Waterfall

Waterfall is a game about building a waterfall together, then falling down repeatedly and trying to score the best gemstones as you go.

It’s exactly the “simple gameplay” (for kids and families) with “extremely high interaction and variation” I’m looking for in most of my game ideas.

For the longest time, the working title for this project was “Decision Trees: The Game”. Because, at its core, that’s what is. The waterfall is a pyramid with options, and when you fall down, you repeatedly have to choose: “do I want to go LEFT or RIGHT?”

This is very intuitive and easy to setup and explain. It also means that you’re literally shaping what you can do on your turn every single turn. Every move matters, every tile placed provides one more possible path another player could take advantage of, and near the end of the game you get these really powerful paths that might suddenly hand the victory to someone else.

What’s special?

It’s quite common that, after making a game, I realize much better ways of making the game. That’s simply the result of doing it and finishing the idea. You now see the flaws and the strengths, and your brain realizes how to do it much better next time.

Usually, though, “next time” means incorporating the lessons learned in an entirely different game a year from now.

This time, I literally saw the better version after a day of working on Waterfall. I bit the bullet and completely re-did the idea the next day to get a simpler and more streamlined version of the idea.

That’s the “base game” you will find everywhere and that’s promoted by me. The original version is still available, but I recontextualized it as a “spin-off” that’s slightly harder (and has more text to read).

Despite lacking motivation at the moment—who wants to redo what they did just 15 hours ago?—I am very glad I instantly switched to the new plan. It shows why iteration is the key to creating anything. The final Waterfall game is very different from the original idea, and very much better. (And actually quite easy to make, because I could re-use a lot of code and assets I’d created for the original idea.)

• It has no text, only icons.
• The tiles are less busy in general.
• The water paths are not dynamically generated (that is, in Waterfall, they’re the same on every tile). This meant I could make them prettier as I drew them by hand once, and the board is easier to read at a glance.
• It has simpler rules, while actually allowing more options and strategy.

All I “wasted” to get there was a single day working on the “first try” of the game idea ;)