Crafting and gathering in Enshrined
I think there is something built into the human gene that makes it so that we want to hand craft things. Maybe it’s because our survival as a species has depended on it since we lost our crazy chimp strength and became big ole targets in the grasslands of Africa. I sometimes wonder if other tool using species like crows get the hankering to go to the middle of the forest and build a log cabin even if they know the experience will never live up to how they imagine it to be, the cabin will be drafty and leak like a sieve. I suppose building a nest is something like that. Are we just crappy crows?
Since Minecraft burst onto the scene and has probably sucked up enough man hours to set back the industrialisation of space by a decade or 2, I suspect that new generations have had that itch scratched in a way not feasible in the real world or at least highly inaccessible without the requisite tool and training. That is until 3D printers came along. A bit of tinkering in a 3D suite of your choice or accessing one of the many, many sites offering ready to print models and in a way we’ve turned crafting into a real world role playing game.
We’ve also seen crafting make its way into every genre of game in some form or another, from survival games (where they make sense) to shooters like Fortnite (where in my limited experience it makes somewhat less sense. Then again Fortnite was meant to be a very different game so maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way). However, a lot of this integration has become formulaic, what is hot in gaming right now as opposed to how does this support the intended experience? Now full disclosure (aside from the title), Enshrined has a crafting system. In fact we have spent a lot of time thinking about the crafting system, tinkering with it, integrating it with other systems but most importantly, trimming it.
Crafting Table Concepts
See, when designing a game I find that most people’s initial response is to go wild. Every game has every feature and the real design work comes when you start trimming the fat so to speak. Our initial plans were that you could craft every part of your armor, there was a building system, you could manipulate the terrain and more. It was a heady high, but also pretty stupid. Who in their right mind would want to switch out 21 pieces of armor multiple times per game as they find or make new pieces all while seeing how it affects their character stats? Building houses likewise seemed like poor time investment on a player’s behalf so it was cut much like armor was trimmed. In our meandering approach to game design, we’ve asked ourselves what we want crafting to be in Enshrined, what part of the experience does it bring or fundamentally support. At some point (probably around 4am) we settled on that a core element of Enshrined is player self expression and employing their creativity to solve problems and that is what we want crafting to be a fundamental part of.
You would be able to craft and modularly assemble every component of your sword
We’ve since broken the crafting process into 3 parts, each part requiring a different approach. Part 1 is gathering. This is pretty straightforward, you find the tree, ore node or animal that contains the material you want. This part is all about planning your build and answering the bigger questions. What resources are on the map this time? How readily do I have access to them? Is it worth the time or the risk to get them? Part 2 is refining your crafted materials. This can be done in one of 2 ways; either you select default processing and get materials with average stats, or you can choose to dive deep into the process of alloying, laminating, quenching, stitching etc. consisting of a series of minigames that allows you to fine tune the resulting material properties. Here we are asking the players to be strategic in their choices as this step directly affects the final properties of whatever armor or weapon component they are making. The final part is creating the components that will make up a weapon or armor using the materials they have refined. This is where all the decisions made up to this point come together to elevate or change the chosen playstyle of a player and what a player makes must be considered in the context of what the player has access to, what other players are doing and how the environment of the game is shaping up. Luckily, weapons and armor can be disassembled into their components to try different configurations.
The degree of variation that players can introduce into components and then how they choose to combine those components means that no 2 weapons will ever be exactly the same and ultimately that’s what we want. In such a vast open world, why would we want to see the same old stuff again and again?
Join our discord and share your crafting ideas with us!
