Game Design Flux, or How I learned virtual crop rotation isn’t fun.

I don’t like game design documents. After an initial prototype of the action is made, playing the game tells you what’s right and what’s wrong, what needs to be added and removed. After many revisions, if the document isn’t constantly updated, it becomes useless. I much prefer a list of tasks that specifies what needs to be added, removed, or changed. It’s flexible and shows at a glance what needs to be done, and what was done in the past.



I’ve followed this method for all of the development of Banished. I had a half page of notes scribbled in the middle of a notebook for the initial prototype, and after that it was the task list. Looking back through my implemented tasks I notice that crop rotation has been added, removed, added again, tweaked, and then removed. Whats going on there?



This is a good example of how I’ve been designing the game.



When I first added crop rotation, the game only had agriculture. The only way to produce food was in crop fields, orchards, and pastures. Hunting, gathering, and fishing were on the todo list, but a long way from being implemented.



I figured crop rotation would be a good addition to farming. Soil quality would be a resource to manage, just like everything else. Every few years, depending on the crop, a fallow crop could be planted and left to die and rot in the field which would restore the soil.



If I was building a farm simulator only, this would be fine. But the player is also balancing many other resource producing areas, building things, placing roads, and generally forgetting to switch to a fallow crop every once in a while. This can be devastating to the town if the food production is balanced closely with food consumption. It’s also annoying to click on 30 fields and change settings.



The obvious answer was to add a feature where you could plan crop rotation ahead of time and the farmers would plant a fallow crop every few years automatically. You would then balance multiple fields to have some produce and some lay open.



I starting thinking that this was strange – I added a feature that made the game less fun, and I was adding another feature to remove the annoyance. If you could setup the crop rotation schedule once and forget about it, why even have it? So crop rotation was removed.



A lot of time went by and hunting, gathering, and fishing among many other features were added to the game. At this point I decided I wanted agriculture to more difficult than hunting and gathering, so I added bug infestations to crop fields and orchards, and diseases to livestock in pastures.



Then I thought, “I can make crop rotation fun. It will make farming slightly harder. I’ll add it back and make it better.” And so I did. I left out the fallow crop this time, and just required a different crop to be planted. You could still leave a crop to die in a field and it would restore the soil. I also experimented with different lengths of time required between rotations. Large farm towns were still annoying. Even more so when you only had to rotate a crop every few years, making it even easier to forget. I thought of having a user interface that would show all farms and you could change crops in one place rather than clicking. I even rethought auto rotation.



Last week, after a long discussing with my play-tester, I decided the crop rotation was getting pulled again. Other than crop fields, no other food production method required constant monitoring. If you had no farms and a town setup well, it could be self sustaining, barring any disasters. Crop rotation didn’t fit this – a few farms and a few years of not rotating crops and the townsfolk start dying of hunger.



In addition, if farms were left open to restore the soil quality, that meant more space for farms, and less space for buildings. I’d rather have players build a larger town than use up most the space for farms. If I wanted that, I could just reduce the amount of food each crop field produces. Hunting and gathering already takes a lot of open space, and farming is the method players can use to build larger towns on the limited land.



So now, once again, there’s no more soil quality or crop rotation in the game. I don’t really feel like I wasted time, artwork, or code by trying this feature several times and then removing it. I still feel like crop rotation is a good idea, but it’s not actually fun. It doesn’t add to the game. There’s still a lot of things to think about while playing, and I don’t think the majority of players are going to miss it, or even realize there were features I tried out and then removed from the game.



Now I have to update the website and remove the references to managing soil quality…. maybe.