# TooManyOrigins, and how I design origins nowadays.

Okay, so I just wanted to make a little post about TooManyOrigins, and **why** it was reworked.
Simply put, I did not like the original content. In fact, I thought it was just similar to other poor quality contemporaries in terms of the actual game design quality presented.

Please do not use this as a guide for game design with origins, there is no correct way at game design, so just make things you're happy with, okay?
Origins Minus is a great example of why this shouldn't be used as a guide, it pretty much works off its own design philosophies, rather than following what you'd typically see within an origin.

The rework aimed to fix three main things.
- TooManyOrigins was meant to be a base mod style addon, yet it wasn't this. (We'll come back to this point later.)
- TooManyOrigins didn't really appeal to anybody, the addon was in a weird spot of not appealing to the masses due to the themes and mechanics being simpler than most of the mass appeal origins, and not appealing to those who enjoy good design because it just wasn't well designed.
- TooManyOrigins was way too hyperspecific in its thematics. Leave content up to player's interpretation, jesus christ.

Anyways, before we get into this, there's a question that you should ask yourself.

# What is an Origin?
What an origin is differs from person to person, players might think of them as races that they play with, however, this is something you should ask yourself as an origins dev at a certain point.

To me, an origin is a set of powers that come together to change up gameplay for a player. Of course with a thematic ribbon on top, how boring would the mod be if the thematics were all the same? Very much so.

At which point in time did I think about this question? What was my origin design like prior to asking such a question? Well, let's get into that.

# The Major Flaws of the Pre Rework TooManyOrigins. (IMO)
I'll briefly go into a few details as to why I dislike the OG TMO, we'd be here all day if I specified everything here.
- Overemphasis on thematics over mechanics..
- In TMO 0.x.x, some mechanics just kinda existed because they "made sense", if that makes sense. It felt like we were writing races rather than designing something that's meant to be played.
- Overexplanation on descriptions/lore
- Origin descriptions are best when they're kept vague imo, it's something that the base mod does so well, leave the imagination up to the player when it comes to how they perceive what their origin is.
- The worst offender of this was Swarm imo, where it specified exactly what it was. A swarm of bees. This was retconned in the rework so people can use this idea/parts of this idea if they want, but otherwise they don't have to.
- Downsides existed to "nerf the origin", rather than encourage you into using your upsides.
- Downsides are an art. Being like "oh, you are slow near cats!" is not a downside, it's purely an annoyance that doesn't encourage anything new within your gameplay.

These are all relatively rookie mistakes that I commonly see within quite a lot origins devs, it was never specific to me, so I can't beat myself up over it too much.

Anyways, I think it's obvious that my process has changed over time, so what is my new process?

# My Process
You can either start with a base thematic or a base mechanic.
For TooManyOrigins, I had to start with thematics, I had no choice in the matter as I was working with pre-existing content.

## The Goals
First of all, you should think to yourself "What am I trying to achieve with this Origin, what sort of gameplay am I going for?" A base origin example is Avian being a casual experience and an origin designed for people new to the mod.

Another example, inspired by my friend Omniv's Watchman origin; you chose to make a Warden themed origin, or just an origin with built-in blindness, what should this origin's gameplay achieve? For example, it could be a challenge origin that focuses on playing around this pretty major downside.

Like all parts, this part is ultimately up to you to decide.

## The Core Mechanic
Anyways, the first thing I often think about after the goals, what is/are the main mechanic(s) that tie the origin together? Whether it be something like Withered being able to get food from their kills, which ties into the Origin being about getting food in the Nether, or two things like Hare having Hot Hops and Waterskipping, where it's focus is maneuvering the environment, having a solid base is important for content.

Pictured below: Hiss-kin's core mechanic, the rocket jumping power, Buildup.

## The Necessary
Once you get the baseline things down, you should be looking to add powers that are necessary for your content to feel good. Such as Hiss-kin's Build-up requiring Aerial Stability to make sure players have control over where they go in the air, or Dragonborn requiring differing breath types to make sure that they have access to some things that are unique to projectiles.

Pictured below: Hiss-kin's Aerial Stability, which lessens the player's downward velocity.

