DETAILED GAME DESIGN PROCESS
CRAB'MAGA
FROM AN INTENTION TO A CORE GAMEPLAY
Let's start with the beginning: my first mission as Lead Game Designer for Crab'Maga.
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The project was an idea of an artist, and I was responsible for turning her vision into correct game systems.
The first thing I did was organizing brainstormings with the whole team so that everyone could learn more about her ideas of the game. This way, everyone could bring things to the table and we sorted them out together.
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After a few days, we came up with a common vision and several main intentions for the game. This intentions were:
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> Make the crabs that are the base of the game look silly and funny (both in their art but also in the design),
> Represent the crabs as a never-stopping swarm that invade everything,
> Add a macro aspect of the game that would encapsulate the player progression.
Eventually, this is the game loop I recommended:
In this loop, the action phase is only a small part of the game.
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Crab'Maga features two resources (two soft currencies): the population and the seashells.
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The first one is the answer I found to create a common link between all the levels. It's also the way I've found to put the foundations of the idle systems.
An idle mobile game wants to create short game sessions and to give players very good reasons to come back on the game a few hours later.
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The population was thought as a smarter 'energy system'. As shown on this loop, the player earns crabs by an idle mechanism, meaning his population count continuously increases even when he's not connected on the game.
Whenever the player plays an action phase and initiate a fight, he loses population, making it a meta-game resource management loop.
The twist here is that the population is also the resource that the player needs to summon his units during the action phase.
Concretely, this means that the population cost of a level entirely depends on the player's performance. If he crushes the level, he will spend very few population. However, if the fight is very tense, the player might need more units to win and therefore might spend a lot more population.
The second resource of this game loop are the seashells, and they're a very basic soft currency used in the meta-loop to emphasize the player's progression.
Each level grants seashells and the player chooses how he wants to spend them. As shown in this game loop, spending seashells allows the player to upgrade his units or to buy new ones, therefore allowing him to progress faster in the game and to face stronger enemies.
This quick presentation shows how I designed the game loop in order to both support the game's intentions AND achieve important goals such create strong retention mechanics via the use of a very functioning global macro-loop.
It's also a core gameplay that allows the game to target the hybridcasual audience, mostly thanks to the idle component.
This video shows off the tutorial for the very first action phase of the game.
Here, we can see the basics: the player summons crab units, and it costs population every time he does so.
Each unit has a specific population cost.
This creates a direct link between the action phase and the meta-loop which it belongs to.
The game design dynamic that is supported by this feature is that a player's performance in a level has a direct influence on his potential resources available for all the next levels.
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Of course, as we aimed to do a hybridcasual game, the system should be very forgiving for players that are not very good at the game. This is where the idle mechanism comes into play. The players are never really blocked.
Or more accurately, they will never be blocked more than 12 hours, giving them a powerful drive to come back on the game when their population has been replenished.
