Let’s say Joe, a 22 years old accountant with free time on his hands, decides to try that role-playing thing he’s heard about. He’s never played any rpg and doesn’t know anyone who has, so he’s got quite a few obstacles in his path to play Dungeons & Dragons — he must:

• find a hobby store — a strange place he’s never set foot in
• Buy a rather expensive set of books ($56.67 for the 3 core books of D&D, he’d still need some sort of universe description) and dice with too many sides
• Read all of this — we’re talking about a thousand pages of material
• Find a bunch of reliable friends who can all schedule a simultaneous whole evening of playtime every week
• Explain that 1000 pages of material to said friends
• Make characters for all of those players (a 2-3 hours process for each)
• Come up with an adventure

…and then he can play and have fun!

We’re talking about an investment of about a hundred bucks and 30 hours before anybody has fun, or actually any idea what role-playing actually is. On the other hand, trying video games for the first time only require going online and downloading a free demo of a casual game. No wonder the rpg industry is doing so badly.

You may say I’m a bit harsh, and you’d be right. Most people will learn about rpgs through word of mouth while they’re still in school, making the learning curve much smoother. Nevertheless, it’s much harder to play a pen and paper role-playing game than it should be. The first rpg I played was 15 years ago (damn, I feel old all of sudden), but even with that experience I’ve had a hard time getting into a new game in the last months — and my places of work had the highest concentration of gaming geeks you’ll find anywhere.

That got me thinking: what could be done about this?

Reinventing the RPG

The idea I had was for a role-playing game you could play during your lunch break at work rather than require entire evenings. It’s a lot easier for a few geeks working at the same place to use a conference room to play during their lunch-time or after work than the traditional gaming-evening.

To achieve this, the RPG would have to match the following requirements:

1. The rules should take about 15 minutes to read and understand
2. Character creation should be feasible in 15 minutes or less, while still allowing for customization
3. It shouldn’t require any esoteric material: a couple of 6-sided dice, pen, paper and that’s it
4. It should be affordable and easy to get
5. The game world should be familiar enough not to require reading a virtual encyclopedia to understand
6. Game pace should be lightning fast

A challenging set of requirements, for sure, but nothing impossible.

The most important thing is simplicity, especially when it comes to the rules. Fifteen to read rules mean they shouldn’t take over 8 pages or so. Most rpg rules take a whole lot more than that, but it’s certainly possible to explain a complete, functional system in very little text. The brilliant Feng Shui rpg has its core rules resumed in 4 pages at the end of the rulebook. Simple rules can be played faster (nobody refers to an obscure rule on page 117) and there’s no reason why they’d need more dices than what you can find a box of Yahtzee.

Character creation is trickier. You obviously can’t give as much control over the character in a 15 minutes creation process than in a 3 hours one, but you still want to give interesting choices and customization options to players.

My solution is to offer an express character-creation system that works by asking 15 questions, like “Someone has stolen a large amount of money from you. After some research, you found him. What do you do?” Each question has 4 different answers, at the end you’ve got a sheet that gives specific traits depending on each answer. Answering “I convince the local population to create a mob to get justice” to the above question would give points to the stats and skills of a social-oriented character, while “I murder him in his sleep” would help create a stealthier (and eviler) character.

A fully “manual” character-creation system could still be offered, but I think this quiz-based approach could be fun and fast.

The world can be easy to communicate to players by making it grounded in the real world. If you make a game about pirates in the Caribbean, you don’t have too much to explain since everybody has a good idea what this is about. Pirates in a fantasy land would be another matter entirely, since you’d have to explain everything about that new land. There’s plenty of interesting stuff in the real world to base games on anyway.

Of course, rpg makers make a lot of their money selling more information about their universe. It may seem like basing a game on the real world would make that impossible, but nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most popular rpg of all time was Vampire: The Masquerade and it was set in the modern world. There can still be plenty of unique things about the game world even if the core of it is familiar.

Which brings us to the business model. How do you sell and distribute such a thing?

The Business Model
The internet makes online distribution a possibility: you could sell a pdf version of the books and expect players to print the thing. I don’t know about you, but I’d hate having hundreds of pages in a binder printed from my computer (not to mention the price to print that out on an inkjet). That approach might work if we only sell a very thin core rulebook, but if we’re to sell thicker books to returning customers, they’d need to be bound in real books.

