How do you make crafting fun?

Greetings, fellow game creators!

For a long time now, I've wondered what would be the best way to make crafting fun. Almost none of the games I've played had crafting in them, so I don't have a lot of experience points in this. (Still working toward a level-up.) But I imagine some of you do...

So what do you think makes for fun crafting? Is it just gathering some resources and clicking on a button to instantly create an item? Or would it be better if crafting was a mini-game? (For example, if you were making a potion, you would have to stir it at a certain speed to create it.) And if crafting would be more fun as a mini-game, what would be some possible gameplay mechanics?

 

It will take you three hours to go play some games with crafting in them and make your own judgement. Off the top of my head I would suggest Skyrim and Jack Smith. Both are successful games in their respective areas that have two different crafting systems. I'm sure other users will point you to more.

But really, trying to make a mechanic a core part of your game without seeing what the market is already doing on that mechanic? Its a recipe for disaster.

 

Oh, I would definitely study other games if I could. Indeed, I've been trying to find a good crafting game for the iPad, but so far my search hasn't turned up much.

As for games I could get from the Internet, well, I tend to be rather nervous about those, since, in my experience, they often come bundled with viruses and other nasty stuff. As for Skyrim, that IS a game I would play, if it weren't for the fact it was M-rated and wouldn't work on my computer.

I have to admit, you rather hurt my feelings. I was just hoping to get a little guidance, after all.

 

Sorry, not trying to be insulting. But the best advice I can give you is to see what makes crafting in other games fun. I'm personally not that attached to the mechanic, I can take it or leave it.

Unless crafting is the major mechanic of your game, I would suggest a way to allow players to avoid it altogether. In many RPGs you can craft awesome weapons. Or you can just buy an equivalent weapon from a NPC.

In general the biggest draw card for crafting is customisation. I can build a set of gear that fits my play style exactly, rather then relying on what the game designer has provided.

 

Look at how minecraft did it. If its good enough for minecraft

 

A game I particularly enjoy the crafting in is Don't Starve. Crafting, along with survival and exploration are pretty much the central mechanics of the game. It very much has an exploration based... "what if I combine this with this?" sort of feel. A similar game for IOS is Doodle God. The entire game there is "crafting" in that it's combining different elements to make more complex composite elements.

The point being that the point of crafting isn't just... "now I have gear that I could have bought ... just cheaper."

It's "what if I mix those poison berries, with my stone arrowheads, and sticks... ooh now I have a paralysis arrow"

 

Thanks for the replies! I've heard about Minecraft of course (who hasn't), but I didn't know it had an in-deph item crafting system. I thought the crafting referred to changing the geometry of the world.

And no hard feelings, Kiwasi. I can understand where you were coming from. Thankfully, now I have something I can study!

Thanks again for the suggestions. I'm off to get that level-up for crafting.

 

YouTube is a good place to go if you don't have any way to run the game you want to analyze. Chances are someone made a video showing off the crafting. Personally though I think its crafting system is a bit dull. Collect ingredients, select the recipe, hit a button. You don't even have to learn a recipe as your character will automatically know them all.

 

A Spore style crafting system would be really innovative, so you have your parts to the side and you just drag them into each other to make something

 

1. You come up with the most basic system possible.
2. Develop it in Unity
3. Play test.
4. If it is fun and you see no immediate easy way to improve it further you are done.
5. Add something or otherwise redesign.
6. Go to step 2.

People use different terminology to describe this process. Some simply call it prototyping. Others call it "finding the fun". I call it experimental design or developmental design.

It doesn't matter really what you want to label it, the process is the best way to answer your question in my opinion.

 

According to a series of tweets by long time RPG developer Jeff Vogel, the best crafting system is no crafting system.

 

I agree with all of those tweets.

 

Won't really disagree with that, although I'll bet most of that opinion comes from playing games that just duct taped a crafting system on. Wayward is a decent example where it fits (think MacGyver meets Castaway). The system itself is nothing special, but it makes sense when you're shaving tree bark to make tinder to get a fire going.

Mechanically though, most crafting systems don't have any depth to them. There is no mastery to exercise, just a checklist of items to collect that have no use outside of crafting. If there is anything to master, then it's often because of how obscure and cryptic it is (mostly from older games).

