iDevGames recently posted a postmortem article examining work on Andy Korth's Reclaimed, an entry in the UDevGames 2008 competition. In the article the developer discusses the design of the game and what went right and wrong with the title's development.

Reclaimed is an multiplayer online roleplaying game which focuses on building and player interaction rather than combat. The sandbox style game gives players the chance to chat with friends, build buildings, tunnel into mountains, and kill the local wildlife.

The initial plan for Reclaimed was fairly ambitious. Since I was an army of one, I knew I had to limit the scope of the project carefully. The goal from my original design document stated that Reclaim would “create a basic persistent multi-player online top-down tile-based game.” All that, and have it at least moderately fun to play while falling into uDevGames’ three month development time limit.

For a handful of gamers, the design document’s goal was achieved. In fact, one gamer played 41 hours, and there were at least six that played for about 13 hours. On the other hand, of the 171 people who logged in, a lot of them didn’t spend more than a minute or two online. This includes a number of my contest peers — one notably spending only 95 seconds in game! It seems that while some players enjoyed Reclaimed, others definitely did not play long enough to receive a good sense of the game. The real question is why?

Overall, my inspriation for Reclaimed was based on Dwarf Fortress, A Tale in the Desert, and various MUDs(Multi-User Dungeon). I think Reclaimed has the same sort of feel or ‘je ne sais quoi’ you’d get from these games. I maintained a focus around invention, construction, and creativity in a sandbox environment.

iDevGames: Reclaimed Postmortem

Reclaimed

iDevGames

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