This week I made one of the longest post series I've ever written, behind only my series on Pearson's personality archetypes (found here). It was a more-or-less complete breakdown of Fallout's game design, which I'll include links to at the bottom of this post.

I want to quickly break it down, talking about my reflection on what it was like to write the series, what it was like to go in as a game designer and do some really deep analysis, and give my final thoughts on stuff I'd add going back in.

Writing the Series

Unlike the Pearson's personality archetype series, each part of this was released on subsequent days, which somewhat increases the difficulty of writing since you really need to write on time pressure. Sticking to a single subject tends to just be harder than choosing a new subject on a daily basis for me, and I think this is probably more or less the case for everyone.

The series, in six parts, was just over ten-thousand words long! If I did the same amount of writing per day for the whole year, it'd be six-hundred thousand words. I finished up another article for my other blog during that time (well, on Monday, so it wasn't like it was a hugely ongoing effort), and did a few hundred words on a freelancing gig too, though I will say that I didn't get as much done on the freelancing side of things as I had hoped.

Given that I went back to my day job this week after a much-needed vacation, I think it's a good amount of output.

One thing that I found really difficult was to figure out how to compartmentalize the individual elements of each of the articles. There's a sort of magic number between going all-in and writing too much on each topic (I think that about 1500 words is the "sweet spot" for being a good point to start wrapping things up if you haven't naturally done so already), and some of the articles were much longer than others. Parts 1 and 2 were definitely the longest (or at least the meatiest).

One of the downsides of doing so much heavy writing all at once is that it's much easier to forget things. I don't like to go back into a post and do substantitive editing (fixing little things is fine, but I like all readers to get the same experience), so there were things I wished I'd said as the week drew on, but nothing too major.

Breaking Down Fallout

Fallout is probably one of the best video games ever, and it's spawned enough sequels, spiritual successors, and had enough influence to really become an icon in game design history.

I can't really claim to be honored to do it because nobody asked me to, but I think that breaking it down was a really good reminder of how to design games for me. I used my layer-based approach that I used while writing my game Hammercalled and sort of reverse-engineered Fallout into layers. It worked even better than I had planned (Part 6 being largely me talking about how some games have mechanics that don't fit neatly on layers, but Fallout generally doesn't).

Revisiting such a classic game leads to some interesting things. A lot of the modern focus on games has been done from a player experience side of things (e.g. Battlefield 5 rebalancing its gameplay based on time to death/time to kill) rather than a mechanical side, and I'm definitely more of a mechanical designer than a player experience designer.

I think that when people complain about new games being worse than old ones, it's part of speaking a different language in terms of that design philosophy. There are definitely times when games definitely move in a direction that I don't like (for instance, my favorite video games growing up were the original GearHead and Avernum, but later versions like the Avernum reboot that still follow a similar format but streamline it lost some of their appeal for me).

Looking back at Fallout one of the observations that impressed itself upon me was that Fallout really had to be mechanics driven because a lot of tools that we use in modern player experience based games aren't there.

The universe isn't immersive, in the sense that it has no dynamic physics, no high-end rendering, no responsive environments. The player doesn't have a lot of control over their avatar; it's an isometric system and the player just sort of walks around.

Compare this to a spiritual successor like ATOM RPG (literally a love-letter to Fallout) or Age of Decadence, and it's immediately apparent how much more immersive a 3D environment can be, even within the same style. Games like Divinity: Original Sin 2 are even more technically impressive, and feature so many more deep features that just weren't possible with the budgets, team sizes, and hardware back in the 90's (if Fallout were a person, it would be old enough to drink here in the US).

What I'd Change

The layers-based design approach is very heavily inspired by tabletop roleplaying games, because that's sort of my main wheelhouse.

I think that one of the strengths of this approach is that it's really cognitively simple, which makes it easy to understand what's going on. It also lends itself to a fair amount of versatility, if the person doing the break-down is good enough to do it, but it's probably a forward-moving rather than a reverse-moving process (e.g. you make layers before building the game, rather than taking an existing game and then shoehorning its elements into layers). As a result, there are a lot of things I couldn't touch on.

The layers-based design approach is a type of mechanics-driven design approach, and with player experience driven game design being more of a thing, it would perhaps be useful to also look at that side of design theory. With Part 6, I really moved into the non-layer stuff, and a lot of that falls into player experience rather than raw mechanics.

I think that going the way I did made it a lot harder to touch on some of that stuff well.

Wrapping Up

I'm not sure what I'll write next yet. I was thinking about doing a mechanical breakdown of D&D, though I think that's probably been done before by more competent people, but I'm not sure. I've got a lot of freelance work (relatively speaking; it's not a ton, but it should take me a while), so I might also do some light softball stuff to give myself more time to work on it.

Let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like to see me write about. I'm thinking about maybe also talking about game monetization at some point, since that's always a nice hot-button topic and I don't know if I've written about it here before (I do daily articles and have a somewhat shoddy memory).

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The Series Itself

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6