## Encouraging Powers
After this, find upsides/downsides that encourage your main gameplay loop. An example of this is that Dragonborn was designed around not being able to use projectile based items to encourage utilising your own built-in projectiles.

Pictured below: Hiss-kin's slower movement speed, to encourage using your rocket jump mobility option.

## Finishing Touches
Then there's finishing touches. If you think your origin is missing something, you can feel free to include a flavour power such as Hiss-kin's Ailurophobia, or Swarm's Beekeeper.

Make sure to be careful of bloating your origin with unnecessary powers when making one. I feel I'm a lot more receptive to power bloat than other devs are, due to how I perceive origins.

*pictured below: Hiss-kin's Ailurophobia, a flavour power that makes it so you shake near cats, ocelots, and Feline players.'*

# In Practice
I'll be going over my design process for exactly one origin. That origin being Swarm.

Swarm's **goals** were centered around the idea of Mumbo Jumbo's Hermitcraft Season 8 playthrough, the idea of not killing anything. Except this alone would be too punishing for most players, there's players out there that think that Feline and Merling are too extreme, this would be taking it to another level.

I also wanted to keep a chill experience, if there's anything that the original origin got right, it was that the experience was pretty chill and suited for staying around your base, tending to your crops.

The **core mechanic** of the Swarm rework was Stinging Pains, which is a power which exhausts you upon harming entities considered hostile by the game. Players might think "hey, this isn't impactful enough!!! >:(", but to that, I didn't want to make it the most impactful origin. I explicitly wanted a medium impact out of this origin, and giving the origin anything punishing would remove the chill aspect of the experience.

The **necessary powers** are Hover and Unity. This origin needed a mobility tool to get around if the player is to avoid mobs, and Unity is necessary for giving the player extra stakes when it comes to not keeping yourself well fed.

The **encouraging powers** are Pollination and Calming Aura, these powers allow you to create food more easily, to make sure the core mechanic wasn't too punishing, as well as actually allowing you to harm mobs if the moment calls for it without feeling too bad. On top of this, you sometimes might need mob drops, so the game shouldn't prevent you from doing exactly that.

The **finishing touch** was Beekeeper, which was a flavour power that allows you to harvest from bees without angering them.

All together, this creates the Swarm origin. It's honestly my least favourite out of the bunch, but that's mostly because I like them all a lot.

Swarm's gameplay is one of the best when it comes to being linked to its thematics, in that you're suited to staying at home and tending to areas around the home, although, mob drops are a little harder to come by as this origin, due to your exhaustion upon attacking hostiles, and there's not really a good substitute for that, but you just can't design around every single thing.

You have what your powers do, cool. Now how do you convey them to a player? There's of course visual/audio feedback and all that, but let's get to the most basic form of telling a player what their origin does.

# Description Writing

Description writing is the next phase of Origin development, such as what your origin's impact is, and how you explain your powers to the player on the origin selection screen.

Let's start with Impact, as that's the first thing that a player will usually read.
I try to match the base mod's defintions of impact. As I feel it knows how to gauge impact quite well. Of course, we don't know how Apace gauged impact, so we're left to do guesswork based on the other origins in each impact.
The main rules I follow are as follows:
- No Impact (0) is reserved for Human, anything with a power is automatically Low Impact by default.
- Low Impacts are origins where you can play the game relatively normally without a major downside getting in the way.
- Medium Impacts are origins where you can still play the game relatively normally, but you have a major downside in the way. Such as being damaged by water, or attacking hostile mobs draining your hunger.
- High Impacts are origins where you are basically forced to interact with new gameplay loops, such as spawning in the Nether, or only being able to breathe underwater.

For example, you could debate that Dragonborn is a medium impact because it can't use projectile based weapons, but projectile based weapons just aren't as mandatory as something like touching water, or branch mining. I usually play the game without bows, with Tridents being the only projectile based item I touch.

Anyways, a good description:
- Tells the player what the power does in clear and conscise terms.
- Has a little bit of flavour linking it to the thematics. Usually this is done by the power name, but in shorter descriptions, you are able to include a bit of flavour text alongside the how the power works.

Let's look at a bad and good example of basically the exact same power.

