After the previous experiment with a town builder we came to the conclusion that we didn't really like it if you can place buildings wherever you want, in whatever rotation you want, without any sort of restriction.
It felt like it made it too easy to quickly plop down a bunch of buildings without putting too much thought into it.
So we gave it a second try but with everything on a grid!
Town Builder, Hex Grid Edition
We still wanted to experiment with things we had not done before, and thought a hexagonal grid might be a good fit for a town builder.
It has all of the restrictions of a grid but allows to build things in a slightly more organic looking way.
Something we haven't really touched on yet were the visual challenges for these prototypes. Both of them would require detailed, bespoke assets for buildings, resources, large amounts of land and of course the characters. Some of these we are familiar with, but others would have been a challenge for us to accomplish well.
You can see in the images we created some placeholder objects to represent buildings, and this was causing problems with scale. We weren't sure if we wanted to make these massive buildings, and thus the people would need to be tiny, or to stylize it and fudge the scales of different things.
We also had issues with art style, which would become a recurring problem for most of our prototypes except a few near the end of our experiments. While art style comes into play after a prototype a lot of the time, it can help inform a number of important decisions early on. It can be handy to have concept art or sketches to pull from, and we didn't have that for these. This leads into another problem of feeling engaged and passionate about an idea, and we weren't sure yet if we liked what we were doing, so a solid theme and setting never materialized.
In the end, due to game design issues as well as artistic issues, we decided not to move forward with this prototype either.
What we learned
- just adding a grid didn't really make the game interesting enough to inspire us to keep working on it.
There have been enough town builders that work just like this and we were missing something unique that would make the game more interesting. - we felt that in addition to gameplay we should think more about setting and art from the beginning as well
- committing to a multi-year big game project based on a tiny prototype is hard!