Actually, the internet makes that kind of stuff very easy too. Sites like Lulu.com allow to create and sell actual books, without having to worry about inventory or any of that messy stuff. A 150 pages book costs only $7.53 to print, and it’s only printed when somebody orders a copy so you don’t get ruined having to buy a bunch of copies before you know how many you’ll sell. There are other similar self-publishing companies online, some might even offer better deals.

If I were to actually do this, I’d offer the core rules and universe description for free online. You’d get all the basic rules, a short version of what’s important in the game world, the express character creation process I described above and an adventure to get started. It’d be enough to play with custom characters and custom adventures for free. The goal is to get new players hooked by offering them enough so they have fun and want to get more information about the game.

In addition, I’d offer a fully-fleshed out rulebook for purchase on a service like Lulu: detailed information about the world, more character creation options, but equipment and similar stuff, maybe a few additional rules for special circumstances (car chases or whatever). People who buy this book will probably have started with the free starter kit, so it’s ok to add more complexity now that they’re familiar with the world.

Then, additional books on specific aspects of the game could be made and sold: more equipment, more information on the world, new rules, etc. Creating a good game-world filled with intriguing mysteries is essential in keeping players hooked to the game. I have a few friends who kept buying books of their favorite rpg months after they’d stopped playing simply because they wanted to see about the game evolved.

I think such a business model could have a chance of success. I don’t think anybody would get rich with it — I don’t think anybody ever got rich publishing pen and paper role-playing games — but it may be enough to make it worth one’s time.

I guess the bigger question is whether I will do anything with that idea. Frankly I don’t know. The nice thing about it is that I could possibly do this in my spare time — plenty of people write novels during their free time, why not a rpg? On the other hand, I already have far too many hobbies as it is. Adding another project to the list probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Still, it would be an interesting project — anybody interested in seeing anything made out of it?

That said, working on that pitch really opened my eyes about how instructive this blog has been. Frankly, when I started it I didn’t expect too much from it. Would writing pitches for random themes, outside of real-world constraints, really make me a better designer? I believe it did.

The assignment I got at my new job was to work on a licensed title. It would have been easy to go for the obvious idea, the kind of stuff you always see for licensed games. In fact, at first I did. When I looked back on what I’d written, I realized that I could do better than that. Heck, I’d done a more interesting concept for a game about wine, of all things. That pushed me to search for something better, something that would do justice to the license and would be more interesting to play.

After thinking and searching for a while longer, I believe I found the right approach — an idea simple enough that it sounds obvious once you hear it, but which wasn’t obvious at all at first. This blog taught me to be confident that there was a better idea to be found, so I kept searching until I found it. But I obviously can’t talk about it. NDAs and all that. Suffice to say the project went from just-another-licensed-title to something pretty interesting, I think. Let’s hope I can help transform this original vision into a cool end-product.

I really recommend this kind of design exercise to anybody who wants to improve as a game designer. Being able to make game concepts without having to fear about the reception it will get from bosses, publishers, license holders and everybody else who can judge your work is liberating. It lets you push yourself to your limits. It’s like exercising in a gymnasium: it’s easier to go to your limits than when doing real work, so real work becomes easier afterward.

The limitation is that the exercises I did here were limited to the initial concept of a game. It’s a critical step, to be sure — if the core of the game sucks, it’ll be hard to make it good — but it’s not everything. I want to try something else: to write a design doc free of external constraints, to train myself in better detailing my designs.

So I plan on working on a design doc in my spare time. The game is a mix between the “Giant Steampunk Robot Battles” and the Drones high concepts I talked about earlier. Problem is, it’s not quite as easy to blog about this since writing a design doc is much longer and is filled with a lot more details than a pitch. I’ll try to find a way to update this blog about my progress, but I’m not sure when that’ll be or what form it’ll take. We’ll see.

One last thing: a number of people wrote me, telling me they have a game design they’d like to sell and asking how to go about it. My honest answer is: I don’t know. I don’t expect to sell that design I’m writing, because there’s no path to selling designs in this business. Somebody could write the world’s greatest game design in his garage, yet he’d probably never be able to sell it because nobody would look at it. And I think that’s a shame.

