As one of the senior designers on Space Mail, I would like to talk about the framework pertaining to the gameplay loop that Space Mail uses. First however, there is important context to speak on.

The previous project that this team worked on titled ‘Reap What You Soul’, was hurt by a handful of operational and organizational issues, not all of which I will talk about here. These issues led to a situation in which we realized too late that we had bit off far too much than we could chew. We had an incredible world, storyline, thematics, and mechanical ideas but were limited by the fact (among others) that our game would not be ‘good’ unless all of these features were both fully implemented and polished. Stated simply, we did not have the resources necessary to complete the goals we had set out to achieve.

This is something we took into great consideration during the startup of our current project, Space Mail. There were many ideas thrown into the ring as to how we should handle our gameplay loop. What we settled on is what we believe would allow us to target a simple core that would be completable within our limited timeframe and resource limit, while also leaving us plenty of room to expand as far as we want to once we have completed our core. That framework is as such:

“A series of minigames representing four phases of package delivery (packing, routing, traversing, and delivery) which link together to form a ‘mission’. Each minigame will have an independent score, each of which will be added together at the end of the mission to provide the player with a ‘mission score’. A variety of missions will be listed with varying difficulties for the player to choose from. The player's total score (all mission scores added together) will be listed on a leaderboard.”

To reiterate, this framework allows us to split this project into smaller, more digestible parts, while allowing room for as much expansion as we can possibly want to achieve. We view the most room for expansion (without the consideration of time restraints) as lying in design and development of more minigames which could be added, subtracted, and swapped in and out of missions for each phase in order to provide unique experiences between missions. With the consideration of time restraints, however, this is not currently realistic for our team. At the time of writing, we have about one and a half months left to wrap up development on Space Mail. Currently, we have four minigames, one for each previously mentioned phase of delivering a package. Currently, we are at a stage where we have realized there is not any room to add more minigames due to time restaurants. Instead, we are adding in a few more systems which we believe will add replayability and depth to the minigames we currently have in place, but that is another dev blog for another time.