Entry 57 - Resources like in Splendor

To briefly recap the conclusions from the previous post: the core problem at this stage is that the builder's resource-gathering mechanic not only requires speedrunning but is also completely closed off, preventing players from learning from one another. Let’s focus first on the speedrunning issue. It arises because players are initially given unlimited access to basic resources. Want to chop down trees? Go ahead. Collect branches? Sure. Quarry stones? No problem. There's plenty of everything, and the only limit is time. But why don’t champions face this problem? After all, they also gather resources – experience and gold.

Resource Limitation

The key difference is that champions' resources are limited and provided in equal amounts. Experience (considered a resource for progressing toward victory) is earned passively, simply by being present on the lane. Gold is gained by last-hitting minions, and even then, there’s a cap – it’s limited by the number of enemy minions in each wave. Essentially, the game offers both champions on the lane the same opportunities, and players must use their skills to claim a portion of these resources. As long as there’s no interference, collecting these resources isn’t particularly difficult. If players don’t engage in conflict, their growth will be equal, and only through their interactions does a difference in progress start to emerge.

This is the type of mechanic I needed to introduce in my game – resources should be distributed in equal portions for each team. Gathering them shouldn’t be too difficult, but opponents must have the opportunity to interfere with each other’s progress. When searching for the right mechanic, I remembered a card game – Splendor.

This game is entirely focused on resource collection and features much simpler rules compared to other card games. Essentially, it revolves around one core mechanic with a couple of additional features that help balance the game and prevent players from cheating. Here’s a brief overview of the main mechanic: there are five types of resources, which players use to buy mines that, in turn, generate more of the same resources. Players take turns, and during their turn, they can either collect three resources of their choice from the central bank for free or spend resources to buy a mine that produces a specific resource. There are many different mines, each producing one type of resource, with varying costs. All of them are available in a shared syore for all players. The goal of the game, in simple terms, is to build as many mines as possible and accumulate a lot of resources. The mechanic itself is very straightforward, but it has the feature I need – limited resource distribution.

The limitation comes from the fact that on each turn, a player can only take three resources from the bank or buy a single mine from the store. This creates conflict between players, as everyone interacts with the same resource bank and the same mine store. For example, a player might need certain resources to buy a specific mine, but those resources aren’t available in the bank at the moment because another player took them. Or, after saving up for a long time to buy a certain mine, another player might suddenly purchase it.

Another important aspect of Splendor is its complete openness – there are no hidden cards in the players' hands. Every move a player makes is visible to everyone at the table. This means that if someone begins using a new and unusual strategy, other players can quickly observe and adopt it. Overall, the game contains everything I need, and now I just have to figure out how to integrate this mechanic into our own game.

Major Gameplay Overhaul

To start, I decided to remove unnecessary mechanics that overcomplicated the gameplay, didn't solve any problems, and didn't make the game more interesting:

• The blast furnace was removed, and stones containing copper and iron now give ready-to-use ingots immediately. Building the furnace wasn’t a meaningful decision in the game. It was simply a necessity that had to be completed as quickly as possible, essentially another element of speedrunning. Smelting ore into ingots didn’t offer any tactical depth either – it was just another mechanical necessity that distracted the player from other tasks.
• The crafting table was also removed. Like the furnace, it didn’t offer any strategic flexibility. It simply needed to be built as soon as possible.
• Items produced at the crafting table were eliminated. The reinforced pickaxe had become the number one necessity and a speedrun element, while the backpack had fallen out of use ever since players no longer needed to return to the base for building materials. The sling had never been used since the beginning. On the other hand, gnomes remained tactically useful, but I’ll talk about them later.
• The mechanic for summoning minions with souls was also removed. Souls were initially introduced as a replacement for gold, a way to limit the player's ability to strengthen minion waves and break the "snowball effect". At the time, it worked, but the soul mechanic introduced a lot of unpredictability. It was hard to control when and how many souls players would collect, so often they wouldn’t have enough at critical moments to summon the next wave. To simplify things, we made minions completely free. The original problem that created the snowball effect was gold. Removing gold had already solved that issue, and there was no need to introduce a replacement mechanic. However, even though minions were free, players still needed to build the corresponding lair to summon them.

Next, I focused on reworking the resource system. The first step was making the entire forest non-interactable. All those trees, bushes, and stones in unlimited quantities were no longer necessary. Instead, we scattered resource spawn points across the map. Following Splendor's example, we chose five different resources – copper, iron, jade, ice, and obsidian. Each resource spawn point holds exactly one stone, which always breaks with a single hit from the pickaxe and always gives exactly one of the corresponding resources.

There are a total of four resource spawn points for each type of resource on the map, meaning the overall supply of resources is quite limited. This naturally creates conflict over resources, which is a positive outcome. However, similar to how in Splendor resources return to the bank after purchasing a mine, in our game, once resources are spent, they respawn on the map, allowing for continuous resource collection.

The player's inventory is also limited – each backpack slot can hold only one resource, and there are a total of seven slots. There are no chests in the game, so stockpiling resources is pointless.

To simulate the restriction in Splendor, where a player can only take three resources per turn from the bank, we designed it so that each swing of the pickaxe depletes exactly one-third of the character's total energy. The energy is set to regenerate fully in 30 seconds, meaning resource collection is quite limited – on average, players can gather one resource every 10 seconds.

To ensure that the core resource-gathering mechanic was transparent and allowed players to learn from each other, we temporarily disabled the fog of war.

Card Table

With the previously mentioned changes, we successfully created our version of the bank mechanic from Splendor. This alone could have been enough to solve the core issues: resource collection was now evenly limited, transparent, and introduced competition among players. However, we decided to take it a step further and adapt Splendor's mine shop mechanic, which also fostered player conflict.

Let's take a closer look at this mechanic. Even though each mine in Splendor grants only one resource, the prices vary between them. Even mines that provide the same resource can have different costs. Depending on the player's current resources and which other mines they own, the actual price they pay can vary greatly. Players can buy mines in a way that maximizes efficiency, allowing them to save resources and reduce the need to draw from the bank in future turns. Other players, seeing this, can interfere by purchasing a valuable mine first, forcing the player to either waste a turn gathering more resources from the bank or buy a less optimal mine at a higher price.

I decided to try adapting this logic into our game. Resource spending in our game mainly occurs when purchasing minion lairs or upgrading minions. So, I completely removed the old construction menu and introduced the card table. Five different cards were implemented to begin with: brick, soul, zombie, healing potion, and gnome.

Here’s a quick overview of the available cards:

• Bricks: Builders use these to construct minion lairs.
• Souls: Used for upgrading minions. Although we still call these cards "souls," they’re no longer the same souls that were previously used for summoning minions.
• Zombie: Purchasing this card forces the opponent's next wave to consist only of zombies. Since we abandoned the old system of summoning minions using souls, zombies – once an automatic penalty wave – lost their original function. However, this card now serves as a way to punish the opposing team.
• Gnome: Grants the builder a ranged gnome. These are the same gnomes that could previously be crafted using the crafting table.
• Health Potion: Simply heals the hero.

The card table is shared between both teams, meaning once one builder buys a card, it’s no longer available for the other team. A new card, generated randomly, replaces the purchased one. Both the card's effect and its price are randomized, making pre-planning virtually impossible. This mechanic completely eliminates the speedrun element, as players now have to react to current circumstances rather than follow a preset strategy.

With this intriguing and promising system in place, we moved on to testing:

And I’ll dive into the analysis of the results next time.