First and foremost, I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who took the time to play, rate and/or review the game. I’m still absolutely gobsmacked to have finished fifth - I placed 26th the last time I entered IFcomp, and my personal goal this year was to place in the top 20. The result far exceeded my expectations and I’m so delighted that people seemed to enjoy the game! I thought I’d share a few thoughts here reflecting on Eikas’ development and the response during the comp.
Inception
There were a couple of factors that shaped the initial concept for Eikas. The first was the feedback I received for my last IFcomp game, No One Else is Doing This. That game was a short workplace simulation based on a job I had recently left, and was partly a way for me to process how jaded and disillusioned I felt about that role. It involved a gameplay loop that was purposely unwinnable, and while this was an accurate representation of my feelings in that job, a lot of players felt cheated by the lack of a ‘good’ or successful ending. This inspired me to create a game this time around that had a clear win/loss state, as a challenge to myself more than anything.
I also knew that I wanted to make a game that shared a similar structure and setting to one of my previous games, Ataraxia (which, it turns out, a lot of people on the forum have played!) The title of Ataraxia comes from Epicurean philosophy, specifically the two states of mind that are said to be key to a good life - ataraxia (freedom from mental distress) and aponia (freedom from pain). I’ve known for a long time that I want to make a spiritual sequel to Ataraxia called Aponia, and that this game would be something quite big and ambitious. I originally wondered whether I could begin work on Aponia for IFcomp, but it quickly became clear that my ideas for it weren’t yet well-developed enough to complete within the timeframe. I decided to set my sights on something a bit smaller and more achievable.
The inspiration for the game came when I was looking through other terms from Epicurean philosophy, and came across Eikas, a name for a feast day. I’d been tooling around with the idea of making a food-centred game for ages, and this seemed like a great opportunity to develop that concept further.
I kept a lot of the same design principles that I’d used to shape Ataraxia - a focus on community and relationship building, finite energy resources, a limited open-world setting - but brought in the community meal mechanics to provide more challenge and structure.
Difficulty
I suspected going in that the difficulty curve would be the source of a lot of critique, so I wasn’t especially surprised that this was the case! I found balancing this game extremely challenging. A number of different game versions were distributed to playtesters, and for almost every iteration there were some people who found it impossibly hard, some who found it embarrassingly easy, and some for whom the balance was just right. The inconsistency of this feedback threw me a bit - how do you adjust a difficulty curve when you’re receiving totally conflicting reports on what the problem with the difficulty curve is?
From the feedback I received during IFcomp, it seems like the current version skews towards the ‘too easy’ end of the scale (though I know that a few people didn’t manage to get the successful ending). In an ideal world I’d address this by adding a new narrative thread to put more pressure on the energy-slot resource, but realistically I don’t think I’ll have time to add more content to the game any time soon. I’ll probably tweak some of the numbers to make it a bit more challenging before I do the post-comp release.
I’m okay with it being quite a merciful game - as one reviewer correctly observed, I want the player to succeed - but what I don’t want is for it to feel grindy and boring around the end, which is what a few people reported.
Menu Planning
I’ve talked a little bit about this already, but I thought I’d expand on it more here as I’ve seen some more questions about it in the post-comp feedback!
My process for developing the menus ended up being this: I started with a list of ingredients, then combined them into dishes, then combined them into combos. In retrospect that was not the best way of going about it! If I could start again now I’d do it in reverse order - come up with my groupings of dishes first, then work out common ingredients from there. As it happened I was doing a lot of square peg/round hole, so I don’t think the combos are as intuitive as they could be!
There were also a few questions about groupings of regional dishes, especially in a non-Earth world. This definitely wasn’t ideal, and was sort of an ‘I’ll fix this if I have time’ issue that I ended up not having the time to fix. I hope these things didn’t spoil your enjoyment of the game too much!
