Deformable terrain

I would imagine terrain editing similar to From Dust would be highly satisfying in VR. 

I suppose the trick is that fine polish of making it meaningful, yet avoiding tedium.

all the best God games have had the ability to alter the terrain my personal favourite was populous the beginning

A tricky topic, if not handled carefully, since this is a mechanic that has the ability to kill off a game's development if it becomes more of a gimmick the rest of the game surrounds...if there's much of a game there at all. You know the one I mean...



Find yourself at Miner Wars 2081 - you've perfected destructible terrain, but you've not much of a game otherwise to show for it - isn't a good position to be in for a company, and so KSH had to undig themselves out on that one so Space Engineers would have a chance.

So a big concern around this mechanic would be to make sure that if it is going to be an integral part of the core gameplay then it needs to be refined early on so that other parts of the game are not waiting broken for it to arrive.

Okay so it won't be a core feature of the game then but may possibly be implemented in limited form later on. That's how I read it.

What about randomized terrain generation? I find it adds to the replay value of games. Games where you always play on the same map(s) tend to get boring.

Along the topic of deformable terrain, anyone else remember this little gem from indie's past?

Tread Marks

If you're into Arkanoid/Breakout-style games, LDA's DX-Ball 2 is a good addition to the genre.

Another one, from a developer I met during Lionheart's development (Reflexive, now since acquired), Ricochet.

Deformable terrain in a god game isn't so much a straightforward link to me. I mean, I get it, the first god game had it, so it's part of what we think about when we think of god games. But the problem for me is the integrating of it's function.
In my view Godus took some steps in the right direction when it comes to integrating the feature but even in Godus it falls short.
Deformable terrain is an investment, both in terms of how long it takes to build the feature, and in what things you have to adjust design-wise because your players can change the landscape. It has to be worth that investment.

I'll take the vulcano as an example, which they did in Black and White, and wanted to do in Godus. In Black and White it created a mountain, it spewed some fire balls, oozed some lava, and then disappeared. Trees would be gone, buildings destroyed. Pretty consequential, but it only created short-term gameplay before gameplay would be normalised again.
So what happens if you stretch out the vulcano duration?
What if it starts with gasses rising from the ground, making nearly lakes acidic, killing the fish, and making them un-crossable, then it kills trees. Then slowly elevation of the ground happens which alters how you can move around. After a good long while it erupts, creating a pyroclastic flow, destroying whatever is downhill and making the area unlivable for a while. Lava comes down and the occational fireball. This is the period during which nobody wants to be close. Afterwards, when the eruption dies, the ground becomes super firtile, but the mountain stays, creating perfect farming ground with elevation. Stretching this out over a period of hours or even days means that gameplay changes for an extended period of time, rather than a minute or so, as with how the feature was done in Black and White. And the period of acidity in lakes and the ground can take days to subside as well. The period of lava and ash making the ground very firtile can last for weeks. Elevation being permanent means you also have more reason as a player to flatten the ground again for building purposes.
And what if, during the time before eruption, you can dig into the landscape to determine where the eruption point will be? What if you can alter the landscape to make the acidic waters nearby flow into your enemy? What if you can take the firtile ash and hardened lava, and move it around to a different site?
That's a well integrated terraforming feature that alters gameplay over an extended period of time.

I think the best thing to communicate here is that terrain deformation is something we want, but done so in a meaningful way that isn't the core part of the game.

Minecraft had not just terrain deformation, it had creation/destruction to a fine point based on a rather simple mechanic. But it was a masterpiece and a revolution for games.

I really like the point by idem, in that a volcano spell is something that is framed as a short-term miracle that might even lead to saturation or over-exposure. I found the tsunami and volcano, in From Dust, to be the perfect examples of world changing miracles. A volcano would perhaps be a super-miracle, or a natural antagonist, or anything in between - but not something made lightly.

My design rationale is that currently the game's design, core mechanics, function without any terrain deformation but are reactive to it. Plant a forest, raise a mountain, flatten the land - they all have tangible resource results that directly impact the core loops of NPC Want, Get, Expand. The idea will be to look at how terrain deformation can expand on gameplay, but not crutch it.

From Dust, personally (and strictly personally) speaking was a good example of this.

It was an amazing tech demo and terrain deformation puzzle, but it was eventually cannibalized by Ubisoft to be used for just the water in Black Flag (allegedly). I always felt that they relied too heavily on just the terrain manipulation, whilst they actually built an amazing platform to host a great RTS game. Past a linear set of puzzles, the game was limited, and ended up being just a tech demo/prototype for a function in a bigger game.

Terrain deformation needs to reinforce, I feel, a game that can function well without relying on it - as a feature and not a core concept.

I loved from dust it was a beautiful sandbox, only thing missing was more depth in the game play, no idea how they could of added it but it was missing such a shame there was no more.

You sound a bit like Peter M there.