itch.io

I really enjoy what you’ve got here with Terraformental. I want to qualify that statement- I made an account just to express it. I’ve been around the block on gaming. I was old when the earth was young. Cookie clicker, Adventure Capitalist, Theory of Magic, the idle genre, the incremental genre, the stories written as light novels rather than games, they were new once, I’ve witnessed their rise. You’ve made something good here. That’s not to say other people aren’t making good things either though. I'm quite pedantic so I'll leave a long ramble here, but that's the crux of my message.

One perspective of gaming is that it's a learning experience. In reinforcement learning, there’s a dichotomy of choice between exploration and exploitation. Choosing to acquire new information vs utilization of old information. However, you aren’t just making one choice, but one among a long sequence of choices. Often, they feed in to each other. You explore to find things to exploit- you exploit to be well enough off to explore. It is a dynamic process where you balance and evaluate both things. The through line underpinning it all is time, tempo. In this game, it’s a bottleneck, a duration. In other games, it’s an evaluation on what duration is shorter to elapse- to prestige or to just keep grinding- what is the faster pace.

In practical terms of what I mean with what is existing in the game- let’s talk about the water recycler. There is a rate of water consumption. Similarly, there is a rate of water creation through the recycler. There are three states those numbers can be in- deficit, balance, and surplus. Whether the artifact or quick recycler is acquired, it shifts it from a deficit to a surplus- from a finite span of time to an indefinite span. If food, water, and power are all surplus, like in the barracks of Santorini- you are leaning on exploitation, you don’t need to loop. So you then don’t need to exploit effective choices to get to Santorini quicker to have more time to explore. Even what it is that you exploit is a choice. “What happens if I arrive sooner? What happens if I arrive later? What sequence of events are necessary for something here? What gaps do I have space to do other things with?” You might recognize the resemblance to Majoras Mask, if that is in your pool of experience.

Oh, the story and fantasy is nice too. The overarching goal, space, future, terraforming a planet. It’s cool, you don’t see it much. The story is really important. It gives you something to read while you’re counting down the timer. It gives you some scaffolding to extrapolate for exploration and exploitation. Getting a solar panel eventually, and what that means for the choice of rover attachment, and how that impacts the routes you can take. This game is certainly like a puzzle/adventure game. Like games of old, a cutscene or some dialogue is a reward, is content, is enjoyable as well as connected to the gameplay. It gives a fantasy for the mind to run with and speculate in imagination. To tap into the joy of imagining a station that you power up with solar panels, food generation, water generation, air.

Well, the game seems in good hands dev. The artifact you dig out being optional, the intent for different routes, the exclusivity of options, the limitations of resources, packaging tasks to recognize that repeating them gets old, improving at some tasks... lots of intelligent design with these choices. Maybe some day you'll discover that the starting area is boring, and maybe you'll introduce an artifact that lets you have a different spawn location. Your choice to expand breadth and depth by revisiting the previous station helps keep all options fresh for possibility and exploration- as opposed to a content treadmill of power creep- while simultaneously the text and cues of the game give meaningful directions on what to explore rather than running in circles doing arbitrary tasks like staying in the starter station for 5 hours to discover something.

Glad I got to play it before it ends up having a price tag.