Cosy Games
Okay, this is something I’ve been thinking about since Ataraxia was released, and I’ve only been thinking about more since Eikas came out - I personally really dislike the term ‘cosy games’. I was a bit reticent to admit this, as many of my most effusive reviews have referred to my games as ‘cosy’, and the last thing I want is to appear in any way ungrateful or critical of that. Besides, I completely understand why they have been categorised this way - I make low-conflict community-building games set in rural beauty spots, after all. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck! I’m just personally not a fan of the ‘cosy’ nomenclature, and over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to unpack what it is that bugs me about it. And, to be clear, this really is me attempting to figure out my own subjective feelings on the subject - this is in no way a criticism of anyone who likes the term or finds it useful!
I think there’s a whole heap of associations I have with the word that aren’t necessarily positive - it brings to mind the proliferation of Stardew Valley clones we’ve seen over the last few years, the explosion of the cottagecore aesthetic, things of that ilk. While the trappings of a lot of this stuff appeals to me (Slow living! Nature! Communities!) I find the core of a lot of this content can be a bit hollow, especially when it feels like an attempt to cash in on a trend. ‘Cosy’ has become a real hot button marketing term, and that’s enough to make me cynical about it.
I also feel like ‘cosy’ implies a lack of challenge, both mechanically and in terms of content - and yeah, to be honest, I do think Eikas fell foul of this. I’ve already touched on the difficulty curve, and the plot has been called frictionless, which I think is fair. Quite a lot of players didn’t respond well to the misery-fest that was No One Else is Doing This, and I think I may have overcorrected in my efforts to make a less bleak game this time around!
There’s a lot more I could say on the ‘cosy’ thing, but I’m writing this on the train during my Monday morning commute and I’m probably not in a position to articulate those thoughts very well! I think maybe I find the term a little infantilising, though I don’t believe the people using it are doing so with this intention. I’m afraid that the kind of games I want to make in future won’t be taken seriously if they’re tagged ‘cosy’. I worry that even by writing this I will have offended people who play or make games that proudly call themselves cosy! That isn’t my intention. I’ve played and enjoyed many of these games, and the bee is in no one’s bonnet but my own.
Playtesting
I’ve seen a few people on the forum recently wondering whether they should enter their own first-time work in a competition, which is really exciting - I love seeing IF from new authors!
If any of you are reading this post and you only take one thing from it, make it this: a good playtesting team is worth their weight in gold. Their observations, suggestions and critiques will massively improve your work. Get your game to them as early as possible, and listen closely to what they have to say.
I’m exceedingly proud that, save a couple of small typos, I’ve so far had no bug reports for what is a fairly long game. I do think this level of polish contributed significantly to Eikas’ success, as I guess that most reviewers will rate a well-polished game more highly even if the content isn’t to their taste. That’s all down to thorough playtesting.
I’m not exaggerating when I say Eikas would have been half the game it is without the generosity of its playtesters. Testing and updates accounted for about two-thirds (maybe more?) of the total development time. Appropriately, given the content of the game, it really did take a village to make.
What’s Next
Making games about community-building is the main thing I want to do, and keep doing. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Valentin Serri’s brilliant talk from Narrascope 2022, ‘Building a Desirable Future is Not an Individual Heroic Effort’, and specifically about what verb sets can be used to make community-centred games.
This is very personal for me - I’ve been working and volunteering in community organisations for many years, and I spend as much time thinking about how we do this stuff in real life as I do about how to implement it in games. It’s extremely hard, often unrewarding work, especially given the political climate in the UK right now, but it never stops feeling necessary and important.
I feel like my two IFcomp entries ended up embodying my feelings about the work of community-building, but at completely opposite ends of the spectrum - No One Else is Doing This was the manifestation of all the frustration and cynicism I felt at my lowest ebb, and Eikas is a quasi-utopian vision of what community-building could look like in a gentler world. I think they both did a decent job of capturing these extremes, but lost nuance in the process. I think when I eventually come to make Aponia I’ll think carefully about how to include the challenge and the reward, the shadow and the light.
Final Thoughts
Thank you again if you played Eikas, or indeed anything else I’ve made. If you have a favourite moment from the game I’d love to hear it!
I never stop being amazed by the generosity and care that people in this forum show towards each other - maybe the quasi-utopian community in a gentler world was the friends we made along the way, eh? - and I feel very lucky to be a part of it.
It’s interesting to me that you were trying to balance the difficulty and actually had the game be too difficult during much of development!