Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure
Lead Game Designer
The Project
Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure is an Automation game that was crafted to be approachable to a wider audience. I entered the project after the prototyping phase, and for preproduction, the concept of the game was boiled down to “Factorio made by Nintendo”.
From this direction, I took charge of the user research, creating personas, and solidifying game pillars with the creative director and lead coder. I’ve played enough Factorio, Oxygen Not Included and Satisfactory to know the core appeal of Automation games - the satisfaction of the open ended puzzle. To me, the shape of the work was immediately clear. Stardew Valley is both a very calm and cosy game, and you could play it with a spreadsheet open, go for finishing everything in year one and go deep in it’s systems. Our aim was to create something that had the same effect but in Automation.
The task then is to unpack that open-ended puzzle core away from the standard brown and sci-fi wrapping, and add adventure and RPG genre conventions to create clearer markers of progression that give extrinsic rewards to the player. I pushed for themes that differentiated us from other automation games - I didn’t want us to be alone in the middle of nowhere, I wanted NPCs that you relied on and grow with. We chose fantasy instead of sci-fi, lush but soft greens instead of muddy browns and metal greys. From day one, we designed with controllers and mouse and keyboard in mind.
We ended up getting some pushback for some of our decisions when we entered early access - some players believe that we had stepped too far away from normal automation because we force them to do more than just automate. For us, combat and adventuring is a core part of the gameplay loop and that you had to take breaks from the automation by actually doing combat, which some players detested. However, we still sit at “Very Positive” on Steam and we see a lot of people who have never played an automation game come to our discord and say that they have loved the game, with multiple hardcore players playing the game for over several hundred hours.
We did add more ways to ease and automate the combat, remove some of the friction of “manual” harvesting that is part of the adventuring genre, but I’m not particularly interested in just creating “Factorio but with a traffic system instead of a conveyor belt”. When we add mod support, I’m sure hardcore players will make it more suitable for them, much like how Factorio has mods that make the game more difficult, but that’s explicitly not our aim.
At the time of writing, Oddsparks is still in early access, but we have a demo on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. I look forward to finishing the game. A big chunk of our target players are simply not the type that play early access games, many only play on consoles, and when it’s at “1.0”, I think we’ll see our vision and direction pay off.
the work
High level concept game and narrative vision & direction
Player, Genre and Competition research
Building the Oddsparks world and lore from scratch
Crafting the tone and themes of the game, managing both the player’s emergent narrative and the background story
Designing and communicating vision for updates and features that are prototyped by myself/other team members
Low level design implementation, balancing and writing in UE5
Writing NPC dialogues and all in-game texts and tutorials
Designing, balancing, and implementing various core features such as the quest/tech tree, the logic feature, all of the different “recipes” for the different buildings, etc
Co-managed localisation pipeline
Player-facing communications, such as store page texts, steam news and devlogs, and the dev face for various videos and streams.
Team leadership, production, and management
Short and long term planning, including scoping features for milestones and doing task breakdowns for sprints
Managing internal team members and external freelancers, including having one-on-ones and hiring responsibility.
One of the five leads of the company that does company direction, production, and leadership for the company of 25 people.
What I learned
Oddsparks is the second game where I was the Lead Game Designer, the first being Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, but is the first one where I had the freedom to create an IP from scratch.
I think the biggest thing I learned was the difficulty of preproduction and the importance of a strong vision when creating a new IP. Gameplay wise, Oddsparks stayed relatively similar from preproduction to the current version out on Steam. However, during the preproduction, we had tried out different tones for the game and tried an art direction that didn’t work out so well. We shaved more and more and went for something simpler to account for the complex gameplay and ended up with our current style.
We did end up taking bold risks and weren’t afraid to kill our darlings. When we reviewed people playing our Steam Next Fest demo, we realised that the first order optimal strategy on the logistics was one that allowed the player to solve the problems too easily. We ended up changing a core part of how the Sparks work, which made the game more difficult, but better and more coherent. Us having our heart open to these big changes to foundational rules was helpful.
There is one unfortunate thing that I learned, which is just how bigoted the audience we make our games for are. Having a “cute" art style and constantly setting a friendly tone in our communications seem to have helped in pushing away some of the more bigoted audience. We do still get negative reviews just because some of our NPCs don’t fit cishet norms and you can have a rainbow cape… with over 50+ hours in the game and saying that they like the game but not the “politics” of our own personal representation as developers. I don’t envy community managers who walk the tightrope on pleasing bigoted “core” gamers.
Additional information
Trains and Trades update trailer for Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure, showcasing new features coming in the update.