 

Ah, crafting minigames. Something many of us consider at some point. If the user is going to spend time on such a mechanic, make it worth it for the user. Have better score for the minigame equate to better crafting outcomes.

It's one thing to say that crafting is overdone and usually poortly done. It's another thing to make a huge error in definitions by stating the best example of something is the absence of that something. How does a crafting system exist as no crafting system? That logic is terrible.

I know it's a variant of an expression that goes along the lines of "the best [negative thing] is no [negative thing]", but even that is just logically wrong. The absence of something is not a quantity of that something! Gah!

 

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but this a question I've had for a long time. How do you make crafting fun? I've never grown tired of the Skyrim lock picking mini game. It's challenging and gets easier as your character levels. It's a perfect mini game.

I'd love it if there was something equivalent for crafting, if there was some level of player skill and focus required (as there would be for crafting in real life). Collecting ingredients is fun, but sitting there and mindlessly hitting buttons and watching a crafting skill go up is very boring.

Here's an example of a cooking crafting mini game in Fable:

And one for blacksmithing too, although admittedly I have no idea what is going on :/

The crafting in Bannerlord looks fun, and Fallout 4 was OK because of the amount of customization you can do. In both cases there was no mini-game, but the player could be creative and give some thought to his or her creations. Generally, whether we are dealing with combat, crafting, dialogue, or leveling, if thought is excluded, the game will become boring for some people. Therefore, it may be that you don't need a mini game to make crafting enjoyable. You just need to have an element of creativity and strategy in the crafting process, as other people in this thread have also concluded.

However, I think it would be awesome if there was a way to marry both creativity and a mini-game. I just don't want to make blacksmithing into a version of Guitar Hero, as can be seen in the above link. Can anyone think of any examples of fun crafting mini games? Or is the whole exercise futile?

 

Crafting isn't fun. Its the punishment that must be borne to enable the the fun bits to seem more fun than they really are.

 

I just finished my second play through of Factorio. The game has only crafting*. Its worth playing if you are interested in seeing ways to make crafting in and of its own fun.

One thing that made the game so awesome was the ability to automate crafting tasks. At the beginning of the game you are using a pick axe to hack iorn ore out of the ground, and manually placing it in a smelter. By the end of the game you have automated miners loading multi carriage trains with ore. And flying robots that unload the train into electric smelters.

The early game is about getting the right amounts of resources to craft what you want. But the late game switches to managing the flow of resources through an automated crafting system.

*That's a lie, the game also has an tiny military component. This military component simply gives the player a series of intermediate goals to drive the crafting.

 

I'm starting to think that you may be right. Customising weapons and armor is fun for me, but there's no reason why the player character should be doing that. By crafting, the character can save money, maybe make a profit by selling crafted goods, but gold becomes pretty redundant in most (all) RPGs I've played anyway. Paying a craftsman to make items for us makes more sense.

I've also found player crafting a bit immersion breaking. If the character gets good at haggling, lock picking, fighting, archery, hunting etc. that all makes sense. The player spends a lot of time in game doing those things. No one, no matter how much they like crafting, would spend the same amount of time clicking buttons in a crafting GUI. For that reason, crafting development never really seemed believable to me.

I thought one solution would be to make a fun mini game, but that would quickly become repetitive. One of the comments in the cooking mini game I linked above was 'that's not a mini game, that's job' and I think he was absolutely right.

 

The process of crafting doesn't need to be fun. The biggest value of it is that it creates an additional layer of complexity to the player's ability to problem solve. Crafting is fundamentally about problem solving, where you assess the situation and get creative.

 

Is it for a touch/phone game? You could try some "new" thing like making them do the refinement steps in some kind of sequenced minigames:

-To make a sword they have to cast a certain amount of metal into a crease (gyro input)
-after that, they have to hammer the blade a bit by shaking phone (acc. sensor) or tapping on certain locations of the sword without overdoing one spot too much
-then they have to sand the Blade by rubbing it along its blade

These steps all need some kind of measurement of success, e.g. if you sand too much on the same spot, the quality of the blade will decline (with a adequate margin for error before the quality declines of course)

Similar things for plate armor, for leather armor you could do the some cutout game by drawing an outline onto a sheet of leather. Chemicals have to be poured onto the leather in the right dose. Arrows need to be cut out by finding the straightest segments of a twig. The possibilities to distract the player from what your game is really about are nearly endless.

