GameIdeas.org

As a designer, I like giving control over the game to the player. That’s the one thing games do better than any other media: while the audience watches a TV show or a movie passively, they have a real influence over the events in a game. Too many game designers try to tell something to players. I believe the best games allow players to express themselves.

There are 4 levels of influence a player can have over a game:

• Personal: What the player looks and acts like. In Power and Responsibility, players will be able to decide whether to be good or evil — that’s personal influence.
• Interpersonal: How the player character acts with other characters. Deciding how to handle your life with your girlfriend and with your job is part of that level of influence.
• Environmental: Being able to transform the physical environment is what this is all about.
• Global: If you can change the game world in a far-reaching way — for example influencing whether the city becomes better or worse as a whole with time — you have influence at a global level.

Today I’ll cover one element that gives players personal influence (character creation) and one element that gives environmental influence (combat).

Character Creation

At the start of the game, you’ll create a new character or choose among a few pre-created ones. If you decide to create your own hero, you’ll choose his name, appearance, stats and powers. Setting the name is straight-forward enough, so let’s look at the others.

You’ll choose your appearance by selecting your body shape, haircut, then clothes for your “ordinary” and “super-hero” appearance. You’ll also be able to choose colors for skin, clothes and hair. The selection of clothes will be made to be more realistic than the traditional super-hero outfit — men in tights are totally Out this season. You should be able to give a cool look to your hero, but still avoid the clichés of the genre.

Once you’ve got a name and a look, it’s time to set the stats of your character. These stats determine his basic abilities.

• Strength: Indicates hand-to-hand and thrown damage. Also determines the size of objects you use or throw.
• Endurance: Indicates the number of health points you have and influences the probability of getting knocked-down by attacks.
• Agility: Affects the speed at which you move and make attacks.
• Willpower: Determines the number of power points you have to use your powers.

Setting stats is easy. Each stat goes from 1 to 10 (powers can push them up to 20) and you have 20 points to spend among all of them. As you progress in the game, you’ll get additional points to spend to push the stats even higher.

And now, the interesting parts: powers! The game will feature a wide variety of powers to really let you customize your character. From fireballs to mind control to super strength, it’s all there.

You’ll start with 100 points to spend and each power will cost a certain amount of points depending on how powerful it is. Powers will be kept together so it’s easy to find them. Moreover, each power purchased in the same category after the first has a 10 points rebate. For example, taking a force-push power under Telekinesis would let you pick a force-pull power in the same category for cheaper.

There are some restrictions to the powers you can pick, for interface reasons:

• You must take one regular attack. Basic punches and kicks are free, but fancier stuff (kung-fu or a gun) cost you points.
• You need to choose one block. The hand-to-hand block is free, but blocks that protect you from other types of attacks (a force field, for example) cost you points.
• You can take up to 3 powers triggered with the press of a button (each will be set to a different button)
• You can have as many always-on powers as you want

Fight!

During combat, the point of view is similar to that of Freedom Force: top-down with an angle (you don’t control the camera). You control your character directly using the following controls:

• Direction pad or analog stick: Move your character around
• X: Base attack / Attack with an object you picked up
• L: Block
• Square: Pick an object / Throw an object
• Triangle, Circle, R: Each can be assigned to a power selected during character creation
• Start: Pause

Attacks automatically target the closest enemy in the general direction you’re facing. Blocks are instant and interrupt pretty much anything you’re doing — that way blocking is easy to do and a reflexive action.

To have cool combat, collateral damage is really important. Jet Li giving a punch isn’t nearly as cool as Jet Li punching a hole through a stone wall — the damage to the environment shows just how powerful the attack was. And it’s always cool to blow shit up.

As such, this game should be filled with as many interactive objects as the PSP can handle. You should be able to tear up a lamp post and whack the enemy over the head with it, or to pick up a car and throw it at an enemy, only for the enemy to dodge it and the car bringing down the building behind him.

The environment should behave in a systemic way: you should be able to fell trees with powerful blows, wooden things should catch fire, standing in fire should hurt you and so on. That way, you can fell a bunch of trees in a park, then make them catch fire to roast the unfortunate enemy who followed you there.

That’s it for now

A highly customizable character fighting in highly dynamic environment should make for really fun gameplay. It really gives you the opportunity to be creative and come up with your own ways to fight enemies — that’s what giving control to the player is all about.

So, until tomorrow, may you feel in control over your destiny.

