Prospector’s core exploration mechanic involves searching for additional resources via strategic placement of supply lines to provide the player with oxygen for survival and power for extended base building. I used a traditional fog of war on the world map but decided to only reveal areas the player has has charted with a supply line. This allowed me to hide resource placement while adding to the player fantasy that they are actually mapping an uncharted world.
Place supply lines for oxygen and power distribution.
Supply lines clear fog of war and reveal resource locations.
Get an overview of active work areas and current production.
The original map design used colored blocks to denote different resource types, every building placed, and every supply line dropped. This work well enough for the early game, but completely broke down in mid/late game where the majority of the world map was uncovered.
This change resulted in a map that showed less unnecessary detail while simultaneously bubbling the most important information up in the map’s visual hierarchy.
Similar to the previous issue of too much detail resulting in less valuable information for the player, buildings being placed close together meant players had a hard time knowing where specific buildings are located due to overlapping pins.
I explored a few options on how to solve this problem:
Cluster pins based on zoom level. Similar to how applications like Yelp use a number to represent the total number of pins in a single geographical location then zooming in would break out into individual pins.
Show generic colored blocks for most buildings like furnaces while showing special pins for unique buildings like the Changing Station or Fabricator.
Show pins for any building outside a Transformer zone while clustering buildings inside a Transformer zone and allow the player to expand a list of buildings by hovering on the Transformer building.
I decided to implement design option #3 because it was an effective way to solve overlapping pins while providing a high level of detail to players and it was significantly cheaper to build than clustering pins dynamically based on zoom level.
Going further
The map experience could have been even more valuable to players if I had implemented a custom beacon mechanic either using a stand alone object or allowing a placed supply line to show up as a different pin icon based on a predetermined set. That being said, I felt that my design changes were solving the major pain points expressed by my players and I was satisfied to ship after these changes were live.
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