When I am under stress-and I am often under stress-I turn to a video game to calm my nerves. Over the last few years, my Go-Two style is one that is recently growing: minimum city builder.
If you are playing PC games like SimpusityYou are familiar with the concept of a city management game. Typically, players need to create and maintain a movement with a stir. Traditionally, it can be a stressful type of game that takes the intensive strategy to the hook. A wrong highway and you can accidentally create an economic crisis. But the new wave style of the “minimum” city builders backs back into its simplest pleasures. They are sports about creating a picresk landscape in the form of pleasant music plays.
That style has the most recent entry DorfromanticWhich comes out of the early access to PC today. Attractive title can be the best in the emerging style yet, with the touch quality of the board game like a painting with joys like Bob Ross CarcassonneAccording to the developers of the game, the mystery of the success of the style lies in the simplicity designed to give players to an end to their complex life.
Think simple
In DorfromanticPlayers gradually create a scenario of interconnected cities, forests and rivers by placing hexagonal tiles. There are some rules what tiles may be connected, and quests give players a more specific purpose to pursue, but it may be less experience. The rounds usually live for about 30 to 40 minutes and this time melts quickly to the nature of the artificial sleepiness of its almost its teaching gameplay loops.
“Our main intent was to design something with a low barrier to entry.”
It is like attraction Island And TownscapperTwo recent city builders who focus on easily understanding gameplay rather than hardcore strategy. Such sports have become more popular over the last two years and this may not be a coincidence. Co-founder of Luka Lengenberg, Dorfromantic Developer Taukana Interactive, explains why that style of sports is an ideal match for today's particularly busy world.
“It is primarily the simplicity of sports that make them attractive and appeal to many,” Langberg describes digital trends. “They have a stressful life and cannot invest hundreds of hours in complex games, making a demand for less complicated sports that experience more comfortably in turn.”
To create DorfromanticThere were four main design columns in Taukana. One of them was called “minimalism and simplicity”. In addition to focusing on making its central tile-placing system as satisfactory as possible, the studio began to remove the elements that could usually put pressure on the players, such as the timer.
“We all love strategy games, but can't always give time to dive into complex sports systems, and if you haven't played in a while, it is always difficult to return to them,” Langberg says. “Our main intent was to design something with a low barrier to entry, while still providing a challenge and inspiring players long -term. We wanted to avoid a disorganized UI, or lots of text boxes and clarifications, it was easy to communicate the core mechanics.
Touch of an artist
It was important to find the right gameplay hook, but aesthetics could create or break such an experience. This type of game requires a certain vibe if it is going to chill players – perhaps that is why so many games in style use rich colors and soft music. Dorfromantic It is no different from its peers in that regard. When the players finish a level, they can see the rural areas he created, which looks like a strange landscape painting filled with details.
When describing his artistic vision for sports, Taukana comes back to the word “simplicity”. The developer saw to create a sense of uniformity in its user-made areas, which is not an easy task, given that players have to make a randomly dealt tile to their landscape at a time. The end result is comfortable, however, even a poorly placed tile can still deliberately watch in the grand plan of the final image. To achieve this, the team saw the world of art, taking inspiration from pictures, pictures and even toys.
“We found aspects in some areas of so -called naive arts, which we liked and tried to align the representation of trees and houses, for example, for example, with him,” Lengenberg, “says Langenberg,” says Langenberg. “For the design of textures and colors, we looked more towards impressive landscape painting. This is the most noticeable in cornfields, where we tried to use different colors to get a vibrant color mixture within the texture.”
“Another major impact was wooden toys that mainly affected ships and trains along with buildings,” they say.
Beauty and challenge
While Lengenberg sees the appeal of comfort game like DorfromanticHe does not believe that this means minimal experiences such as it cannot be challenges. In a standard round, players' stacks have only several tiles. To add more to them to the stack, they will need to complete the quests and create a “perfect” placement. This can achieve a touch stress as the tile count takes a dip in single digits.
The 1.0 release of the game includes several modes, each of which meets the needs of different players. A hard mode that hits players with more complex tiles, a quick mode that is designed for small high-score pursuers, and a creative mode that allows players to make freely without any restriction (when the “game over” in a normal phase, the game also allows players to continue that landscape in creative mode). For Taukana, the balance between casual sports and challenge would have played an important role if the game was going to exceed a comfortable curiosity.
“We always divide the game into three layers of player inspiration,” says Langberg. “The first one is only the internal inspiration to create a beautiful landscape, with a classic high score system with a classic high score system with the second. The balance between the balance between the balance between some beautiful and really a fun and challenging game loop was one of the most difficult aspects to create. DorfromanticWhereas the game is an important part in our vision to re -create as much as possible. ,
Depending on my time with DorfromanticTaukana successfully found that balance. This is a game that I play every day because I get down before the bed. And when I turn it on as a comfortable comedown, I am still eager to defeat my high score and make a big landmas. I am able to play with strategic intentions without touching my blood pressure sky. The more complex my daily life is with age, the more I am learning to give value to the games where I determine the challenge for myself.
Dorfromantic Today is out of early reach and available on PC.
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