As Spider-Man would say: “With great power comes great responsibility”. Super-heroes have a moral duty to help the world, but they must also balance that duty with living their ordinary lives. Super-man, Spider-man, Batman, The Incredibles, even Wolverine: they all must balance their super life with their ordinary life.

This is the basis of many super-hero stories… yet it’s almost entirely ignored in super-hero games. This game concept, tentatively called Power and Responsibility, will force the player to make tough choices between the two sides of his life. But don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of putting villains on fire and throwing them through buildings, too.

Who Are You?

This game is all about choice, starting with character creation. You’ll be able to decide your appearance, your name and your powers from a lot of options. Whether you want to play a nearly-indestructible guy made of sand who throws cars around or you want to play a nimble flying character who fights with bow and arrow, you’ll be able to. Character creation is one of the most fun parts of games like City of Heroes so this game needs that kind of customization.

You won’t be able to choose your background or gender, for the sake of the story. You’re a freelance reporter for a major online news publication — an otherwise ordinary man who discovers strange powers at the beginning of the game. You’ll meet the love of your life at the start of the game.

Indeed, a lot of the gameplay will hinge on balancing these three parts of your life: work, dates and super-heroics.

Choices, Choices, Choices…

In the game, each day will be split in day and night periods. For each period you’ll have to choose what to do, between doing your job, romancing your girlfriend or saving the world. Some missions will be more important than others (arrest a bunch of thugs robbing a 7-11 versus going to your girlfriend’s mother funeral), but you’ll have to balance your priorities to keep your life in balance.

The super-heroic missions will, of course, be the main part of the game. I’ll cover this more in the coming days, but basically it’s the action part of the game. You’ll beat up villains, arrest criminals and try to avoid damage to the city. Or maybe you won’t — the game wouldn’t give you any real responsibilities if you couldn’t make the “wrong” choices.

So, depending on your actions you’ll be good or evil. For every mission you’ll be able to choose whether you handle it as a super-hero or as a super-villain. Do you protect the bank from getting robbed by some villainous character with strange powers or do you rob it yourself, fighting any heroic fools who dare to oppose you? The choice is yours.

A broken-hearted hero (or villain) doesn’t fight well. Your relationship with your girlfriend will have an important effect on the gameplay. Keep your relationship going well and she’ll heal your wounds. Moreover, higher morale will make your power gauge (that indicates how much you can use your powers) fill up quicker. Ignore her and you could end up wounded and with no power left.

As for work, it’s where you get your information. A reporter is well informed and knows what’s going on in the city, so that’s how you learn about possible missions. The better your work-life, the more missions you’ll know about, therefore giving you better options.

While the love and work parts of the game will take the same in-game time, they’ll be much faster to play through than the super-hero part. The focus is strongly on using super-powers in cool ways, but the other dimensions are there to deepen the game.

To Be Continued…

In the next three days I’ll spend more time describing gameplay in more concrete details. Till then, tell me what you think in the comments. I’d love to know whether whether you like this approach to a super-hero game or not!

See ya tomorrow!

This week’s theme and platform:

• Theme: Super-Heroes
• Platform: PSP

Well, it looks like my random number generator likes handhelds…

As for the theme, super-heroes should be easier than last week. The last 3 weeks were pretty intellectual games, but this time there should be more action. It’ll be a nice change of pace.

On the other hand, it’ll be challenging to be original. Super-heroes are all over the place these days: there’s a bunch of games, movies and even TV shows about them. Staying clear of the clichés could be difficult, unless of course I decide to embrace them.

Will the game be filled with men in brightly-colored spandex? Come back tomorrow to know! Same bat-time, same bat-website!

So far I’ve talked about this game in very abstract ways. The gameplay is fairly well defined from a high and low-level point of view, but the presentation of the game on the screens isn’t clear.

That’s what I want to cover today: the interface and the look & feel of the game.

Interface

The Nintendo DS is a special challenge when it comes to interface design because of its two screens. Even if everything would work great in a single screen, you can’t just leave the other one empty. A popular approach is to put information in one screen and gameplay in the other — that’s the approach I’ll use here.

The top screen will contain the status and other needed information. That’s where you’ll check to see if everything is going well. Characters will also appear in this screen to help you with various aspects of vineyard management — they’re the tutorial and hint feature of the game.
The bottom screen is where all interactions are done using the touch screen. You do the different actions by clicking on objects around the vineyard. For example, from the highest level to managing the aging of the wine, you’d go through the following steps.

