The primary thing that I worked on over the past month was the new Championship Wrestling Promoter demo, which you can play right now if you haven’t already. Now that the demo is out, I’ve started work on the financial management aspect of the game. Up until now it’s been possible to book shows, but not to make any money from them. Since running the financial side of your promotion is intended to be a pretty big part of the final game, it’s going to be fun to start to get that stuff all in the game.
But there isn’t much new content to show at the moment, since I’m still working out how a lot of the financial components will look and work, so this month I’m going to talk about the game from a more game design-y, philosophical standpoint. In particular, I’m going to talk about one of the main design pillars for the game, which is that all of the info that you need should be easy to find, and require as few clicks as possible.
If you’ve ever played a strategy game before, and I assume you probably have if you’re following Championship Wrestling Promoter, you’ll know that it’s often difficult to find the information you’re looking for. For example, here’s a screenshot from Football Manager, the most popular sports simulation game in the world:
On the left-hand side there are 17 different menus, and then within each menu there are even more panels at the top of the screen. In this case, there are 7 additional panels just for the Tactics menu. All of these options provide a lot of depth, but it also makes these games very time-consuming to get into. One of my goals with CWP is to try to take this kind of gameplay and make it accessible without losing too much depth.
One way I’ve tried to accomplish that is to make everything take the smallest number of clicks possible. Here’s an example: It only takes two clicks to get from the main game screen and start creating a match. It takes one more click to load the roster to select wrestlers, and that’s it; nothing in the game is ever more difficult to navigate to than that.
Step 1 - click on “Start Next Show”.
Step 2 - click on a segment to add to the show.
Step 3 - open the roster to pick the wrestlers.
The current design of the primary financial screen, the part of the game with the most complex math to manage, never requires more than two clicks - one to open the menu, and one more to view a detailed summary of any particular form of revenue or expense.
Some screens do have additional tabs, there’s no way to get around that. For example, when you’re viewing a wrestler’s profile there’s a tab for their statistics, another for their contract details, and so forth. But there’s nothing in the game that ever takes more than 2-3 clicks to find, and the vast majority of information is always only one click away.
The idea is to make systems that are dynamic, and interact in complex ways, but to present them in ways that are easy to understand. My belief is that the barrier to getting good at a strategy game should be figuring out the best strategies, not figuring out how to navigate the menus, or getting lost because you don’t know where the info you need is located. If everything you need is quick to find and easy to navigate, then you can spend less time trying to figure out how the game works and more time actually playing it.