An Interview with DotAGE creator Michele Pirovano
The medium of video games is defined by an interactivity, a collaboration between the game designer and the player. One authors a system, the other takes that system and authors an experience. We tell stories about the games we play in a different way than we talk about books, movies, or music. Because we are actively creating instead of passively consuming, games offer richer material for when we talk about the game with others. Some games, such as Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld, go so far as to call themselves story generators instead than games.
In weaving, the "warp" is a vertical series of yarn held taught by a loom, and the "weft" is the horizontal series of yarn that weaves through it. To apply this to games, the warp is the video game itself: static, designed, and frozen by the loom of code. The weft is the player navigating the game and passing through the warp: individual, contingent, personal. In this series of articles and interviews, I'm going to examine how certain games are constructed to encourage storytelling and the making of meaning from gameplay.
For the initial foray into this rich topic, I'm thrilled to chat with Michele Pirovano, the creator of DotAGE. DotAGE is a roguelike city builder where you must protect a village from apocalyptic events. Four "Domains" act as your antagonists, and must be periodically appeased in order to prevent disaster. Villagers ("Pips") produce resources at buildings, and some of these resources (such as Hope or Health) keep the domains at bay. Failing to do so triggers events that increase in severity as the game goes on. An early game disease event might involve a pip missing work for a couple of days with an illness, while a late game disease might wipe out half a village.
Josh: How did you come up with the domain system?
Michele: After playing FTL in 2013, I decided I wanted to challenge myself by applying that same tension to some other genre, and decided to focus on one of my favourites: city builders. As I started working on dotAGE, I decided from the get go that it would not have 'enemies' to fight, but that everything would need to be tied to the village's progress and survival against the world itself, i.e. events that would hit the village. I started brainstorming what kind of events could happen to a village, from earthquakes, to water level rising, to sudden maladies, to rebellions, and so on. After collecting hundreds of such events, I realized I needed to give the player some direction on the nature of events to counteract the unpredictability of how catastrophes work in most games, so I started grouping them under major concepts and gave the Elder some power to see the future, and the four Domains were born: the dual Heat/Cold and Nature/Cataclysm play with external forces acting on the village, Health/Sickness with everything concerning the body of Pips, and Fear/Serenity with their mind and the struggles of a small society. Years of iterations brought the Domains to their final form, but they are the original four!
Josh: The Elder's power to see the future really is important to the game. Knowing about upcoming disasters allows the player to adjust their strategy with enough time to save their village. How did you decide on how much of the immediate future should be revealed by the "Prophecy Pages"? Why give the player a partial prophecy instead of having everything known at the beginning?
Michele: The Prophecy shows partial information about what will happen. Mainly, whether the event can be prevented, and the Domain of the event. With this information, the player learns to guess what events might happen at various parts of the game, without having certainty, which creates a game that is always mysterious! With not much information, the player never knows whether they should be focusing all their efforts on beating a given event or not, which leaves a lot of room for doubts and, thus, choices!
Also, separating events into discrete pages helped a lot in making sure not to overwhelm the player with information. Since only the current page's events are shown, the player will focus on them, and especially on the upcoming Doom. The player will thus be able to create a complete strategy for the current page, as the events for each page are few!
Once you complete the first few pages, the existence of the other pages is revealed to you, so that you now have a long-term goal.
Josh: Replayability is a hallmark of the roguelike genre. DotAGE, being a city builder, plays at a slower pace than a typical hack n' slash dungeon crawler. How did you account for that in the game design? What sort of roguelike conventions did you have to bend, break, or double down on?
Michele: I'd say that tackling this challenge is the main reason it took me so much to make the game! Typically, city builders go in a completely different direction than roguelikes, as they are often slow-paced and relaxed, focusing on giving the player constant growth, few setbacks, and a lot of clear information. Roguelikes, on the other hand, throw a lot of uncertainty into the mix, and thus I spent years trying to match their characteristic to a city builder: randomized game elements are tackled not only with the starting map generation (a given), but by randomizing buildings in each playthrough as well as providing hundreds of different events that change the gameplay (boons especially!). I had to abandon the typical exploration of a classical roguelike since this was a village, so I instead transformed it into the process of 'exploring' the prophecy's events.