1. World map: Select the vineyard you want to manage (if you just have one, that step is automatically skipped)
2. Overall view of the vineyard: You select the main building to enter it
3. Interior of the main building: That’s where all the tools to manage the fermentation of the wine are located. You select the oak barrels where the wine ages.
4. Barrels: That’s where you get the information about the aging process: temperature, characteristics of the wine, etc. You can also do the actions related to the aging here.

For each action, you have two options: you can queue them for automatic completion or do them manually. The former is the fastest method. If you’re short on time one day, you can automate all the tasks to save time. The manual method involves playing a mini-game for each action you decide to do manually. Doing it this way takes more time, but results in a superior wine at the end.

Look & Feel

The movie “A Good Year” — about a vineyard — has the type of ambiance I’d like for that game; go watch the trailer to see what I mean. Don’t worry, I’ll wait…

Back? Ok, so you saw the relaxing and old-fashioned ambiance of the vineyard in the movie. There’s a lot of nature, everything is in soft colors and the lighting makes it look like it’s always early morning. This rustic decor is exactly what I want for this game — this ambiance is the dream of every stressed worker.

The graphics would be 2D — low-polygon 3D graphics wouldn’t fit the mood of this game at all. I’d like them to look like paintings, not entirely realistic but not cartoony either. Characters would be drawn in a Franco-Belgian comics style, with a lot of personality.

The overall look and feel should be relaxed and shouldn’t give players any feeling of urgency. They come to this game to unstress, so let’s give them a dream-like setting.

Wrapping it Up

So that’s it with this project. It was a very challenging theme and I wish I spent a bit more time on it — I still feel there are loose ends that would need some work. Still, I think this game could be a hit if handled properly — it’s the type of game that can reach older people who don’t play much. It would obviously be a risk though, there aren’t many precedent to indicate how well this could sell.

This exercise definitely raised my confidence as a designer. I mean, if I can make a game about wine, I can handle just about anything. That game concept isn’t perfect (not nearly, actually), but it showed me that you can find an interesting gameplay angle even when a theme doesn’t feel game-like. It pushed back my limits about what I consider appropriate for games.

So, don’t hesitate to post in the comments if you have any comments, questions or if you simply want to tell me I’m an arrogant bastard to think I can handle anything design-wise… And don’t forget to come back on Monday when I tackle something entirely different.

First of all, sorry for the lack of update yesterday. I had a job interview and was otherwise pretty busy, and what’s more the site was down for a while.

Anyway, let’s jump directly to today’s subject:

Variety

There was concern in the comments that this game could become repetitive. Indeed, wine making isn’t renowned as a thrilling activity full of surprise and excitement. But that doesn’t mean the game can’t be varied.

There are 2 dimensions to variety in games: breadth and depth. Breadth is variety by the sheer number of elements. For example, Diablo has a lot of breadth because there are many different items and monsters in the game — you never know what you’ll get. Depth is variety through the richness of the gameplay. Chess doesn’t have much breadth (just a few pieces and a board that always stay the same) but it’s a very deep game. Every game is different because the layout of the pieces evolves differently each time.

In the case of Pocket Vineyard, it would be hard to find enough different things to add a lot of breadth. Depth, on the other hand, is quite possible if the rules of the game are interesting and subtle enough. That’s why I decided to try to add more depth to the gameplay.

Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, is the best at creating these open-ended simulations. Studying how he does his stuff is a great way to learn how to make a more interesting vineyard simulation.

In Sim City, there’s a large number of factors that influence the city: amount of residences and other types of buildings, amount of roads, pollution, and so on. Every action the player makes influences multiple factors at the same time. Raising taxes increases the money you have but makes people unhappy, building more roads reduces traffic congestion but increases pollution and so on. The interaction of all these factors and actions makes it challenging to find the best course of action, and that’s where the fun lies.

Sim Vineyard

Using that approach, we should have a large number of factors that affect the quality of the wine and actions that change multiple factors simultaneously. Luckily for the game, making high quality wine is a complex activity that requires subtle balance.

Here’s a bunch of factors that could be taken in consideration by the game. Each must be balanced: too much is just as bad as too little and different types of wines have different needs.

• Sugar-level in the grapes
• Yeast amount
• Amount of grapes produced
• Purity
• Acidity
• Quantity of tannins
• Moisture
• Grape ripeness
• and so on…

If this were the full design for the game, I’d make sure to learn enough about wine-making to know which factors are important and which can be ignored. I’m not expert enough on the subject to make these decisions in this blog, but you get the idea of what kind of factors should be considered.

