A bit more direction

This is only going to be a quick update.

Reading back through my last journal entry, I think it probably came across as slightly more negative than I actually intended.

I talked quite a lot about not knowing exactly where Evolve was going, and about the fact that while the game was becoming playable, it still wasn't really hooking me.

I've had a couple of weeks away from it now to think.

And actually, I'm feeling really positive.

I have a much clearer idea of where I want to take both the engine and, more importantly, the game itself.

Giving the player a reason to care

One of the things I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about is what actually makes a game matter to the person playing it.

You can build a world.

You can put crafting in it.

You can give someone food to collect, a shelter to build and things to survive against.

But that doesn't automatically mean they will care about any of it.

There are definitely players who can thrive in a completely open sandbox and create their own purpose.

I don't think most players work like that.

I think most of us need to feel like we are moving towards something.

It doesn't necessarily need to be a quest marker telling you exactly what to do next, but there needs to be some reason to improve your character, build a better home, explore somewhere dangerous or survive another day.

Something that makes what you're doing now feel connected to what you want to do later.

That was the piece I felt Evolve was missing.

I think I've found it

Over the last couple of weeks I've come up with an idea for what that larger player loop could look like.

I'm deliberately not going to write too much about it yet.

Partly because I haven't built it.

And partly because I've already learned that something which sounds brilliant in my head can feel completely different once I'm actually playing it.

So I want to prove it first.

But for the first time, I can look at the systems I've already built and see how they might connect into something larger.

I can understand why a player might care about the world they're living in.

Why they would want to progress.

Why they might take a risk rather than simply staying somewhere safe forever.

And hopefully, why they might stop playing for the evening and still be thinking about what they want to do when they come back.

That last part is probably the important one.

The games I enjoy most are normally the ones where I'm still planning what I'm going to do next even when I'm not playing them.

That's what I want to try and create.

Whether this particular idea achieves that remains to be seen.

Now I need to actually build it.

But I wanted to write this mostly because the last post sounded like I was becoming negative about Evolve.

I'm not.

If anything, I'm more excited about where it's going than I was before.

I just needed to understand what I was actually trying to build.