But honestly, i don't really care much for crafting and always hated it in every game i ever played. For me it was always just an annoying distraction from what the game was really about (Slashing and Shooting games for the most part). The only upside i can appreciate is that you have a lot more attachment to a thing that you crafted yourself, especially if you hated the crafting.

 

Crafting is risky business.
a good implementation I've seen recently comes from a game called FireFall. they call it tinkering. it's just as simple as merging two low level items to make a higher level item. so that you aren't just throwing away items once you out level them.
Then there is the conventional crafting where you have to search for the required materials to make your thing. keep in mind the end result is how do I get this thing. it could be as simple as a loot drop. no one ever says "I can't wait to crafts something, I don't even care what it is." so if you make them go through something painful to get the thing then you are asking for trouble. check out the latest version of 7Days to Die. they've simplified it pretty well. the more simple it is to get the materials, click a button then end up with the thing. the more enjoyable it will be. and the thing has to be equal to the effort it takes to get the materials.

I think most people have been in the situation of a survival game where you are in a fight and BAM! your sword breaks. how do you want the player to react to this experience?
- quickly click a button and make a new sword from material they have in their inventory.
- realize they didn't bring a spare sword and have to go all the way back to a crafting area to make a new one?
- or because of inventory regulations you can never bring a spare sword or keep materials on hand so you are just screwed.
* the idea of being excited to get to craft something rarely comes to mind.
If you can make crafting the core of the game. who ever crafts the most wins. Then maybe you got something good....

I just had a thought. I've been playing the Mobile game Slitherio. and its mega addicting. its based on the old Snake game. you could say the core is to go out searching for materials to 'make' yourself bigger. the bigger you are the more you are winning. so some sort of indirect crafting scenario like that might work.

 

Brilliant! Thanks for sharing!

 

Crafting can fulfill a variety of purposes- but I think it comes at a high cost in terms of content and time you have to crank out in order to flesh it out, balance it, put enough items in boxes, tweak item drop rates ect.

It occurs to me that the biggest thing about crafting is that it hands the player a bunch of raw materials that can be combined in different ways, which means the player has to prioritize what is the best use of his material. (ie. I can make dragon scale armor, or I can make dragon scale soup, but I can only make one, so which one is more important to have?)

This is more flexible than other methods and gives the player control over what he wants to be able to do first. For instance, dragon scale armor will give me access to the volcano temple, but dragon scale soup can be exchanged for the ability to shoot fire from my eyeballs.

(Contrast that with traditional "Exp" progression- Now that I've reached level 10/earned 1000 experience points, I can unlock the eyeball fire skill, and/or by defeating the dragon, I have obtained dragon scale armor. both decisions are separate and don't require weighing one against the other. It's easy to imagine different uses for linking items together like this.)

Another thing crafting can do is theming- Monster Hunter does this pretty well, in that in order to make a sabertooth anything, I have to go out and kill me some sabertoothed things. In the visual appearance of the item, I can see the sabertooth itself, as a testimony and reminder of the battle I had with the Sabertoothed toad of the fire swamp.
A different example of theming might be that if I want to collect some diamonds, I have to go to a cave or mine or other place where diamonds might naturally be found.

Crafting can also fit into a more discovery/exploration oriented role- Minecraft is a good example of this, with it's lack of directions, the player must experiment with different combinations of items both in terms of kind of crafting item used, and what spatial configuration they are placed in. This doesn't mean as much in the age of google, but it's more of a nod to back in the day when all you would have was to compare notes with your friends to try and figure out how to craft the biggest best sword in the game. Still, it's a nice feature for people who like that feeling of discovery when they find something new to craft.

This brand of crafting is much less about finding enough resources to craft what you want, than figuring out the puzzle of what gets you what. If the player just figured out how to make bombs, his reward for solving the puzzle should be to go blow up all sorts of stuff for a while- not go on a really long tedious treasure hunt for more bomb making material.

Which brings me to the pitfalls of crafting- mainly, the mind numbing tedium of finding enough green mold to make the next mission critical item so that I can keep playing the game. Drop rates kind of suck in my opinion, because if I know the thing I need, and I'm in the right spot to get it, I've figured out the solution to my problem and am owed the reward. Doing the same thing over and over until the RNG gods favor me multiple times isn't really my idea of fun, and it kills whatever pacing might have been going on previously. If crafting is the more flexible progression option, it doesn't really make sense to limit that flexibility to just one drop every half billion years. This can be got around somewhat with "luck-boosting" items that make rare drops easier to come by, but it still doesn't leverage the flexibility of a crafting system.