Your actions as a player affect those variables each day. Cutting half the leaves of each plant could increase the amount of sun grapes get directly (and hence sugar), but could reduce moisture. Using artificial fertilizer can help grow more grapes faster, but reduces the purity of the fruit. All actions have that kind of complex impact, so each day you must decide which actions will help you reach your goals.

What’s more, you’re limited to a few actions each day. Your vineyard has a limited number of people working on it, so you can’t do everything every time. You have to decide how to best spend your time each time you start the game.

You also have to take random events into account. The most obvious is the weather. While you’ll get short term forecast and long term trends, you can’t be sure how much sun or rain you’ll get. Sickness and troublesome insects can also cause problems and force you to readjust your plans. It’s this randomness that adds the most variety: every day conditions change so you can never be sure of what will happen.

That’s it for Today

I think that explains better what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis in this game. With a deep enough simulation and random variations, we ensure the situation always evolves and requires interesting decisions by the player. Studying the art and science behind wine making would be necessary to balance realism, fun and approachability however.

I still need to define more clearly how to control the game. I now have a pretty good idea of what you do while playing the game, but I’m not really sure yet how to actually do those actions. That’s what I’ll figure out tomorrow.

It took two days of intense thinking, but I did come up with an idea I like for a wine-based game. I had to read through a lot of documentation (Wikipedia has a surprising amount of info about wine). I thought about a bunch of weird ideas, from a wine trivia quiz to a tradeable wine game (”I attack with my Bordeaux and deal 5 damage to your cheese!”). Nothing worked, until I remembered an idea for a gardening game I had a few years ago. Here it is, adapted to wine-making.

Virtual Wine-Making
The slow, meticulous and old-fashioned work of producing wine is a haven of calm for many over-stressed workers. A lot of people dream of owning a vineyard — that’s the experience this Nintendo DS game will give them.

It’s not a tycoon game. It’s closer to a pet game where you create the perfect bottle of wine rather than raise a puppy. You have to manage your vineyard — get rid of pests, irrigate the grapes, make sure fermentation progresses well, etc. — a little bit every day. Even while the game is off, the vineyard keeps evolving so you must return regularly to make sure everything is perfect.

Gameplay Basics

Your first task is to choose where to set your first vineyard. Do you choose the traditional approach with a location in France or Italy? Or do you prefer the New World, creating a Californian or Australian wine? As you get more successful you’ll be able to get more than one vineyard, but your first choice determines what kind of wine you’ll start with.

Then you’ll have to decide which kind of wine to create. Between red and white, of course, but also rosé, champagne, ice wine or many others. This choice affects the location you choose (doing ice wine in Spain wouldn’t work), the equipment you’ll need and the approach you take to make the wine. An in-game help system will help you with all these choices if you desire.

As you return to your virtual vineyard each day, you’ll have many tasks to take care of.

• Buy new equipment and land
• Improve the quality of the terroir (the characteristics of the location of the vineyard that impact the quality of the wine, such as the characteristics of the ground)
• Cultivate grapes and make sure everything goes smoothly (get rid of problematic bugs and sickness, for example)
• Take care of fermentation to get the best possible wine
• Age the wine properly

Your approach to wine-making is your own choice. You can go the traditional way — pressing grapes barefoot and using natural methods of growing grapes — or use the ultra-modern approach — use high tech wine-presses and the best chemicals science invented. Each has its advantages and drawbacks.

Once the wine is ready, it’s time to bottle it up. You’ll be able to design your own bottle and create your own labels. It’s then sent to stores, where the quality of your creation determines how much money you get to expand your vineyard or buy new ones.

Wine Tasting and Other Features

What does virtual wine taste like? Pocket Vineyard will tell you. By analyzing the way you created the wine, it’ll determine its characteristics and give you a detailed description. You’ll know if it’s “intense, spicy, supple and deep” or “fresh, dry, honeyed and lively”.

Still, that’s no substitute for the real thing. To let you experience the closest thing to your real wine, the game will recommend a few real wines close to your creation based on its attributes and its terroir. It will have a database of wines and their characteristics (and if place is tight, the database will be available by connecting online).
What’s more, each virtual year the game will feature a wine competition in which your wine will earn prizes if you did a good job. Getting the first prize in a category will greatly increase the sales of your wine, giving you more money to improve and extend your vineyard.

But what’s drinking wine without your friends? By connecting online with the DS’ wifi connection, you’ll be able to send a virtual wine bottle or postcard from your vineyard by email.

