Hard to Port

First and foremost is understanding that Hard to Port has two contrasting demographics it must appeal to simultaneously: fans of comfy games, and hardcore competitive players. The former category wants a non-stressful, calming experience, and likely doesn't want to make other players feel bad. For them, Hard to Port may be an entry point into competition as fun, or even to games (or board games) in general. They are a new, largely untapped audience. Competitive players, on the other hand, love optimizing their strategy and skills, and will leverage every mechanic in order to win. They will usually choose the optimal play over being nice, having no qualms about (and much experience with) hindering or even betraying their opponents.

Most notably, this means the game has to be able to redefine competition as separate from stress and hindering mechanics, focusing on developing oneself faster or more effectively than one's opponents, rather than on more actively and directly combating them. This makes the competitive more palatable to a comfy audience while maintaining opportunity for strategy and coming out on top for competitive players. To support this effect, the game makes being nice to other players for as long as possible an optimal strategy, helping to further redefine gameplay loops that typically characterize competition. Instead of making enemies, Hard to Port incentivizes you to make friends for mutually beneficial, cooperative play (more details on this in Player Interaction).

A big part of appealing to both these audiences is also emphasizing satisfaction:

For both comfy and competitive games, satisfaction is particularly central to the experience—a calm, creative satisfaction in the first, and a fiery one in the second, based on outperforming/strategizing opponents. Hard to Port, as a resource management and "engine-builder" development game, creates a space that emphasizes both types: players create and nurture a network of Production Points to give them more and more resources, and they can use that network to compete for Aid Quests (notably optional) or race to develop that network faster or further than others.

Important for this is emotionally connecting players to their resources. Resource generation in Hard to Port is designed to maximize this by making them tangible: every turn, for every resource tile a player is producing on, they get to tick down a die that represents the number of turns left until harvest. This is a routine upkeep action that requires some tactile effort from the player, akin to watering plants, and thus makes them more involved in the process. As a result, players are more invested into those resources when they eventually harvest—and the die doubles as a visual indicator of this time and effort that players put in throughout production.

The game's ship mechanic also plays into this tangibility of resources: they must be picked up and moved to wherever they're needed, rather than abstractly placed into an "inventory" that then can be used instantly anywhere on the map. It is, again, a trivial but frequent effort that makes finally getting resources to their destination more satisfying. The separate ship inventories, in theory, contributes further to this—but they may be removed in the game's next iteration for complexity and gameflow reasons (more on this below in Ease of Access vs. Strategic Depth).

Splitting the abstract into smaller, tangible steps is perhaps an important trait of comfy games—farming crops in Stardew Valley, for instance, involves buying seeds, hoeing ground, fertilizing, planting seeds, watering each seed/plant daily, and eventually harvesting, alongside thoughtful timing of tool upgrades (watering can in particular, since not watering a plant in a day means it does not grow that day). Hard to Port mimics this and the effort each of those steps takes; it is not enough to simply “grow” a crop.

Another part in resource satisfaction in Hard to Port is the amount of resources players receive from production: by default it is already three, which feels satisfying to take and hold, and with specialization this is four (perhaps more by the next iteration; see Player Interaction). Upgrading a Production Point, however, immediately doubles this, and upgrading it twice triples the output from its original! Picking up twelve resources at once is extremely satisfying, and quickly adds up into someone holding nearly a full deck of resource cards, which is physically very fun to see, and a source of much pride as well.

The lack of hindering mechanics also prevents interruptions to this satisfaction; nobody likes being stolen from or blocked, and often doing so even feels bad, despite being the strategically correct decision. However, this obviously has consequences:

Removing all hindering mechanics from a competitive game also removes its main source of player interaction, so a lot of effort in Hard to Port also goes to rebuilding and repopulating those opportunities for interaction in other ways. In particular, Hard to Port makes trading with other players the optimal way to play, thus incentivizing cooperative interaction. 

The specialization mechanic was designed for this explicit purpose: to maximize the benefit from this bonus, players are encouraged to build many Production Points on the resource they specialize in, and thus must trade with others to gain the resources they lack as a result. Technically players can also buy resources they lack at the market tile, but it costs far more than trading—this is why buying resources costs triple the sell price. This is furthered by the maintenance cost system the game employs, where running a Production Point requires corn/fish (and sometimes wood) to start every production cycle. Maintenance costs yield a constant, logistical need for certain resources, and in theory lead to ongoing trade relations between players to satisfy those needs (simultaneously forming fun social relationships!). This also means that the main way to prevent someone from winning in Hard to Port is by ceasing those trade relations—because being independent should mathematically be less effective, and forcing someone to go back and build that infrastructure (or that player having done so from the start) slows them down.

The game is currently the process of a new iteration that further improves the specialization—possibly making a specialized Production Point generate five of a resource instead of four—because playtests have shown an emphasis on becoming self-sufficient, and not a lot of optimization of the specialization mechanic. It may also regain its original implementation (which was too weak and late-game focused by itself), on top of the current one, where building more Production Points of a single type improves the specialization bonus.

