Now that the first step of the Stellaris mod is out of the way, we hit upon a new 'design' element of game design: creating all the traits I want to add to the game.
Adding new traits
The code involved in adding new traits is some of the simplest stuff that I'm going to have to do for this mod. I could do it right now if I wanted, and in fact part of designing the habitability system involved doing so.
But the code is not the only thing I need to do here. I also need to know what I'm going to be adding, and that's not something that I'm going to do while sat at a PC. So this morning's work has all been pen and paper (still my preferred note-taking and planning tools), sketching out some brief ideas of what I want to add.
I don't know how many traits I want to add to the game, or how similar I want them to be to what currently exists, but I have an idea of the direction I'm going, and as long as I have something to put into the game, the rest can be fixed later.
Balancing content
This is another distraction I keep bumping up against in every part of designing this mod. Just like layout and design distract me when building an app or website, the exact values I want to assign to each trait keep becoming sticking points.
In practice, I should know that I can change these later. I'm not going to get a perfectly designed mod first time around, and once they're implemented it'll be much easier to play around with all the pieces and start settling on what the values will actually be. But there's something of a perfectionist in me that makes it a struggle sometimes to just put in vague filler values.
Still, it's all good practice. I've got a fair few traits written down, and I'm going to keep thinking about it and jotting down ideas as they come to me. The joy of this part of design is not being bound by having software open at the right time, or even sitting in front of a computer. I can do this anywhere, any time, in bits and chunks as necessary.
Tomorrow's going to be my last 'working' day on this project for a little while, though, so I want to use that time to finish something playable off that I can come back to at a later date and build on without worrying too much about what I left unfixed. That means in tomorrow's blog I'll hopefully have an overall summary of what the mod looks like (so far) and what still needs doing to it, future plans etc.
Next week I'm going to start learning PHP, which may make for a less cohesive story structure, but will perhaps be more relatable nonetheless.
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