astroneer work. As we worked together we developed a theory that we were indeed misinterpreting the true nature of Astroneer, but neither of us was wholly right nor wholly wrong. This talk was about the methodology we used to re-define the core design pillars of Astroneer, which was a synthesis of both of our perspectives.