Prev
Next
Immediately after coming home from EGX, I began work on my Ryukyu game mod for Hearts of Iron 4. What I found exciting about the prospect of working on HOI4 is working with the “focus tree” system. This system is kind of like a research tree, but is intended to simulate the internal politics of a nation. What’s exciting about this is that “focus trees” branch out in various directions and give the player a lot of different options for how they want to manage their nation, and it allows me as a designer to guide the player’s experience and the narrative flow of the game, while still making the player feel as though their experience is their own.
As my mod was “alternative-history”, I needed to do a little background research into the island of Okinawa and see what I could draw from real history to create this alternate world. I dug up key historical figures from the Okinawa Independence Movement like Kamejiro Senaga, as well as the historical motivations for that movement. Beyond that it was all fiction.
I hadn’t made a Hearts of Iron mod before, so I thought it best to start by planning out what I wanted the player experience to be; looking at the endgame first and then figuring out how to get there. Essentially, my mod was taking an infamously difficult challenge from the game “Europa Universalis” and translating it into Hearts of Iron’s mechanics, so naturally it had to be equally as difficult. I used the focus tree system to allow players to choose paths of varying difficulty, to still make this a challenge while leaving it open for more inexperienced players to enjoy as well. I used the program “draw.io” to make a rough draft of my focus tree.
I did three rounds of playtesting before releasing the mod; one where I completed several playthroughs of each of the paths I’d chosen just to make sure everything was working as intended, then I handed it over to a fellow modder to get his thoughts, and finally I handed it off to some friends with no modding experience to just get that raw honest opinion from someone with no behind-the-scenes knowledge. Finally, the mod was released and it was quite a surprising success. Within two days, the mod was featured on the front page of the Steam Workshop.
I continued to work on it based on consumer feedback, and the final version is something I’m quite proud of. The mod was featured by the Hearts of Iron developers on their official FaceBook and Twitter pages where they recommended it for users to check out. I was made aware of this by popular Hearts of Iron Influencer “Alex the Rambler” who later played the mod on a Livestream. At its height, my mod reached 3rd on the top subscribed mods of October 2018.
