Insight Into: Cargo Protection

Hey Couriers!

Today, we’d like to give you a deeper look at our latest feature update Cargo Protection! Since this is one of the features you’ve requested most often, we and our Game Design Director, Steve Bristow, wanted to tell you more about the development process behind it.

If you haven’t seen our latest video about Cargo Protection yet, take a moment to check it out here

Transporting cargo is the most fundamental objective that the player has in The Legend of Khiimori. All the other systems and mechanics grow from the fulfilment of this fantasy. So, the challenge of doing this needs to be varied and to require mastery of landscape, horse control and care, route planning, resource preparation and all the other things that The Legend of Khiimori offers.

To develop that challenge and to bring the landscape more directly into the player’s decision-making, we added vulnerabilities to the cargo - things like sensitivity to water, heat or cold or qualities like perishability or a scent that entices wild animals. They’re all designed to add challenge to the core of the game and to make each ride different from the last.

Still, because of the system-driven approach we take to our design, you’d sometimes get challenges that were too hard or that made the delivery not ‘cost-effective’ for the player - where the challenge outweighed the reward and discouraged players from taking them on. We did quite a lot of work to fix the worst offenders (I’m looking at you, Chicheg) but, during this time, we got feedback from players asking for ways to mitigate or offset some specific cargo vulnerabilities.

At first this seemed to propose something that would reduce gameplay; allowing the player to avoid the challenges that we’d carefully implemented and sidestepping the full range and depth of the interplay of systems and planning that’s where the game really comes alive.

But… it was also clear that some of the challenge was just unfair. The most obvious example being rain - we, and more importantly, the players, don’t know when it’s going to rain so it’s not something you can plan around at the start of a journey. If you’re carrying water-sensitive cargo, there isn’t much you can do to avoid cargo quality damage if a storm rolls in. This doesn’t meet the goals of the design; the vulnerability gameplay is about overcoming challenges, not just having to accept a loss.

So we started to explore the idea of items that could protect your cargo against the elements. The design goals were:

1. Leverage existing systems from the game as much as possible.

2. Make it clear and easy to understand, to use and to manage.

3. Maximise gameplay -we’re offering a mitigation for one type of gameplay, how can we do that and create a new decision?

It was clearly going to be a thing you could make and buy with resources and money so that covered point 1.

We took the obvious route first – single-use items you can craft like an oilskin wrapper that you ‘Use’ on a cargo to protect it from an environmental effect. This was clear and simple enough to understand but didn’t return much gameplay beyond crafting and gathering. You simply made a thing to remove a problem. Okay, but not great. What if you kept the oilskin and could use it on more than one cargo item? What if we added durability so they lasted for a certain amount of time or uses?

None of these ideas were really inspiring us and they were throwing up increasingly sticky UI problems to solve.

Often, when trying to zero in on a design solution, I do something I call ‘bracketing’ - if a design fails for a specific reason, go to an extreme to fix that specific problem.

Version 2 (maybe it was Version 15 by now), then, focussed on the gameplay of protecting cargo within the saddlebag space. We would craft items that protected one square of inventory space. You’d make many of them and create a patchwork of protective areas in the saddlebags which you could ‘overwrite’ with new protection items to modify the patchwork according to your needs.

This definitely leant heavily on the crafting process and offered interesting puzzle-like qualities for the game. I liked the way it made balancing your cargo more complex as you moved cargo around to gain the benefit of protection and were then forced to rebalance other things.

This also had some tricky UI problems to solve but, it very clearly failed on point 2 - it wasn’t easy to communicate or use.

But, the bracketing worked in the sense that it led us towards the solution in the middle.

So, we implemented the items as a craftable thing that applies to the whole saddlebag when placed in a reserved slot. Protection as a saddlebag effect rather than a cargo-specific modifier gave us balance and saddlebag management gameplay. The ability to overwrite the protection with a new protection item retained our crafting gameplay.

A fleece lining for a saddlebag was easier to visualise than some peculiar patchwork. Replacing the lining according to need made some sense and there was a gameplay virtue in only being able to protect against two environmental types: Often, when carrying more than two cargos, you’d have one or more that you couldn’t protect - this meant the core gameplay wouldn’t be removed by the protection items but would really apply mainly to the more ambitious and complex deliveries. You could protect cargo against rain and cold but not also against heat and perishing. This preserves the interesting decisions at the heart of the courier gameplay but offers an easier and more manageable solution for simpler journeys.

This kind of work in a design team happens in documentation, diagrams, brainstorming meetings, some html or figma prototyping but almost entirely in the imaginations of the designers; in the simulated version of the game we play in our heads all day… and all night. Seeing it take shape and come to life is exciting but nerve-wracking because, as hard as you try, you’re never 100% sure how it’ll play and how the audience will respond but this feature came directly from your feedback! It gave us a fun design problem to solve and I like the way it turned out so, thank you and I hope you like it too!

Let us know what do you think about Cargo Protection and which content and feature you’re looking forward to in the future. And as always: Please keep sending us reports, either on Steam in our Discussion Threads, in Discord in the dedicated channels, or in game with the F1 Bug Report tool, every report helps us, and we really do appreciate them!

Be Amazing Everyone!