• Theme: Edison and Tesla
• Platform: PSP

Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison are two of the most famous scientists and inventors of the end of the 19th century. They’re known not only for their inventions — among them the radio and the light bulb — but also for their intense rivalry. For years they were involved in what has been called the War of Currents.
Their genius and this rivalry made them popular characters in retro science-fiction (also called steampunk) — you might have seen them in the movie The Prestige, for a recent example. As far as I know, their rivalry has never been made into a game, so I thought it would be a fun theme to use.

So, what do you get when you mix 19th century inventors, video games and a total disdain for historical accuracy? The obvious:

Giant Steampunk Robot Battles!

This game will be a fighting game involving 3 stories-high machines of iron, steam and electricity duking it out in the city and country-side. But with a twist — two twists, in fact.

You see, while those robots are controlled by radio, the processor driving them is very slow. These mechanical processors, an evolution over Babbage’s work, take some time transforming commands into action. As such, drivers must anticipate what’s going to happen and order actions on what they anticipate will be the right move. The nice thing is, these iron giants move slowly, making it easier to choose the right moves.

While the game will look like a typical 3D fighting game, with robots on either side of the screen facing each other, the way to control the robots will be different than usual. Indeed, because of your robot’s slow processor, you’ll choose 3 moves in advance what you want it to do. Because of this, you’ll have to anticipate your opponent’s moves and make sure your own moves are hard to anticipate.

For example, starting the fight you could enter the following commands: go forward, punch high, low circular-kick. As soon as the first command, go forward, is executed, you could enter a new command in the “buffer”. Failure to do so would mean the robot stays idle for a little while. While you input those commands, your opponent could input the following: sidestep, activate an electricity cannon and block high. Since he side-stepped, he’d dodge the punch you ordered and hit you with the canon, but get hit with the low kick since he blocked at the wrong height.

This method of control transforms the fight into a battle of wits rather than reflexes. Rather appropriate for a game about inventors, I think.

Something else appropriate for a game about inventors, and the second twist I mentioned earlier, is the part where you build your robot. Between each fight, you’ll spend some time on R&D, trying to improve your fighter: making it faster, sturdier, stronger and giving it more moves.

Each robot will have an electricity gauge. Each move, aside from blocking or doing nothing, will take a certain amount of electricity. Simple moves, like punching, will require little electricity while powerful attacks, like electrocuting your opponent in an electric arc, will require a lot. As such, you must manage how much current you have left throughout the combat.

Since each player will favor certain types of technology, everybody will have his own custom robot. This will make multiplayer an always changing experience, where you have to adapt to everybody’s tactics. The nice thing about the slower pace of battle is that it works well with lag. Even if your commands get stuck in the tubes of the internet for a few seconds, the game can go on since you’re entering your commands in advance.

Conclusion

I have no idea whether this game would work, to be perfectly honest. I think it could, but it’d require a prototype to test out. The “choose your moves in advance” mechanics worked well in the RoboRally board game, but it’s unclear whether it would work in a fighting game. It would be fun to try, though — I really think “Giant Steampunk Robot Battles” is an awesome idea for a game.

Talking about fighting steampunk robots, check out A Gentleman’s Duel. It’s a short 3D animation movie that’s part of the inspiration for this game.

Everybody in the gaming industry has a great idea for a game. The desire to see that idea become a reality is what brought many of us to this industry. Sadly, the quality of this idea – or even of the game itself – isn’t enough to guarantee a commercial success: critically acclaimed games like Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil have sold far fewer sales than they deserved.

How can you tell if a game has the potential to become a huge hit based only on its design? Marketing executives at major publishers have sophisticated tools to evaluate that kind of things, but you don’t need all that complexity to find the potential of your idea. With just a few questions, you can evaluate the marketability of your game. I compiled these questions in a simple test that you can use in 10 minutes.

Read it here. I’d love to hear what you think about the article!

You wouldn’t be the first to make this mistake, but Julian Streets is much more than that: he’s also the Fox of China, gentleman burglar. He steals from the rich — corrupt English officials and triad leaders — to give to the poor. And the cut he keeps for his expenses is quite reasonable, too.

In Julian Streets, the Fox of China you’ll experience the thrilling life of Streets: go anywhere in the Hong Kong of the 50s, climb any building, jump from rooftop to rooftop, steal from the corrupt government, fight the triads! Can you save the lovely Miao Ping and stop the nefarious plans of the mysterious Mr Cracknell? Come back each week for a new episode!
Assassin’s Creed meets Crackdown with More Panache!

