Reverse Engineering (5th Oct)

We were assigned to find an artefact that we wanted to reverse engineer and talk about our further understanding of that artficate through this ideaisation technique.

Reverse Engineering is the process of taking a feature and breaking that feature down into its core components.

I chose to reverse engineer the storage system on a game called ‘A Dark Room’ [1]. I was really intrigued with the games wood storage mechanic that was put in the game and how it drove the games story with it being a source of currency in the game.

Below is a basic look how the wood storage mechanic works:

Wood is used as a source of currency in this game with the player having the ability to go out into the forest to collect more and have the ability to build things like traps and huts with the wood. The wood is also a source of decision making with the player being able to pay someone wood in reward for something else.

Wood stocks will also increase with builders, 1 builder = +2 pieces of wood every 10s the more huts the player has the more builders there will be. With this storage mechanic this adds both to the feel of the game and how fun it is to play and helps to drive the narrative of the story.

Overall I think incrementing this into our Ant game would work really well. Using ants and food instead of wood as a source of currency and progression. The more food you have, the more ants join your colony. With ants this concept really does work, as in real life a colony of ants is dependent on the amount of food it has to support the colonies size.

[1] Michael Townsend, 2013, A Dark Room ,Available at: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

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