This new iteration of specialization also has a secondary purpose: to give players extra resources with which to trade. Currently, not much trade occurs in the early stages of the game simply because nobody has anything spare. Improving resource generation in general should help alleviate the issue, and improving specialization should also make players hesitate to use their resources instantly for Production Points on non-specialized resources, since they cannot be removed and players can only build six of them total.

Other than trading, players also indirectly interact as they compete to complete Aid Quests throughout the course of the game: they give players the option of an alternate, more competitive focus compared to the general process of development. There are three tiers of Aid Quest, sorted by difficulty, so they are relevant during all points of the game. Analyzing what Quests other players are preparing for (or lack thereof) is an important part of the game's interaction as well, though it is geared more towards competitive players in the same way that cooperative trading is likely more geared towards comfy players.

Having many different modes of play in the game also helps it appeal to a very broad and contrasting set of audiences, and also deepens its strategic potential. The Aid Quests (and potentially a random board layout) can determine if certain playstyles or specializations are stronger or weaker in any individual game, in addition to what specializations are chosen by the players—and perhaps more importantly, which are not. If many Quests in a match require cloth, for instance, a cloth specialization might be stronger than usual, or if there's no wood specialist, a strategy that requires lots of iron (which requires wood as a maintenance cost) might prove harder to play.

In particular, some of the special rewards Quests give are designed to change the way the game can be played, such as by increasing the number of moves a ship can make in a turn, or by giving players a constant influx of fish every turn. Gaining one of these rewards (or aiming for a particular one) can rapidly change the gamefeel or strategy of the match. This also means that playing "quickly" by investing resources into early Quests as opposed to development can be a very fruitful playstyle!

The existence of Energizing with fish and Production Point upgrades* also offer different ways for players to develop. Keeping up with the heightened pace of logistics for Production Points a player may constantly be Energizing is one such method, especially if combined by playing "wide"—having many un-upgraded Production Points as opposed to a few upgraded ones, which would be "tall" and another valid strategy. Focusing on one's specialization versus producing a wide variety of different resources is another set of contrasting strategies players can employ.

*the Expand and Supply mechanics may need to change with the incoming overhaul to the resource economy

Even disregarding all this and just choosing a particular specialization immediately highlights some strengths and weaknesses and different playstyles:

Someone specializing in corn, for example, draws a lot of their value from trading as opposed to selling—because, as the main maintenance cost, corn has a higher value when used than sold (corn being the second cheapest resource), and trading value can exist between the sell price of corn and the buy price, which is triple that. Corn players will likely be very social and trading lots throughout the game as a result; they find their advantage from favorable deals and developing off of them. Simultaneously, however, corn players are very independent in the sense that corn Production Points require no maintenance; they aren't reliant on a constant income of any particular resource other than wood for building.

Specializing in iron, on the other hand, is a late-game investment, as iron sells for by far the most gold, but simultaneously has the highest maintenance cost of one wood AND one corn per harvest, and is thus heavily reliant on other resources. It also has relatively low trade value since it is (currently) only used in a single crafting recipe: to Supply a Production Point, which is functionally identical to Expanding one. (This may change in the next iteration since, after changing the win condition from reaching a gold threshold to gaining Public Approval, the importance of gold has drastically decreased)

A cloth specialization contrasts this by being the most independent specialization: the only resource one needs to run cloth Production Points is corn for maintenance, since they are constructed using gold. Simultaneously, cloth is also used in relatively few crafting recipes, so its trade value is not very high either.

Wood specialists have the benefit of producing the most sought-after resource in the game (wood being in the most crafting recipes), but also suffer from reliance on two other kinds of resources (cloth and corn) rather than just one. In this sense, they are an amalgam of the gamefeel of corn and iron specializations.

Finally, fish specialization is totally unlike any other, due to fish not taking Production Points! It is a more early-game focused specialization, since it doesn't scale as well without upgrades, but it also allows a fish specialist to produce whatever resource they currently need more quickly using the Energize mechanic. Fish are also higher-risk-and-reward because they're disproportionately affected by the variable market prices; their base price is eight, while the variation adds between one and six gold to that value.

It's also important that Hard to Port is fun in ways other than winning the game, especially since only one player can do that. The satisfaction of developing oneself is obviously one, but also the existence of resource card variants (pictured below)—rare cards with silly special features, like different expressions or funny hats—that exist within the resource card deck can add an additional layer of fun and an alternate objective to the game. These variants don't offer any practical value, but their fun design means they're emotionally more desirable, and such a thing has actually been playtested by accident with the use of a Frieren card deck as a placeholder for corn resource cards. The Frieren card deck features some cards with characters from the popular anime, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, on them, and during playtests, collecting as many of these special cards as possible became an alternate way to have fun in the game, regardless of (and even interfering with) whether or not those players won. Players would even trade corn with each other in mechanically pointless ways (one corn for one corn) in order to trade these special cards! The variants should encourage this kind of comfy play for all five types of resources.

