DECLARATIVE PROLOGUE.
The team have been hugely busy this month working on a ‘vertical slice’ of Kenshi 2, which I have the pleasure of sharing snippets of today.
For those unaware of the terminology, a vertical slice is a portion of near-finished quality game which then allows a studio to visualise some of what they’re up to. It’s traditionally distinct from a prototype in that the quality is much higher leaving less room for flexibility but for us we’re blurring that line a bit and using it primarily as a tangible design tool. Internally nicknamed ‘Concrete Neon’, it’s about having a space to test and iterate on some of Kenshi 2’s ideas by taking them away from a design document and experiencing how they might actually be played.
Sharing some thoughts on our first major milestone, Chris compares Concrete Neon to founding Kenshi’s Holy Nation and his hands on approach to game design: “Anyone who played the [Kenshi 1 early access] map in it’s earliest incarnation will remember that only a small area around the holy nation was active, the rest was greyed-out and you couldn’t go there, because it wasn’t finished. This gives us a test bed to get everything working early on so we can play the game and experiment. I’m not a very formal designer, my technique is iterative because my ‘special skill’ is playing a game for a while and then going “hunger needs to be 0.8x slower and strength needs to raise 1.12x faster instead of 1.08x”. It’s also better that way because I can approach the design as a player rather than as a game designer. I don’t like game designers.”