In this game you play Julian Streets, an athletic gentleman burglar. The game is played from a third-person perspective in an open map of Hong Kong circa 1955. You can go anywhere, by foot or by car — really anywhere. Streets is a skilled climber who can climb any surface with protruding elements like window sills, large bricks and so on.

The game rewards creativity; missions don’t have predetermined path to follow to succeed. You can decide to go through the front door, the back door or through an open window on the third floor. You can use your environment creatively too: throw a bottle to attract attention, turn lights off to hide, etc. You choose the approach you prefer. The game gives you an interesting problem to solve, and lets you figure your own way to solve it.

To further let you personalize your experience, Julian Street will increase skills as you play. The more you use an ability, the better you’ll become at it. Increasing your athletics skills will let you jump farther, run faster and climb to harder to access locations. Bettering your combat ability will make you deadlier hand to hand and barehanded. Becoming more skilled at driving makes cars run faster and withstand more damage. Improving your stealth lets you hide better in shadows and use better disguises.

Indeed, this game will have you rely on your stealth in addition to your wits. Barging through a well-defended location is likely to bring your death. You’ll have to avoid detection, whether by hiding or by using clever disguises, to reach your goals.

Each mission — a new one each week — will have a primary goal and secondary goals. While you need to successfully achieve the primary goal to complete the mission, secondary goals are optional. Achieving secondary goals increases your reputation, and so does stealing a lot of loot and avoiding to kill enemies. A higher reputation means the population is more likely to help you by giving you information and special gear.

Episodic Content

Just like pulp fiction stories, this game will be set in episodes. Each week, at the same day and time, a new mission will be released, adding about one hour of fun. Players will want to return each week to play the new adventures of the Fox of China.

Adding missions at such a rapid pace will be a development challenge, but it’s feasible with good preparation. Using an open world helps a lot: the overall environment can be reused each episode, only adding mission-specific elements.

Having multiple small teams work in parallel is essential. If a new mission takes 3 weeks of work, 3 teams working simultaneously on separate episodes can release a new one each week. And of course, you’d need to work a few weeks in advance so that slight delays don’t jeopardize the schedule.

It’s a very ambitious project requiring a hefty budget, but the payoff could be worth it. If a TV show like Heroes can release movie-quality shows each week, I don’t see why games can’t follow a similar model. Having millions of players eagerly anticipating new episodes each week could create quite a phenomenon around the game.

• Pulp Fiction (the literary genre) for PS3

Pulp fiction, for those who may not be familiar with the genre, is light literature that’s written to be entertaining to be entertaining first and foremost, with little artistic concern. It’s in fact quite unrelated to the movie of the same name — I wouldn’t consider Quentin Tarantino’s movie to be a good example of Pulp Fiction. Indiana Jones and Star Wars are better examples: big, fun adventures where heroes are heroic and villains are villainous. Pulp fiction was very popular from the 20s to the 50s.

It’s a broad subject and the PS3 is powerful enough to handle nearly everything you could throw at it, so there’s lot of room to come up with a cool idea. I’m a fan of the genre and the look and feel that goes with it, so it should be fun to work on.

These robots are called drones. They vary in size from large robotic tarantulas crawling up walls to spy on conversations to small planes able to carry surgical strikes. They are remote-controlled by people called riggers. These riggers can control multiple drones simultaneously, without being in the line of fire should they come into trouble.

A group of rebels challenge the established order and fight to regain the privacy and freedom of the past. They capture drones and reuse their parts to build their own custom drones. You are one of those rebel riggers.

Mech Warrior meets Pokémon

This cyberpunk game is a cross between Mech Warrior and Pokémon. You assemble teams of custom drones to fight in turn-based battles (the Mech Warrior part). The drones are created using random parts obtained after each battles, which can be traded with friends (the Pokémon part). Let’s look at the combat part first.

You start the game in a poor quarter of a gigantic metropolis, which is under light surveillance by the government. Your goal is to take control of this quarter, then move to another better-defended quarter to take over and so on until you have freed the whole city.

To take control of a quarter, you first fight a number of random battles. Each of those fights give you random drone parts (more details on those later) which allow you to improve the power of your drone squad. When you become powerful enough, you catch the attention of that quarter’s governor. He’s the “boss” of the quarter, a more powerful and skilled enemy — but beating him makes the whole quarter fall under your control.

