Why a galaxy, not a graph

The first version of Six Degrees was a flat 2D graph. Dots and lines on a plane, the way you would diagram anything. It was fine while the map stayed small.

The thing that broke it was just adding more games. A few dozen looks like a tidy little web. A few thousand looks like somebody knocked over a plate of spaghetti. Flat space ran out fast. There was nowhere left to put anything, and every new line only made the mess worse.

So I went looking for more room, and in hindsight the answer was sitting right there: build a sky instead of a diagram. Three dimensions. A galaxy you fly through instead of a chart you stare at.

The extra room was only half of it, though. I wanted the connections to be something you could feel, not just see. So the strength of a link became a physical pull. The heavy connections, the direct ones, two games out of the same studio or with the same director behind them, drag each other in tight until they are practically neighbors. The loose ones, a shared genre, a similar art style, just let two games drift somewhere near each other, in the same part of the sky but not holding hands. Nobody has to read a legend. You can tell how related two games are by how hard they are clinging to each other.

That is the part that makes the whole thing click for me, and the funny bit is I didn’t really design it. I backed into it. I just kept asking the map to show me more, and “more” eventually meant a third dimension and a little bit of physics. None of it was a plan up front. It is just where the problem kept leading.

Open Six Degrees of Play on the live site ↗