If it’s true that we are the sum total of our experiences, then Mech Armada should reflect that: as a solo developer I’m fully responsible for the design and all decisions, even if other people contributed to it. I’ve been thinking about this recently and I can recall some moments which I believe helped shape the game.

Please don’t shoot me

In 2001 I moved from a tech job at a big corporation to work on games. The contrast between the two offices was pretty impressive: from beige non-descript cubicles to toys decorating workstations and a “relaxed” dress code. People would play multiplayer shooters during lunch breaks literally every day. This was way before Call of Duty. Counter Strike was huge and I remember Return to Castle Wolfenstein coming out and influencing multiplayer design moving forward.

Being new to the team (and, let’s be honest, older than most other people), I naturally wanted to fit in and participated even though I’d never been a huge shooter fan (cue another story about playing Doom on Unix workstations while at university…) The problem of course was that I was terrible. There’s no nice way of saying this, I didn’t have the skill and the dexterity to use the mouse to quickly move the crosshair to where the other guy was while strafing away. I still don’t. Multiplayer shooters are competitive and tend to reward doing well (they have positive feedback loops) so if you suck, you do worse and worse each time, as other people get the best gear while you respawn with nothing.

At the time, I had been playing videogames regularly for 15 years, so I wasn’t exactly a newbie. However, my favorite games were adventures and RPGs. Some key differences are that those games tend to be single-player focused and don’t require lightning-quick reflexes. I learned a lot about how it feels to constantly lose in competitive games, as well as how hard it is to improve mechanical skills, especially as you age.

When I was designing Mech Armada, I knew it was going to be a turn-based game. You can take your time, leave the game at any point, come back and it will be exactly where you left it. No crazy reflexes required!

Look at that sweet End Turn button!

Animation animation animation!

A few years later I started working on my first proper action game, with an experienced team, as an artificial intelligence programmer. Before that I had worked on strategy games and some prototypes that were cancelled.

I naively thought it was going to be the same. Plug some animations on the enemies, string them together and off you go. I couldn’t have been more wrong. For a third-person action game animation (and audio!) is everything, both for the player and for the enemies. Let me explain. The rules of the game world define how things work: how you win and lose and what strategies are best to use. But what’s really important is but how players perceive it, and they do it through visuals and audio. The timing of an animation, having a clear silhouette and slowing it slightly before it speeds up as an attack releases, and really feeling the impact with an explosive reaction together with camera shake. This makes it look like your attacks have a real effect in the world and it immerses you in the game.

This is all called “game feel”. Action game developers really understand it. Their players are closely connected to the game characters because they control them directly. It’s too often neglected in strategy games because designers prioritize depth and gameplay complexity over flashy visuals. However, I learned it’s extremely important, so I’m spending a lot of time making sure that Mech Armada’s explosions and attacks are impactful, and that the game runs fluidly at 60 fps on modern hardware. Little details matter too: in Mech Armada you don’t have to wait for a Mech to finish moving before you give commands to the others, the game responds as fast as you can click.

This game is on fire!

Hidden costs

The last story is from the time I was working on Free to Play (F2P) games in the mobile space. Even though the technology and graphics requirements were very similar, the design for those games was really different from Premium games.

This is not going to be a rant against F2P games, we’ll leave that for another day.

The fact is that fun games do better in mobile F2P, so there is some overlap. At the same time, creating a fun experience is just one of the considerations for designers and, sadly, the hardest one to measure. And F2P games measure, and measure, and then measure some more. I’d argue the other two main concerns for F2P designers are getting players to come back to the game every day and to open their wallets. When your job depends on keeping people playing and spending, you’re going to use every trick in the book. In the end, it becomes the primary driver of design decisions.

Interestingly, a popular way to keep people in the game is to remove “friction”, that is, anything in the game that may cause frustration. At first sight, this seems like it can only be a good thing, but consider this: every time you die in a game you feel frustrated, so should we remove dying? (well actually, this is what idle games do…) But wait, there’s more! You need some friction to encourage players to spend money, so they can get rid of it. What do you do? You introduce artificial friction that can be effectively removed by spending. You can’t pay to get more skilled at a game, but you can pay to get better gear and upgrades.

Over time, as a designer, you forget about what makes games fun and obsess over what kind of dangling carrot will keep players hooked and spending. I wanted to go back to a simpler time, when a game was just something you enjoyed as a player, without a hidden agenda. Mech Armada doesn’t remove frustration, but instead leverages it towards getting better at the game. The fun comes from learning, discovering and improving.

You get closer to victory with every death