Conclusion

This game idea is very casual, it’s more a toy than a game (for those fluent in design vernacular). I don’t think it would be popular with hardcore gamers, but it may be able to reach the “gray gamers” Nintendo is marketing the DS to with Brain Age. In any case, it’s quite different from other games on the market.

Tomorrow I’ll go into more details about the intricacies of the gameplay — don’t miss it!

This week’s random theme is a woozy — the most challenging on my “list of random themes”. I hoped it’d come up later, but randomness being what it is, I got it this week.

• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Theme: Wine Tasting

This is about as inappropriate for video games as it come. Games are good with sight, sound and even touch (with rumbling controllers), but have nothing for taste and smell. Wine tasting, on the other hand, is all about taste and smell. Obviously, a game based on virtually tasting and evaluating wine isn’t going to work…

So, why did I put that theme in my list in the first place? The whole idea of a game based on tasting wine comes from an interview Yu Suzuki (the guy who created Virtua Fighter and Shenmue among others) had years ago with the now defunct Next Generation magazine. In it, he talked about his hobbies and how it influenced his work. He mentioned he liked wine tasting and that there probably was a way to make a game out of that. If Yu Suzuki thinks he can make a game out of that, then it deserved to be on my list.

Of course, now I’m stuck with having to find a good game idea… Whatever it is, it should be unique. Come back tomorrow when, hopefully, I will have thought of something.

In the comments, Thelo made me realize that controlling this game like I described could become quite complicated. To solve this problem I rethought the user-interface and decided to go with a more SimCity-esque control scheme rather using the RTS model.

Rather than ordering characters around, you’ll just have to decide what needs to be done and characters who are skilled and available would come to take care of it. To create a building, you’d just choose what building to make and decide its position and builders would come work on it automatically. You could collect a specific resource by constructing the appropriate building and characters would go collect nearby resources of that type. Exploring would be just as simple: select a point and explorers go discover its surroundings.

If you so desire, you’d also be able to select a specific character and assign him to a specific task. That’s useful to make sure one character gets a particular skill very high for example.

You could also change the speed of the game, from completely stopped (to let you issue complex orders at your leisure) to accelerated (to avoid waiting for a critical building being constructed). Entering menus, like for diplomacy or for customizing buildings, would also pause the game, so you can take the time you need.

Story

This type of game doesn’t usually have a story, but I think it would be a good idea to add a bit of mystery around the island. By dropping hints of the secret past of the island here and there, you give an additional incentives to players to go explore every nook and cranny (and that’s the theme of this week’s game after all!).

By finding ancient temples and relics of the past, the player would be able to piece together the story of the archipelago. It’s be revealed that the group of island is, in fact, the lost continent of Mu that sunk thousands of years ago along with its civilization. Only the highest peaks of the continent were kept above the water and that’s where the player ended up. Getting more information would reveal a bit more about who the Mu people was, what made the continent sink and how some of them decided to travel to a distant land, where they became the Mayans.

Look and Feel

The premise of this game is rather bleak — a few survivors of a shipwreck, trying to survive in adverse conditions — but I want to have an happier overall feel. The focus of the game is on exploring, but you wouldn’t feel like exploring if the whole game was dark and gritty.

As such, I believe the game would be better served with lush scenery that makes you want to see more of it. The island should be covered with green forest, magnificent waterfalls and gorgeous ruins. It should look like a great vacations spot… if it weren’t for the absence of food and the raids by angry natives.

Musically, Cuban music could be interesting. It would add a lot of life and energy to the game, but maybe a little too much considering the theme. Otherwise some world fusion music could work great too — some Indian-inspired music would add an exotic touch and sound different than most games soundtracks.

That’s All Folks

And with that, the second design challenge comes to an end. The result is a pretty ambitious project, but not exceedingly so. I think the game could appeal to a pretty wide market: it has an interesting premise (likely to be popular seeing the success of Lost and Survivor) and it probably wouldn’t require a very powerful computer to run. The customization aspect is likely to bring a community around this game too.

It wasn’t an easy design either. I really wasn’t sure where I was going with this theme at the beginning of the week and I had to change a few features as the concept progressed, but I think the result is pretty good — I’d play that game!

Come back on Monday when I’ll start with a new theme, with something (probably) completely different. And tell people you know about this site, it’d be so much more fun with a bit more action in the comments

Yesterday was all about describing how to control the characters and the task they have to do, today is going to be about resources and construction. These survivors will need to build useful structures if they’re going to survive the long months stranded on that island.

