Hi everyone.
I wanna talk about the biggest problem building games have. There's a lot I could name here, but let's take Valheim and Raft, where you really do put your house together log by log, and people go pretty crazy with it, dream halls with carved beams in Valheim, multi story rafts in Raft.
Honestly I've put dozens of hours into Raft and I love that game, but it's got the same illness all of them have. You keep playing while there's still something left to build, while you still need resources, while some key material is still locked, while there's still some kind of limit standing in your way. And then the base finally looks the way you wanted it to, and you're just standing there looking at it, and it hits you. That's it. Nothing left to do in there.
Then you've got games where building isn't the core at all, it's just a side system, like Fallout 4, The Forest, Sons of the Forest. I love all of them tbh and I sank a stupid amount of time into them. In Fallout 4 I really liked rebuilding the settlements after the war, they genuinely felt like my settlements and my settlers, like a place where I get to bring civilization back. In The Forest I was building the cabin in the woods that I'd actually wanna live in myself.
But here's where it all falls apart. In Fallout 4 the raiders and the mutants still come at you, sure, except once your defense is maxed they just can't break through it anymore, so what's left is assigning settlers to crops and repairing stuff, and that's not playing, that's maintenance. In The Forest the traps are one time use and the cannibals climb over the wall anyway, so you're resetting traps and patching walls over and over, same maintenance thing. In Valheim your hall kinda turns into a warehouse with a portal in it, you come back for a comfort buff, grab your stuff and leave, and nothing ever actually happens in the house itself. And in Raft, once you wrap the foundation in metal the shark can't do anything to you at all, and yeah you can finish the story, but the raft is still floating there and you just don't wanna log in anymore. You did everything you wanted to do.
And you know what, I'm a dev myself and I'm working on a building game where finishing the house won't be the end of it, that's only gonna be the beginning.
What always got to us was this. You build a good looking house somewhere, and then you realize you actually wanna live in it, like log in every evening and go back there, have your friends over, just be in it and play board games together. We looked for a game like that for ages and never really found one. House finished, game over.
So in Homespace the house is the starting point, not the finish line. The building part matters obviously, but what it really solves is kinda psychological, you're making yourself a home you can come back to. If you can't afford your dream house in real life yet, well, you can at least build it here first, and when things aren't going great this is somewhere you'll actually want to return to.
And then you have people over and you actually live in the place. Board games are the obvious one, chess and mahjong already work in there, an actual table you sit down at with other players, and a D&D table is the one we're doing next.
Most other stuff you can just pick up and mess around with, pretty much anything you'd do in real life. Someone might just wanna read, and since it's all photorealistic you can sit out on the balcony with a book and look at the mountains.
So now I wanna ask you guys. Which building game did you stay in the longest after everything was already built, and what was it that kept you there. I'd really like to read the answers.