I doubled down on the permadeath aspect, as the game is in a permanent iron mode, even when playing relax mode. I realized that it fit the game as, due to the compound effect of early turns, even if I gave the possibility to reload a previous save it would often not be enough to counteract dozens of turns of errors. As I made the game, I realized it had more in common with Civilization than The Settlers, even if my inspiration was the latter, and thus I remembered how I never loaded a previous save of Civilization, but instead decided to restart to make sure I did the early turns better, even if no permadeath was there! I think that permadeath is a very interesting mechanic as it gives the player a very tangible risk in losing even hours of progress, thus making each encounter with an event much more compelling and tense, and making every choice meaningful.
Josh: Scarcity is one of the motive forces of the game. You always need more - more food, more pips, and more goods. The Domains demand more and more with each passing season. How do you create that feeling of scarcity? How do you back off and give the player a break? How do you balance that pacing?
Michele: Years of iteration, and years of re-doing my math! My goal was to keep the player on the edge, but I dislike automatic adaptation in games, so the game mostly does not change the strength of events based on how you are faring. Instead, I iterated a lot on all the numbers, always focusing on the "one more turn" aspect as my main rule: if I had one turn in which there was no change from the previous, I changed numbers to instead make it meaningful. I think that is the reason why the game gives that same Civ feeling!
There are four major recurring tension-giving elements throughout the game that work on different timings: the Apocalypse of course, with the game getting harder and harder as you advance, and scaling exponentially so that you need to always get ahead of the next Domain value; then we have the Seasons, with Summer and especially Winter creating periods of hardships and thus messing with the more relaxed pacing of the other seasons; we then have the single pages with each Doom at the end; and at last we have the Risk events scattered in the page. The player is thus always reminded both of his short-term and long-term goals.
Josh: With a few exceptions, pips are interchangeable. (In fact, the game does an excellent job of seamlessly reassigning pip jobs when a job specialty is required.) Pips don't have personality statistics, mood meters, or individualized wants. This makes running a village economy much simpler and more legible, but it can also make it harder for a player to care about individual pips. How do you get a player invested in the fate of their village?
Michele: From the get go, I did not want players to need to focus on specific Pips if possible, as that made the board-game inspired worker-placement gameplay much better. That is one of the reasons they are called Pips, as the dots on a dice, the individual is not important, but it is the group that matters most! In a way, the player *is* the village in dotAGE, and thus Pips themselves are unimportant. I also think this gives the game that special ironic mood, with Pips feeling a bit like lemmings than actual people, and thus making the uglier moments funnier. Sure, due to Quirks, Connections, Ailments, Jobs, Classes, VIPs and Events some individually comes out of each Pip, and the player might get attached to some of them, but the destiny of the village is often much more important and the real protagonist!
Josh: The game does have a great sense of humor, and I agree that keeping the Pips anonymous (for the most part) helps with that feeling. The number of pips in your village matters far more than any individual, and the humor makes any dealing with any given disaster more bearable. Was the game's ironic sense of humor planned from the beginning, or did it evolve along with the mechanics?
Michele: Yes, I love contrast, so I wanted to make sure to double down on that. On one hand, the game talks about an upcoming Apocalypse, and some events are really harsh. The humour helps me in adding some very awkward situations (like Pips killing each other) without the game feeling out of place. I think the visuals really help in pushing that dark humour, with some of it (especially the exaggerated animations) directly inspired by the Gobliiins series of the Amiga,
Josh: One final question. I loved the worker-placement mechanics of the game, something that's much more common in board games than in video games. Were there any board games in particular that influenced DotAGE?
Michele: I love these mechanics too, and I am surprised that in all these years (dotAGE has been in development since 2014) it is still relegated to digital board game adaptations, as it creates simple yet very satisfying mechanics! DotAGE draws heavy inspiration from board game for its mechanics while adding all the juice to make it feel more like a videogame (all the AI of the Pips has no gameplay purpose!), and the major culprits I'd say are Agricola, Stone Age, and even 7 Wonders for various visual cues.
I think that getting inspired by board game helped streamlining a lot of mechanics, making them cleaner and clearer, and conveying information in a more concise and clean way than videogames usually do, which made the game's complexity a lot more approachable. This is a big lesson from board games, which tend to get simpler but still maintain complexity due to the rules needing to be enforced by players!
It was a pleasure talking to Michele about how he made DotAGE so compelling. Bryan and I covered DotAGE on the podcast. If you are interested in DotAGE, it's available on Steam.