### OG Hare
To deconstruct this down:
- There are complicated terms that don't explain much that exist in this description. Such as "momentum".
- 'while in the air' is the most literal way I could've told the player how it works.
- The part about 'You keep built up momentum momentarily while on the ground.' is bloat and is totally unnecessary to tell a player, they'll figure it out by actually playing the origin. This is probably the biggest crime of this description.`
- The active should've probably been a badge, although this was written before badges existed, so there was really no better option.

### Rework Hare
- This power description is clear, and conscise. It tells a player exactly what the origin does but doesn't overstimulate them with information.
- This power leaves room for a player to infer what it does. Losing momentum if you stop sprinting just makes sense, you don't need to specify it in the description.
- While the "leap forward" isn't accurate to actual ingame mechanics, it adds to the flavour of the origin, so I find it to be excusable.

There's also the art of knowing what to hide and show to players, not everything needs to be told to players. For example, specific stats are something that I avoid telling to players, as being told that something deals 3 damage is less inferrable to the average person than just saying it deals a small amount of damage.
I think that the above is something that not a lot of origin devs like to follow, mainly because they feel the need to know everything about their origin, but I feel it goes a long way to let players just understand their origin through actually playing it, rather than forcing them to read an entire wikipedia page to understand it.

You should also keep the origin screen's size in mind, it can be rather small for a player, and scrolling through origins is not always the easiest process, so condensing information into a compact, easy to read form is important.

Speaking of playing the origin, you'll have to do this as a developer. Whether you like Minecraft or not, that doesn't matter, I'm sure you'd be motivated to playtest parts of your origins.

# Playtesting the Origin
You may think that playtesting can only happen once an origin is entirely planned, but I think that it's valuable to playtest when something feels missing too. Hiss-kin's Aerial Stability was a late addition because I realised during playtesting that you just didn't have enough air control as the origin.

Playtesting also doesn't mean "speedrun to beat the ender dragon", I've heard this take before, and I feel that more valuable playtesting feedback comes with taking your time and just playing normally.

It's as simple as testing your mechanics, does the cooldown feel too long? Is movement on your mobility option too sluggish? That's something that the next part will resolve.

# Balancing
If there's one thing I very often see within newbies to game design, especially in the Origins scene, it's that balance is the most important part of game design, either due to not knowing better terms, or due to a misunderstanding.

Balance is as important as you make it out to be, poor balance can absolutely take away from the experience, but it's not something that you go into development seeking out. It's moreso something that you do after, think of balancing as tweaking what you already have, rather than making entirely new mechanics.

How much you should balance depends on your setting, obviously PvP oriented servers may value balance more than a PvE oriented one, just know your audience before making balance changes, and of course, playtest your balance changes to make sure they don't ruin the origin in question.

# Failing Your Original Goals
TooManyOrigins, ultimately, failed its original goals. From the beginning, being like "oh I want to make a base style origins addon", was not the best goal for somebody who felt as though there could be differences to the OG mod's design. On top of this, everybody's game design is vastly different. One thing that a person strongly dislikes might be exactly what another person loves.

Apace's Feline design came about because he preferred the idea of being forced to explore caves, instead of branch mining, which is not an opinion that a lot of people have when it comes to the game. I probably would've designed something called Feline entirely differently, as I don't feel this problem as strongly as Apace does, there's also that Apace named the origin after creating its mechanics, something that I wouldn't have done if I knew I was making an origin named Feline.

You can always have new goals in mind if your original ones have failed, so keep that in mind. You don't have to rework just because one goal failed, and that's exactly what I did, because I was happy with the quality of the origins, which imo matters more than if the origins feel exactly like Apace's original ones.

# Closing Notes
Hopefully this gives some insight as to what TooManyOrigins 1.0.0 was about, please do try out the mod if you think it's of interest to you. [You can download the addon on Modrinth here!](https://modrinth.com/mod/toomanyorigins)

I'd also like to thank Omniv, and all of my other friends for discussing the mod with me at length, or even contributing directly to the mod, making sure that certain things are as good as they can be. I'd also like to thank anybody who has played my mods, having not just my friends share their thoughts on them hugely helps me figure out what I can do to improve any aspects of my mods.

If you wish to contact me about anything I've written here, please join the [Pug's Modzone Discord](https://discord.gg/UBfEjsANNz).