Action Systems
The Banished Vault — Design Diary 05
Today’s entry is a catalog of all the action systems implemented in the game, the original one, and two subsequent ones after some internal feedback rounds, leading up to the current one as it is in the game. The rest of the design diary entries here. Wishlist the game here.
Time is a funky thing in The Banished Vault, as explained in a previous entry. A turn is a nebulously large amount of time, on the scale of months or years. Meanwhile, actions are smaller subdivisions of time, but also possibly representing a vague concept of energy, logistics, or communication limits. The narrative justification is vague because the game started with a global action set, available to the player across all planets. Spend an action building something on a planet, and that’s one fewer action you can spend doing something anywhere else. Piloting ships doesn’t cost an action (but might cost turns).
It’s a little unusual, but if it works it can be justified. The reason I started with global actions was for simplicity, with less to explain to the player and a simpler interface. This is a classic ‘scaffold’ design, which is not meant to be final but only to provide moving parts so the game can function.
However, it was just kind of weird. Vi, one of our designers at the studio, pointed out that for three actions you could: build three buildings on a planet, or fly to three different moons and build three buildings. All the while your other characters did mostly nothing. While it may have been simpler, it was more narratively confusing than the alternative I had previously discarded: each planet has its own set of actions. Consuming an action at a location simply depletes that location’s set, which is refreshed at the end of the turn.
Location Actions
There are benefits to this added complexity. Each location can have fewer actions, which is a more interesting friction for players. With five global actions, the player has flexibility in where to spend them: you can really construct or produce a lot at one location, or do little tasks all over the place. While it sounds appealing, in practice it gives too much to the player. When one location has two actions, the player is rate limited on the amount they can achieve there. This provides an incentive to go elsewhere, because just on that nearby moon are two more actions that you can access. The tradeoff is now you have a more fragmented set of abilities, but this is a good thing for the game overall and is ultimately more fun.
The local action system also provides a lot of opportunities to add variety, and allows me to start fiddling in interesting ways. For example, a piece of feedback was a lack of real incentive to go ‘down-system’, or closer to the sun. Because, at least in that version of the game, most resources were available everywhere, you could stay in the fringes of the solar system and achieve your goals. Even with a refined resource population, the game’s math makes it more expensive to travel closer to the sun.
So, using the actions as a metaphor for energy, the idea follows that planets closer to the sun have more actions. A Mercury-like planet, drowning in solar energy, might receive 5 or 7 actions per turn, while something in the Neptune region would get only one. Regardless of the quirks with random solar system generation, this will be a clear trade off for the player. Spend the time and fuel to go down-system, and you’ll get a lot of actions in return.
Another interesting wrinkle with location actions is letting players boost them by constructing special buildings. While this still works with the global action system, it makes better narrative sense with the local actions. For one reason or another you might trade off building footprint with an action-generator in order to boost that location’s actions per turn.
Later on, after more testing, the action system evolved again! During internal playtesting, our programmer Hannah noted something that now seems obvious in hindsight: combining both characters that used actions, but those actions only available from a pool tied to each location, resulted in there being no difference how many characters actually went to a location. Whether three characters are at a location or only one, if the location has only five actions, only five will get used.
The knock-on effects to this design are interesting. With actions at locations being set, characters become more of an ‘activation’ of a location, and the only remaining rate-limiting factor for the player are ships. There’s no longer a decision to split up your characters or keep them together, as the game has made that for you. So this was immediately redesigned.
Character Actions
The current action system is yet another example of arriving at an obvious conclusion, but I think is actually more interesting because of the process preceding it. It’s certainly the result of a quirk in a scaffold design of action systems, and having characters introduced to the design (see the previous design diary).
Like in most turn-based games, actions are tied to characters. Having multiple characters on a planet means you have a larger pool of actions to use. It also allows for actions on the Vault, which helps solve a separate issue that I’ll detail in a future post.
A key new wrinkle with this action system is that I still wanted to maintain the location influence to incentivize players to venture further into the solar system, and still having players spend infrastructure to increase a location’s value for actions. So with actions tied to characters, the number of actions they receive at the start of a turn depends on their location. A character at the vault gains a set number of actions, and a character in space only gets one action. Characters at locations regain actions depending on the action restore value of that location, which increases as you get closer to the sun.
This final system combines the best of both ideas. It has some of the flexibility issues outlined in the global action system, but otherwise provides strong incentives for the player to keep characters grouped together or separated. However, if you stay in the safer shallows of the outer solar system, you might get a quarter of the actions per turn (per character) than you get as you go further in. And if the player is moving around a lot, which doesn’t currently require actions, the characters moving are more likely to start their turns with the single action from space travel as characters staying put.
The overall goal is not providing a clear right answer on how to achieve the player’s goals. Ideally there are many interesting terrains created by the map generation, and the player can try and figure out how to gain the actions necessary to achieve their goals.
