Exploration: The High Concept
October 24th, 2006 by Pierre-Alexandre Garneau
Lost meets Civilization meets Spore. That’s the high concept for this week exploration-themed game.
What does that mean exactly?
Lost
The game starts has a small group of survivors from a shipwreck find themselves stranded on the beach of a mysterious island. Your first job is to handle their immediate survival by sending some of the survivors to explore the island to find essential resources like food and water.
You must manage the scarce resources carefully to create initial shelter, have enough food and water for everybody, defend your “tribe” against wild animals and continue exploring deeper into the island. This continued exploration doesn’t just reveal new resources and better locations for camps, but also strange ruins and even other indigenous tribes living on the island!
It’s up to you how to deal with those tribes. Do you attack them, steal their stuff or try to be friendly? You’ll need their resources whether you take them by trade or by force.
Civilization
Once your tribe becomes established, the game becomes closer to a real-time version of Civilization. Your tribe gets bigger as couples forms and babies are born. You must develop and improve your camp by building new structures, researching new technology and defending yourself from hostile tribes still on the island. Exploration is constantly needed to find new spots for camps, to find new resources to exploit and get the useful items from the ruins.
As you make decisions, the computer analyses your personal style, to see what approach you prefer. What do you favor?
- Religion or science?
- Peace or Agressivity?
- Liberty or Control?
- Equality or Opportunism? (ie. socialism vs capitalism)
- Beauty or Pragmatism?
In this way, the game becomes a mirror of your personality — or at least your play-style. When placed before tough decisions, which side will you choose?
Spore
You’ll also customize the appearance of your tribe: from their style of clothing to the shape of the buildings in your camps. This will be done with very simple in-game design tool — similar to those in Will Wright’s Spore.
Once your island is well developed and you have developed enough technology to build a small boat, you’ll be able to send explorers to nearby islands in the archipelago. That’s when the modelling of the playing style and unique island customization becomes interesting.
When you find other islands, some of those will actually be downloaded from other players’ computer. You’ll get the layout of their island and its unique style, along with a play-style that fits the player who created it. A peaceful tribe may let you start profitable trading, but an agressive one may send your explorer back with arrows in his back.
The really nice thing about user-generated content is that it allows an infinite amount of exploration. If we just went with procedurally generated content, the game would tend to get fairly bland content that lacks personality. By leveraging the players making their own customized content, we make sure every player can discover new and interesting things every time he explores a new island.
Conclusion
Overall, this game would play like a real-time version of Civilization, but at a more human scale. You’d be able to see individual characters walking around and doing their business — I think that would make the game more concrete and make you care more about each individual. Compared to Civilization, this game would also focus less on war and more on exploration and constructing your own content. Ideally, the game should be simpler and easier to approach — in two words, more casual — than Sid Meier’s classic.
This game wouldn’t be a massively-multiplayer game, even though it allows for trading of islands online. The reason is that multiplayer games tend to be very unforgiving to new and casual players. You’d create your first island next to an expert player and in 2 days it’d be invaded and you couldn’t do anything about it — frustrating. There may be good solutions for this kind of problem, but I’m neither an expert or a fan of MMOs so I don’t know them. I don’t particularly feel like adding this kind of complexity either — this project is ambitious enough as it is.
There are 3 days left to add details and change stuff in this design. If you have any ideas, questions or stuff you’d like to be explained in more details, just post them in the comments. See you tomorrow!
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