Stats Gone Wild

[Eiwynn]

@Kefs

I have tried to do this and I find it hard to implement. All the ifs and possibilities makes my head spin Authors who manage to make such games are great.

Balancing the mechanics is hard. As Jim the creator of ZE and ZE:SH says:

@JimD

For new authors, there’s a benefit to developing a gamebook under the standard model and not use special gameplay mechanics. If you produce a well-written game, it will get published and get good sales. If you experiment with new features, you have extra development time and the game may not appeal as much to the core fan base. Personally, I like new game mechanics, but they can be risky and take time away from the standard elements if you feel you’re on a clock to publish (like me, even for my Hosted Games project).

Bold emphasis mine. I do think with Safe Haven, Jim learned a lot and in the future, I imagine some things will be done differently but only he can say for sure

With all this and above said, I’d like to link a very important resource for everyone:

COG Game Design Guidelines

Today we’re sharing one of our internal design guideline docs with the COG/HG forum community. This is the doc we send to potential authors to use as a guide to outlining a game for us. The focus is on mechanics like stats, branching, choices, and what we call end-states, i.e., the various ways the game ends. At the outline stage we ask authors to keep chapter summaries very short–an outline is not a blow-by-blow account of the game, it shows us the game’s overall shape and design. We’d like to…

These official guidelines are essential background to check out when designing mechanics because CoG goes over a lot of ground to help its authors succeed.

I still can’t find my old posts on the topic, so I’ll have to edit in my past statements once I do.