Crafting is a logic driven process that should take thought and therefore time, but there is absolutely no reason why I should have to spend ten minutes crafting the same healing potion repeatedly. A shortcut process for common consumables is almost necessary to prevent crafting turning into a boring menu slog. That, or remove them from the equation entirely by not making them craftable. Maybe the player can just eat green flowers to replenish health instead of having to combine green flowers with blue slime and red bull 1000 times in a playthrough. No need to require crafting for more powerful versions of consumables either- just make a passive item available that scales the benefit that he gets from green flowers at the appropriate point in the game.

The other common downfall is inefficient use of content- commonly lots of the crafting content just goes obsolete and is forgotten by the end of the game. If I get to the final boss and I have 100 butterfly wings that I kept because I thought I might need them someday, that was a lot of time wasted collecting insect wings that I could have spent doing something more fun. Since a developer's time is very precious, it just seems like a waste to make a craftable item that ceases to be useful after a short time or is possibly never useful. If I have to craft something just to find it isn't useful to me, that's a letdown where a reward should have been- either I need to know what I'm crafting before I spend the resources, or every craftable item needs to be useful in some way. It would be nice to always have a fallback that the player can always use crafting items for- that way, if I find myself with a surplus of butterfly wings it doesn't become a "What am I doing with my life?" moment, because I can always turn them to something useful. a crafting system being designed for more flexibility, this seems like a natural thing to have.

Lastly crafting seems to have a bad relationship with traditional currency in games. If I can buy crafting items with gold for instance, then why can't I just buy the items they craft outright? What function does gold have if not to buy items? Couldn't any problem gold solves be solved equally by the crafting system? While it might make sense for a local business to not accept mammoth fur as payment, it can leave both systems a bit hobbled as neither is used to its full potential.

 

Personally, I find crafting fun when it's not a one-step process. For example, say you want to add a high-end item that you don't want to be easy to acquire; you can make it a much more fun process than "well you need like 75 obsidian bars." Make it more like: "you need to charge the 15 bars with the essence of ----- and fuse it with a ----- and then attach -----." It goes from being some menial, annoying task to something the player wants to do, not needs to. Personally, old WoW did this I believe and it made it so much more fun than how other games do crafting. Crafting should be a mechanic, not a feature.

 

Crafting is fun when it's in the whole gameplay loop, and by that I mean it basically create a management game.

Crafting is boring when it's just a gating mechanics that lock good item behind a grind.

Minecraft is still the best crafting game for a reason, crafting IS the progression system. First resources are tiered you have free access to low tier resources (wood) to access higher tier you need to craft items (stone) which also open new crafting possibility.

As you climb up the tier system, resources became rarer and you start having to decide how to spend your resource (what to craft) which decide what you have access to. Most item to gather resources are limited in use with a withering system, so you start to hoard rare resources and have more difficult decision to make about what to craft.

Resources are distributed unevenly in space, so it force you to explore and take risk to collect them, some of them being only obtainable by defeating some enemy or completing challenge, which mean the crafting system naturally lead you and give meaning to other object in the world, it also does not prescribe a direction nor an order, giving a feeling a freedom and allowing the player to plan ahead its objective but also improvise on the fly.

The darkness spawning monster make night and day meaningful and give an extra incentive to craft as the player need protection, closing the loop where enemy drive crafting, crafting drive fighting. Everything feed and reinforce each others.

Now minecraft is rather generous, but other game keep the stake high so meaning don't diffuse when player has too much resources (see terraria).

If you smart you can ties an event system that trigger interesting stakes as the player progress. For example gold attract thief, which mean you need to pay guard, guard revolt when the pay is too low. The king want you to pay a tax. People start offering job, travelling salesman start visiting you. You can open a bank. You start paying peasant to dig gold for you, you amass popularity. A town start developping around you, you fortify the town to deter bandit, you raise an army to defend against the increase of raider coming. The king feel threathen and send an army to seize you, you send back a diplomat, you propose to marry his son, making an allience, the king dies, you have become king. That's just with gold, you can tie anything to any resources or stat.

And presto! interactive story at no cost!