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About Riverbed's game design
We can't talk about Riverbed's game design without talking about its main source of inspiration: Minecraft. I can't pretend to know all the reasons behind Minecraft's success, but I've made a few observations.
I think this is generally true in games, but it is particularly relevant in Minecraft's case.
Whenever my friends and I boot up a server, we always observe a variety of gameplay styles, reflecting a variety of motivations.
There are the players that want to acquire strong PvP gear, the players who want to rush the Ender Dragon and elytras. I call them the "RPG players", and they usually don't play long on the server (if they don't find other objectives afterward), because such goals are quickly reached in Minecraft.
If you ask those players what they would change in Minecraft, they would tell you "a better progression curve", like Terraria has, with more metals to climb your way through. They might also tell you "better dungeons !", "stronger elite mobs !", all aspects that you would expect a good RPG to have.
And it's true, Minecraft is not a good RPG, if you look at the game this way. There are no character stats to improve, the villagers are basically an infinite money glitch, and the end credits are famously quick to reach even though the game is procedurally generated !
Then there are the "self-motivated" players, who come up with their own objectives (building a castle, a huge secret base, a train road, etc.), I fall into this category :). They are not "better" in any sense of the word than the RPG players, but they're able to play Minecraft way longer.
Now is a good time to mention that these 2 player categories have overlaps and varieties. I know of players who will rush the Ender Dragon just for fun and then continue playing by going about their building ideas. I also know of players who will rush top gear just so that building is more convenient later.
When you ask the "self-motivated" players what they would want to add to Minecraft... well really all and nothing at the same time. They may have lots of nitpicks about particular topics: Redstone, lighting, water (😉), etc. But they would totally continue to play Minecraft as-is, because that's what happens when you come up with your own in-game goals. Some even prefer going back to old versions of the game to enjoy a purer creative experience !
To me this is what's special about Minecraft, it's a game in which you can come up with a seemingly infinite amount of ideas of things to build and accomplish, and when you factor in community-made content like mods, plugins, maps, etc. it is no wonder the game has been this popular for this long. There are plenty of good RPG out there, but there's just one Minecraft.
This is why I think voxel projects that neglect the building aspect by going micro voxels or focusing on RPG elements are making a "mistake" (if their goal is replayability); the strength of Minecraft is self-motivated gameplay, and I have doubts about whether or not a great RPG can be designed when players are able to completely edit the terrain, which is the strength of voxel tech.
If what I've written above was all there was to Minecraft, MS Paint would be the Top #1 game on the market. The amount of possible drawings you can achieve with MS Paint is unmatched and the interface is way simpler than Minecraft's so it also wins on this front. In reality of course, most Minecraft players (even the "self-motivated" kind) would be bored in front of a drawing app, even if it was multiplayer (although multiplayer would certainly make it enjoyable for longer).
Something is clearly missing here, it is not enough to offer possibilities to the players, they also need to care about them. To me this is the core design issue in Minecraft, and any game aspiring to compete with it. It is easy to make a creative voxel game in which players can build anything, it is way harder to make them care for it.
In a traditional RPG, players are kept busy with quests. Quests are a clear list of objectives that will reward players with some form of progress, it can be narrative progress in a story line, stronger items, cool looking cosmetics, etc. Players embark on these quests and play for however long they are because they care about the story or they care about having a strong/cool looking character. Quests are "well-defined", they have a clear objective, precise ways of achieving it, a predictable outcome.
The closest thing Minecraft has to a quest is defeating the Ender Dragon and the reward is.. the credits + a neat decorative item i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There is however another lever that a game can push to make player do stuff. A lever so subtle it can often go unnoticed, but way more powerful in my eyes: incentives. An incentive is never explicit, it does not have a precise way of achieving it, but it does lead to the player taking action, often way more durably than quests.
The perfect example of an incentive in Minecraft is Mob spawning near the player at night. In any RPG this would just be a way for players to get XP points, but in Minecraft it is an incentive to build. The first night this might just be a hole in the ground, but eventually the player wants to store items, smelt ores, have a bed, etc. And a hole in the ground is boring and ugly. This is when creativity emerges. The player builds a house, or a tower, or a walled garden with torches everywhere. And maybe they find a trick to keep the mobs out while easily being able to come and go inside their base. It's hard to predict what it will end up being, or how much time it will take, but all of this started because mobs were annoying the player at night.
Incentives allow for more player creativity than quests, but they do not replace "self-motivation": when a player has built for itself every niceties they could need, the only thing that can get the ball going is setting their own goals. What incentives are good at is giving the players ideas of things to do when they struggle to find them.
I also think it's important that incentives never become too prevalent in player motivations, otherwise when they do run out the game can feel very empty. Incentives need to be light, to not go beyond the "nice to have". They need to be an excuse to start building the cool railways that you wanted to build anyway.
Lastly, regardless of what prompted the player to act (quest, incentives) it's important to look at how the player might fulfill their objectives. Slaying 50 boars is way less engaging than completing a (BotW/TotK) Zelda Shrine, even though they could keep the player occupied for the same amount of time. Slaying wither skeletons in the nether for a 2.5% chance of dropping a wither head is not fun when you need 3.
So, how can we make it better in Riverbed ? Here are the design goals:
- Add more incentives, but be careful not to make them too strong, leave room for creativity
- Improve the RPG aspect where possible, but don't make it the focus of the game
- Pay attention to QOL; I didn't talk about it because it is obvious, but there are a LOT of low-hanging QOL improvements that Minecraft didn't pay attention to
Now let's look at the distinguishing features I want to add to Riverbed and see how they meet the design goals.
Flowing rivers (without infinite water creation) is the flagship feature I want to add to Riverbed. The player will be incentivized to cultivate plants, which will require a natural body of water. This will be an incentive for exploration, to find a good spot, and building or terraforming to use the river efficiently for irrigation of crops. None of this is complicated (it's not a farming sim), but it is both a good incentive for all kinds of builds, and a way to grant some value to food by making it somewhat harder to cultivate.
Giving biomes a real impact on plant growth and including plants in (botw/totk) Zelda style cooking recipe, will make Riverbed biomes much more impactful than Minecraft biomes. Acquiring a foothold in multiple biomes will have a real interest for the player because it will unlock cultivation for more plant species which in turn unlocks more cooking (or crafting) recipes. This synergise really well with rivers, the player will need more exploration to find a combination of a biome they want + a river, OR deviate the flow of an existing river, both good gameplay.
This may seem like a bad design decision at first, because it seems like making ores renewable will just reduce player exploration. However, I think the opposite is true. Renewable ores have much more value than regular ores, they are a real asset, the same way a farm would be.
If the respawn time is not too short, players will want to keep looking for the best ore veins, and once found they will want to manage it by making it more accessible, connecting it to their base with mine carts (which are finally going to be useful!) and adding lights and decorations. This adds another build incentive, and also has the side effect of making long terms settlements a more attractive prospect, especially in multiplayer contexts where ore depletion is a real issue!