Each fight is a battle between two riggers and their band of drones. The goal is to either eliminate all of the opposing drones or to eliminate the enemy rigger.

You have to move your drones carefully — there’s a big element of stealth and deception at play. Each drone has a limited sensor range, which depend on the quality of its sensors. It cannot detect enemy drones or riggers outside of that range (similar to fog of war in RTS games). Not all drones are equally easy to detect either: a large drone using lots of energy is easier to spot than a small, energy-efficient drone. Moving stealthily around enemies can bring you more success than simple brute force.

The terrain is also important. Walls provide cover, rubble slows drones down, smoke makes aiming harder and so on. Different drones handle different terrain differently: a rolling drone would go fast on a street but slowly on rubble, one with spider-like legs could crawl on either at normal speed, and a flying drone would just fly over both.

Your rigger is a bit like the king in chess: a weak unit that means defeat if lost. While weak, it has its own useful abilities. Each rigger has a rigging skill level, an intelligence level and a special ability. The rigging skill indicates how many drones he can control at the same time: the higher the skill, the more drones he can have in his band or he can have more complex drones. The intelligence ability give additional information at the beginning of each battle — with high enough intelligence, you can learn what specific drones your opponent is using. Finally, the special ability is similar to the commander’s ability in Advance Wars: a power level accumulates during the fight, when it’s full you can use the power (healing, power boost, etc.)

With a practically infinite number of possible drones, each fight is different. You must always adapt to new conditions, new enemies. That’s what make this game great: no two games are always the same, you can always be surprised by a situation you hadn’t expected.

Building Drones

When you win fights, you gain new random drone parts. Some drone parts are rarer (and more powerful) than others. To get them, you can trade parts with your friends using the DS’ wifi connection.

With all those parts, you can build very different drone squads. The parts have a wide range of abilities — it’s not just slight damage and range differences. You can really come up with creative strategies that suit your play style. For example:

• Timmy is a younger player who just wants to have fun. Instead of making a complicated squad of robots, he makes one really big, bad-ass drone. What it lacks in subtlety, it sure makes up in fire-power.
• Johnny is a more creative player — likes to explore the strategic possibilities of the game. He creates a clever squad of bots: a few small, hard to shoot drones fly around, spotting enemies. When they detect one, they send its coordinates to a slow, mortar-firing drone that stays safely behind cover.
• Spike is a hard-core gamer. Winning is everything for him, so he builds his drone band lean and mean. His drones are stealthy hunt-and-seek machine that avoid enemies while searching for the enemy rigger, which they eliminate ruthlessly and efficiently.

To allow this flexibility, a wide range of different parts must be available. Here’s a short list of possibilities:

• Frames / movement type: large, small, wheel-based, track-based, leg-based, flying and so on. This is the overall structure of the drone and it affects the space available for parts, the maximum weight that can be carries and how easy it is to detect.
• Energy source: a bigger energy source lets you use more power-hungry parts. It also creates more heat, which makes the drone easier to detect.
• Armor: more makes the drone tougher, but increases its weight which slows it down.
• Sensors: Essential to detect enemies.
• Weapons: from melee weapons to full auto machine guns, including sniper rifles and EMP — it’s all there.
• Other stuff: electronic counter-measure to make detection harder, cargo space to carry other drones around, interference-generating parts that freeze enemy drones. There’s a lot of really interesting creative stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into other categories.

The nice thing with the collectible aspect of the game is that even with lots of different parts, that game stays approachable. You start with only a very limited set of drone parts and get the new ones progressively, so you have time to understand them. That’s much better than giving everything at the same time initially and hope the player understands everything at once.

Multiplayer

This game would really shine in multiplayer. Playing against your friends, trying to find the right strategy and the right drone combination to beat your friends would be great fun. It’s similar to the fun of creating new Magic: the Gathering decks, in a sense.

Of course, the Nintendo DS is great for that type of multiplayer. You can play in the same room using the wireless connection or play online using the internet connection. These same channels can be used to trade drone parts.

The Business Case

So, would this game be a commercial hit? I think it has potential. The original Pokémon fans are now grown-up and may be willing to try another trading-based game if it’s more mature. The trading element also increases player involvement with the game, helping to make a community appear around it.

