Interview: Scorchlands Adds Up The Resource Management Challenge With A Supply & Demand Aspect In Gameplay

Kuba: Hi, I’m Kuba (or Ringlan). I’m the main guy responsible for Scorchlands and have worked on it as an indie developer for several years.

In the past, I also worked on making ports for SUPERHOT games, adding cool stuff to an MMO called Realm of the Mad God, and working on Cooking Simulator and its sequel.

Kuba: I have a habit of talking to random friends about the design of the games I’m working on. On one such occasion, we went for a walk in the park with a friend and were discussing different crazy ideas for game mechanics. We were talking about how trading works in different games, and as a joke, we tried to represent “trading” as various similar things that follow the formula of “something going from one place to another”.

From what I remember, we were discussing Eve Online at the time. After the laser idea came up, I loved it so much that I implemented it, and it stuck ever since!

Kuba: A long, long time ago, I played a browser game called Lord of Ultima. It was a browser MMO city-building/grand strategy game that featured a very rudimentary building adjacency bonus system. I thought it had great potential, but it was very undeveloped. At the time, there were no other games that had something even remotely resembling this system, and it felt like a good thing to build upon.

Since the start of the development of Scorchlands, there have actually been a lot of releases of different games that began exploring this feature a bit more. Before We Leave or Islanders are great examples of such games and represent different approaches you can take.

Kuba: Long story short, playtesting a lot. Every month or so, I invited a friend who played similar games for playtesting for 1-2 hours. I mostly just sat down with a notepad, observed very carefully, and listened to everything the player said.

I spoke only if asked questions or if the player encountered a game-breaking bug. At the same time, I encouraged players to share their thoughts as they played. I also did not try to defend my ideas and let those be roasted by players freely.

Kuba: While I think most games with resource production have non-random yields, Scorchlands does things a bit differently when it comes to resource production. Essentially, everything revolves around supply and demand, and there is no resource storage.

With these two twists, the game can be played as fast or as slow as one wishes and really changes its nature to be a lot more relaxing and peaceful. It starts feeling slightly more like an ever-expanding puzzle that you design for yourself rather than a simulation of a city.

Kuba: Since Scorchlands entered early access, there has been a ton of feedback from players. I’ve read it all, and to be honest, about 90% of what people said made its way to the game. The remaining 10% were either in the wrong direction, too hard to implement, or had UX / other problems.

My favorite change that came from early access feedback was adding workforce to the game. Having more depth to the placement of each building as players could no longer spam stuff without a second thought until they got enough production, and the limited amount of buildings you can place in your colony has added much.

Kuba: When it comes to the most praised thing about the game, the removal of resource storage seems like the biggest breath of fresh air. Not having in mind current resource storage or having to wait for… anything really reduces a player’s mental load. It also lets you focus on having fun with other parts of the game.

Not being under constant time pressure and still having some in-depth resource management gameplay is liked very much too.

Kuba: Most of those happened throughout early access, with my favorite one being the week before the initial release when the game got featured on Steam’s popular upcoming page.

There was a lot of attention around the game. It felt quite surreal. At the time, I was working a day job just to keep being able to afford more 3D freelancing. I was able to leave the job and go full-time indie sometime after.

Kuba: I’ve been working on Scorchlands since the beginning of 2020. There were actually a couple of people who helped me a bit during the development and a couple of freelancers that I hired to make things I couldn’t do myself.

Making a game by yourself is both very satisfying and very stressful. This stems from being responsible for making literally everything in the game. There are no parts that you can skip over and just leave for someone else. This, though, can be quite satisfying once you look at the complete thing once you’re with a milestone.

Kuba: Yes. The full release will actually feature customizable difficulty when starting the campaign. The game will calculate % difficulty in relation to standard config. It goes anywhere from 12% up to 900%.

The highest difficulty is incredibly hard, and I expect that only a very small percentage of players who try it will be able to complete it.

Kuba: I’m not sure as of yet. That depends on the scale of success of Scorchlands shortly.

Kuba: It was easy to say which things worked or did not during playtesting. I mostly looked for different parts in which players were getting stuck too often or parts that took longer than expected.

With this flow of game balancing and design, the game went to being playable very early in development and just kept getting gradually smoother to play every month.

Kuba: At the time of the development of Scorchlands, almost all games with colonies and resources were simulating workers walking on streets, working in different buildings, and hauling stuff. I consciously tried to avoid this trend as it got very old for me; apart from that, I had a goal of making something as unique as I could and showing that similar games can still be made in new and original ways.

Kuba: Those advancements arrived when Scorchlands was already in early access, and it was a bit too late for that. In future projects, I will likely use those new tools for things like brainstorming stuff, writing code, gathering references, making localization, and maybe some game features that integrate AI language models.

Kuba: Nope! The previous questions were very interesting and touched on all of the subjects I would go over. Thanks for having me in this interview!