Voyage of the Marigold Author's Notes

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I released my scifi game, Voyage of the Marigold, last year and always promised to do a full post mortem/retrospective. I have finally written up a post detailing some of the design decisions (both good and regrettable) that went into the game.

Voyage of the Marigold Author’s Notes

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Hey, thanks for writing this, it was a fun reminder of a game I really enjoyed, and it was neat to get more insight into your writing and design process! This reminds me I never got that far into the space station on any of my playthroughs…

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Thanks for sharing a bit of your thoughts, and for sharing them in such a pleasant-to-read text. I’ll have another go at Voyage now.

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Very enjoyable write-up! A pleasing excuse to revisit a game I enjoyed.

interesting to learn there was an algorithm to place the shortcuts–I feel like at least once I found one right at the moment I desperately needed it, which was satisfying gameplay, so fun to know that was intentional

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Pure randomness can be fun but I did try very hard (despite appearances) to make the game easier. The maze is fixed at the start of the game but the algorithm for placing the encounters is a complex set of heuristics.

  • There are fixed zones - top-left, bottom-right, center, near-exit. Certain encounters are placed preferentially in different zones, so players that take different routes through the nebula in different playthroughs will tend to see different encounters.
  • Encounters that can give you resources, especially fuel, tend to go near the exit where they are most needed.
  • Encounters that can give you information about the map tend to go near the start.
  • Encounters that break the maze (the wormhole, gate, pressure wave, etc) are usually placed in dead ends or a long distance away from the exit to help players that are on the wrong path.
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The space station was the last encounter I wrote and the most elaborate by far - almost a little mini-story to itself. Like VotM at large, the rooms of the station are not completely random and get more rewarding/risky every time you choose to go down the stairs.

The goal was to give plenty of chances for a player to realize that something was wrong and they should get out, while teasing just enough rewards that a curious or desperate captain might decide to stay.