Some may see the turn-based nature of the game as a problem, but I think it could do fine. Plenty of popular games are turn-based — Advance Wars, Final Fantasy, Civilization, etc. — so the genre can definitely still be successful. What’s more, turn-based gaming is great for portable consoles since it can be interrupted so easily. People can play the game in short breaks (on the bus or while waiting for a movie to start at the theater for example) which is a popular way to use the DS.

It’s a pretty distinctive game with a large market (Pokémon sold over 145 million copies!), so I think it has the potential to be a real hit if handled well.

Oh well, time for a new challenge:

• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Theme: Cyberpunk

I’ve always been a fan of cyberpunk — William Gibson is one of my favorite writers — so this should be a fun challenge to work on. It’s also pretty open: it specifies a setting but not any specific gameplay.

By the way, if any of you feels like taking on the challenge too, I’d be happy to see what you come up with. Just post them in the comments (or a link to them) if you feel like it.

Instead, the idea is for a game where you play an architect who has to come up with beautiful and functional buildings under the constraints an architect would have. It would be a casual game, perfect for Xbox Live Arcade or the PC. The game will focus on interesting constructions: creating museums, hotels and conference centers — the glamorous side of architecture rather than just creating homes. The Sims does that well enough anyway.

The game is divided in levels. In each you must create the plan for a specific building. You start with having to make a simple house, but eventually have to work on malls, museums and skyscrapers. For each building, you must decide a bunch of elements:

• The size of the building and its parking (if any)
• How much and what kind of decorations you have inside and outside
• The style of the building (futurist, art deco, colonial, etc.)
• The interior layouts (what rooms are where)
• and so on

You have constraints to consider when making the plan. You must care about cost, construction time, risk (some elements could take longer than expected to build), the type of structure you’re building, the tastes of the client and so on. Each level has unique challenges: a client might care more about form than function, a museum might have to be constructed in a very limited space on a crowded Manhattan street, a memorial for a tragedy could have to be in an easily accessible place, etc.

The game is played at a pretty high level. You don’t do precise modeling of the whole building, you just make high level decisions (”I want a art deco building with low quality material for the exterior, but I’ll pay extra for a fancy door”) and the game updates the look of the building automatically. For the interior, you just place pre-built “blocks” for rooms. For example, you could select a large bathroom and select where to put it without having to lay out all the walls and each bathroom stalls like in many tycoon games. The goal is to be able to make a plan in 15 to 30 minutes.

Once you’re happy with your plan, you send it to be built. That’s when you discover the real time and cost for construction (like real constructions, sometimes things don’t go exactly as planned). Once it’s built, people walk in and around the building and you get the evaluation from different categories of people:

• Visitors, who come to use the building but don’t work there.
• Employees, who have to deal with the building on a daily basis.
• Passerbys, who see the building’s exterior but don’t come in.
• The client, who paid for the building to be constructed

You have to balance the needs of each type of people. A beautiful building that cost a lot of money could please the passerbys while displeasing the client who had to foot the bill. A functional but ugly building could please the employees but annoy the visitors. At the end of each level a score is given for each category, and the total sum is compared to a target: if the total score is high enough, you go to the next challenge. If it’s too low, you must try again.

Visually, the game would look like an architect’s sketch while you’re designing the building. While the building would be in 3D, it would be drawn in a hand-drawn look. Once the plan is done, the rendering would become more realistic to show the real-world result.

Evaluating the Concept
A lot of people dream of being architects, but can’t follow that dream. I think this game would really please those people. It puts you in the shoes of an architect who must create a beautiful and functional building under certain constraints. It’s the type of game that does what only games can do: it lets you become what you can’t be in real life.

On the other hand, I’m a bit worried about whether it leaves enough for the player to do. Is creating the building at a higher level like that too abstract? Would complete control the details of the construction be better? But then each level would become very long to play and complexity would be added.

I’m also wondering about how to give good feedback to players: how do you know you’re doing a good job while you’re making the plan? Having the evaluation at the end is more realistic, but it may lack enough information to avoid frustrating players. Maybe you could have advisers giving you tips about whether you’re doing well or not before the final evaluation…

Still, I think this concept could be interesting — at least worth to spend more time thinking about it. It’s the type of game that could reach to older gamers, and the gaming industry really needs to reach out to a wider market.