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Episodic content allows for scalable game design, says ’80 Days’ developer
The idea of making a video game scalable may sound odd at first, but it is actually becoming more and more common in game design, especially with the recent trend of creating episodic content. According to Inkle Ltd founders Joseph Humfrey and Jon Ingold, their popular mobile game 80 Days had the advantage of being naturally scalable thanks to the episodic nature of the game’s design.
The game is based on Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and the gameplay is part Choose Your Own Adventure, part resource management and strategy. Players set out on their own around the world adventure, and they get to choose the route they take and how to respond to different events that happen at each location.
In a postmortem for the game on Gamasutra, Humfrey and Ingold explained that because each location had its own events and story, they could effectively develop the content in any order they wanted.
“At the start of the writing process, we agree the core stats – money, health, time – and the core character traits – skillfulness, style, and ‘properness’ – and these are the only things we consistently track from city to city and journey to journey,” they explained.
“That meant when we asked Meg Jayanth to start writing, the first thing we wanted was just one journey that took us all around the world and back. The plan was to get that up and running, play it, see what worked, and branch out as much as we needed to.
“In practice, that first journey wasn’t complete for several months, and in the meantime we had already begun to encase the world in a spider’s-web of routes and journeys. But the episodic nature of the design meant we could scale up in whichever direction we wanted, Meg could write scenes entirely out of order, and we were even able to jump in and provide additional content as well, all without stepping on each other’s toes.”
This episodic sort of design means that the 80 Days developers could also continue adding new locations to the game with little disruption to the existing content.
Image via 80 Days | Google Play
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