Speaking of cute resource card variants, the narrative and art of the game are incredibly key to making it "comfy", as aesthetic is perhaps the single most important aspect of a comfy game. The development the game engages with unfortunately conjures heavy capitalistic and even colonizing gameplay loops, so framing it as a re-building, as Aid Quests, and emphasizing Public Approval are all incredibly important. Punishing players for not maintaining their Production Points at the end of the game (unmaintained Production Points are worth -1 Approval instead of +1), as well as forbidding them from destroying any, should both help prevent players from entering overly-capitalistic modes of play.

The artstyle of the game is also carefully designed; it is cute, calm, and playful—but not so cute as to alienate the more “serious”, competitive gamers. Additionally, it focuses on the resource icons, with everything else left simple but colorful to help with visual clarity in a complex game, as well as giving everything a straightforward, cozy vibe. See examples both above below:

Another of the game's balancing acts is having dynamic gameplay that changes from game to game and makes things hard to predict, while simultaneously avoiding upsetting and unsatisfying losses due to dice rolls. Both sides are important to the game's genres—competitive games thrive on adapting strategy to specific scenarios, while comfy games emphasize positive results from the consistent efforts of the player, rather than random crises or pivots at the last minute.

Accordingly, as stated above, Hard to Port is entirely deterministic when it comes to generating resources—like growing a crop in Stardew Valley, you manage them daily (ticking the dice) and after a set amount of time (three turns), you harvest it. The fate of the game will never come down to a random dice roll at the end to push a player past the win condition; this had happened once in a prior iteration and was deeply unsatisfying for all players. Originally, winning Hard to Port only required reaching a certain gold threshold first, rather than the current Approval system, and it had a scavenging mechanic where players could roll a die to get a free resource (once per ship), which allowed that dice-roll victory to happen. The scavenging mechanic was initially added to increase unpredictability and allow players to gain small amounts of other resources without having to construct a Production Point for them, as well as give an extra benefit for building more ships (the latter of which has now been translated to fish, but more on their many iterations later). In theory, it would allow players to trade for less resources than they'd need to construct something, since they could scavenge the remainder—but playtesting demonstrated that the whole mechanic was somewhat extraneous and difficult to balance, even after its later iterations of scavenging only on tiles without Production Points on them, scavenging only during the early-game, and, the most fun version, scavenging from a limited, shuffled pool of resources on special scavenge tiles. Ultimately, it was a mechanic that unfairly favored the competitive over the comfy, and particularly players who meticulously thought ahead for every move, which isn't the intended gamefeel.

Hard to Port's unpredictability instead comes fundamentally now from three places: one from player agency and interaction—what trades players would accept, what resources would be plentiful at the table, etc.—another from the game's variable market, a set of dice rolls, but ones that impact the whole table rather than a single player, and also only changes about three times per game; and the last from the game's Aid Quests, which are drawn randomly from their decks (sorted by difficulty) during setup. The longer timescale and equal effect of these on all players provides ample time to react and also means they feel less arbitrary and sudden, a big problem with scavenging, or even something like rolling for resources in Catan (in the context of the comfy; Catan is fantastic in its own context).

The more macro-focused effect of these sources of unpredictability also help make strategy and gameplay of different matches of Hard to Port unique, which is particularly important because of the game's otherwise deterministic nature: it forces players to make different strategic decisions and prevents a mathematically correct or otherwise optimized series of moves from becoming the best way to win the game. Eventually, the game board will also be modular and randomizable, so its set-up will also vary and require specialized strategy and planning to take best advantage of.

How easy the game is to pick up versus its strategic depth is also an important balance—it cannot house too many mechanics, nor punish mistakes too hard, but it should simultaneously involve multiple ways to win and reward thinking ahead, as explained earlier in Different Modes of Play. Functionally, the game needs a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling, and to not be overwhelming in how it's complex.

The dichotomy between having complex logistics in the game (which is part of making resources more tangible, as explained in Satisfaction) and make trading as easy as possible (part of Player Interaction) is the main example of this give and take. The mechanics of each ship having its own inventory, as well as when trading can occur, are the mechanics in question; over the game's iterations, trading has become increasingly easy, and thus ship inventory logistics have as well. Now that, in the most recent version of the game, ships can move three tiles per turn instead of two (three turned out to be too punishing, despite two making logistics much more difficult and strategic), the separate ship inventories have become very negligible, especially since players tend to stay in a single area of the map for most of the game. 

Other than logistics and trading, another example of this balancing is of having enough complexity to strategize and do things every turn, and also not having every turn take a long time or too much mental planning: originally this was achieved by a scavenging mechanic, but it turned out to be difficult to balance, complicated, and somewhat extraneous, so its role was replaced by a new implementation of fish. Fish tiles in Hard to Port are special in that they produce resources via ships; players move their ships over to them between harvests and quickly collect some fish before returning to their Production Points on land. Every five turns, fish tiles also receive special fish tokens that players can collect for extra fish, encouraging them to move to parts of the board with fish tiles to take advantage of them when otherwise unoccupied. The board is specifically set up so that ships are always within three tiles of fish, so this mechanic ensures players always have something to move towards!