Anonymous asked:

I beg you please do some more work on legacy, I know you've already said no/maybe, but maybe you could do with a break from cookie clicker and work on some other projects your fans love?

orteil42 answered:

i still really want to get back to Legacy, it was the first idea i thought of after Cookie Clicker made it big and i realized idle games were becoming a thing

the problem with Legacy is that, while i usually don’t have much trouble thinking of gameplay ideas (i’m much more limited by my lack of energy to actually turn those ideas into code and art assets), i found myself hitting some pretty tricky game design walls, such as :

• how do we handle units becoming obsolete ?
• how do we handle changing scales, ie. do we still hire individual people when we’re managing entire cities ? when we’re at the point where the player is the ruler of their entire solar system, what do we make of those 3 hunter/gatherers we trained earlier on ?
• how does the invention of currency work ? do we just change all the costs for hiring and building ? what if the player chooses to never research currency, do we still let them pay spaceship engineers in venison ?
• how do interactions with other civilizations work in an idle game ? is the player at risk of coming back to their game to find out that some other faction just obliterated them while they weren’t looking ? what if another country sends you a trade request for cattle and earthware but you only receive it when you’re nearing the space age ? do we make all of those interactions reactive only, at the risk of eliminating some of the more fun aspects of warfare and diplomacy ?
  

these are annoying questions because they have multiple possible solutions that could be equally fun and interesting but would result in a drastically different game. these are tough decisions

in the end, this is something me and opti are eventually going to have to tackle around some soda and a big bowl of chips