Five Buildings To Rule Them All

With Powargrid, we're aiming to create a game that is easy to learn and hard to master. We've tackled the easy to learn part by using as few game rules as we can and by keeping the number of building types as low as possible. We started out with only power lines, power plants and towers, but with only those, we didn't achieve the level of emergent complexity we were aiming for. So we added substations (formerly known as power storages) and lightning cannons to add a few extra possibilities and a lot of complexity in decision-making. Having as few buildings as possible has forced us to make sure our game mechanics work really well. And I must say that I'm very content with how they turned out.

However, a disadvantage of having only five building types lies in designing the campaign for Powargrid. An easy way to spice up a campaign is by introducing new units and such. That way each level or mission feels new and different. With this being a very limited option for us, we've had to find other ways of keeping things interesting. For instance by playing with the shape of the game grid and varying the starting setup for both the player and the AI. I'll look deeper into level design in a future blog post, but for now it's enough to know that this restriction has forced me to tap all the creativity I could muster.

So, does that mean we won't add any new buildings to Powargrid? Well, yes and no. We won't add any new buildings to the game as we're building it now (campaign, skirmish and multiplayer). However, we do have more than enough ideas for new types of buildings. So it's entirely possible that we'll add new buildings after we release the game. The buildings you can use should then be customizable per fight, so you can decide which buildings you and your opponent will have access to.

But for now, we'll leave it at the five buildings we have. Heck, this game is hard enough to finish even with only those ;).