Wax Project: A New Game - Game Pillars, Requirements and More.

I've been working on a game concept for a while now which I initially began in order to prototype multiplayer networking techniques. It's starting to take more shape into some sort of MOBA-dungeon-crawler type game.

As with all game ideas, this one started out very ambitious and quickly had to be scaled back to something much more manageable.

I still don't know what the game is going to be, but I've given myself some requirements up front:

The game shall support a persistent world.
The game shall support player run servers.
The game shall support roughly 10 simultaneous players
The game shall support replayability.
The game shall focus on gameplay mechanics above artistic style and story.

It's always a good idea to give yourself some constraints when starting a project. This helps keep the project in focus and not let feature creep set in. Given a handful of simple high level requirements like this, we can start to make more specific design decisions.

In order to support a persistent world, where players can log on and off at their leisure on player run servers with a no more than 10 players at once, I've decided the client-server model fits best.

In order to create a pillar around strong game mechanics above art and story, I've decided a 2D top-down rendered game using simple geometric shapes fits well.

In order to support game replayability, I will lean heavy on procedural generation to create most content and player mods.

Find your why.

I jumped ahead of myself. I've just listed a bunch of high level requirements that the game needs to meet, but where did they come from and why are they important? What are the fundamental messages for your players? What kind of experiences and emotions are you trying to create for them? Once you understand the answers to these questions, you can start to identify the the core pillars of the game and every design decision should somehow link to them.

Most of my requirements and subsequent design decisions feed into these core game pillars:

Teamwork

Players should be able together as a team and work cooperatively toward a common goal. They should feel a sense of camaraderie and feel how their contribution impacts the team.

Continuous Improvement

With every play session the player should feel they've increased in power - whether it's earning experience points, loot, or increase stats, etc.

The rest of my requirements are simply non-functional. They are constraints either due to time/budget or lack of artistic ability.

Screenshots

Finally some initial screenshots my progress. It's currently implemented with client-server networking model including player movement, chat, and procedural dungeon generation. More to come!