Caravan Experiment Newsletter #8

Hey everybody!

8 weeks down and 8 more to go! I’m feeling… incredulous. Can’t believe we’re at the halfway point already.

Thanks for reading, and please continue to reply with comments and suggestions or just give me a call. I’d love to hear from all of you.

Design Notes: Room Type Distribution

Immediately veering of course from the stated topic to go down a jargon rabbit-hole: what word comes to mind if I ask you to describe the things circled in magenta in this picture?

I personally think of the word “space” or, if I need to be more precise, “board game space”. Examining the purpose of spaces, the ubiquity of spaces, and the unspoken rules of spaces could be vital if we need to someday explain monopoly to plants but luckily we don’t yet.

The point of the digression is to say that Caravan has spaces too, but I (and other people making games) would call them “rooms” (and will call them rooms from here on). The etymological shift from spaces to rooms probably has something to do with games’ employment of random generation to create dynamic layouts as opposed to the static layouts of board games, but I don’t know why I’m writing this sentence.

When you land on a room in Caravan something happens. What exactly happens will always be somewhat unpredictable. No matter how many times you play the game, you will never know with certainty what will happen. This is good and fun. But it can’t be completely unpredictable or else a player would have no reason to choose one room over another.

For that reason, rooms in Caravan need to have an element that is known to the player: the room’s “type”.

• Battles

  • High risk; high reward

  • Exclusively rewards new creatures

• Elite Battles

  • Highest risk; highest reward

  • Exclusively rewards mutations

• Trials

  • Low risk; low reward

• Treasure

  • No risk; high reward

  • Rare

• Shop

  • No risk

  • Resource exchange

• Camp

  • No risk

  • Exclusively rewards health

With the possible exception of the Treasure room, they are all circumstantially desirable. While shops and camps are both free of risk, their value drops off significantly if they are visited multiple times in close proximity (i.e. you’ve already spent all your money, or you’ve already fully healed your team). Trials are generally low risk, but they come at the opportunity cost of a higher reward battle. It’s no mystery that the player’s best strategy is to choose riskier options when they are relatively stronger (such as just after healing from a camp, or just after spending money on powerful rewards from a shop). As a designer I want that strategy to be obvious to the player, because the question I am asking the player is not “where should I go next?”, but “how strong do you feel right now?” A probabilistic question as opposed to a discrete one.

For the demo there will be a variable number of total rooms generated per map, but each path through the map from the bottom of the tower to the top will contain exactly 15 rooms. Each room gets assigned a type randomly, with a few extra considerations. Firstly, there are places on the map where we want to “hard code” certain room types: the 8th floor will always be a treasure room, and the 14th floor will always be a camp before the boss. Secondly, the distributions of room types are variable over the course of the map. This is mostly to ensure that camps, shops, and elite battles don’t appear before the player can make good use of them. Finally, actual random distribution is bad. It has a tendency to make weird things happen like 5 shops appear consecutively in a row. So there is a penalty factor that gets applied to certain room types when they appear too frequently along a contiguous path.