But first, a change from the original concept.

Goodbye Sophisticated Player Modeling

Remember on Tuesday, I talked about modeling the player’s behavior in a sophisticated way? The game would check whether the player favored religion or science, freedom or control and so on? Well that’s gone.

That idea sounded really good when I came up with it, but it’s just not practical so I have to cut it. Sometimes you have to get rid of really interesting features because they don’t fit the rest of the game — that’s such a case.

The problem is that most factors the player would be modeled on don’t correspond to any current gameplay feature. Sure I could add some elements related to science and religion just so I could check what aspect the player prefers, but that would just complicate the design with little usefulness.

One aspect that still makes sense to analyze is pacifism vs. aggressiveness. By checking how often the player fights with other tribes, we can simulate that behavior when other players download their island. It uses features that are already in the game, it’s fairly easy to evaluate and it’s useful, so that part of player behavior modeling can stay in.

Resources

Back to things that are in the game: resources collection. What are the resources you can collect?

• Food
• Wood
• Rock
• Metal

Food is needed to keep all of your tribe alive. If you don’t have enough, your characters won’t be able to heal the wounds they may get during the game. If you’re missing a lot of food, the characters will start to slowly lose health.

I thoughts about splitting “Food” in two categories: “Fruits and Vegetables” and “Meat”. You’d start the game with mostly veggies, but as technology improves you could get some sort of cattle to provide meat. I didn’t include that feature because it added complexity and I couldn’t think of an interesting effect meat could have over fruits and vegetables. I’d certainly consider adding that back in if I found a way to make it interesting.

The next three resources — wood, rock and metal — are all construction materials needed to build the various buildings in the game. At first only wood would be available, but as the tribe’s tools become more powerful they could be used to carve rocks and mine metal.

These resources would work like in RTS games: you need a certain amount of each to make each building. When balancing the game, it will be necessary to avoid “circle of deaths”, like needing wood to build the only place that lets you get wood. These situations can make players get stuck without some resource and no way to get any more.

Buildings

I keep talking about how you’ve got many buildings to construct in the game, but I haven’t given examples yet. So here are some:

• Housing: Needed for each of the character on the island. That’s where they sleep. Better housings make them heal faster and makes them live longer.
• Food reserve: Where excess food is kept. This building increases the maximum amount of food that can be collected.
• School: A character with a high skill level can help other characters raise that skill.
• Infirmary: Where wounded characters can come to get healed. Also increases the average life length of characters (outside of violent deaths).
• Storeroom: Where resources other than food are kept. Increases the maximum amount that can be accumulated.
• Armory: Where characters go get weapons and armor.
• Walls: They protect the village.
• Mine: Allows access to metal.
• Forge: Building this structure unlocks access to everything requiring metal.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, you’ll be able to customize the look of your buildings as you wish. You’ll start with a basic shape and elements that need to be there, but you’ll be able to choose the shape of the walls, of the roof, what materials and colors are used, etc. Not all materials will be available at first and they’ll have an effect on the game: making a building out of stone will make it sturdier than out of wood. This will also affect the resources and time needed to create the building. The goal is to make it easy and fun to customize your buildings, but at the same time to make it useful and to leave room to experimentation.

Conclusion

So, just one day left. If there’s something you wished I spent more time explaining, you should ask about it now in the comments. In any case I’ll be concentrating more on look and feel tomorrow since gameplay is pretty well covered.

See you tomorrow for the final details of this fun exploratory design!

Yesterday I talked about the high level concept behind this exploration game. It’s an ambitious and interesting concept, but it has to be supported by good low-level gameplay to be fun. That’s what I want to cover today: how the game is controlled, what differentiate one character from another, how technology development works, how the game eventually finishes — that kind of stuff.

The Main Tasks

There are four main things you have to do in this game:

• Exploration: To discover the island and find everything you need.
• Building: To create the structures where the people stranded on this island will sleep, cook their food, work, etc.
• Collecting Resources: Everybody needs to eat and drink, but wood and metal are also needed to build everything else.
• Fighting: Wild animals and hostile natives sometimes need to be pushed back or killed if the group is to survive.

Each of those corresponds to a skill every character in your “tribe” has. If a character does a lot of a particular action, he’ll become stronger in one skill but not in the others. That way, as time goes on characters become specialized. Losing a highly skilled character could be a serious hit to your tribe, so you have to protect them.

Raising a skill will have multiple effects. Raising Exploration, for example, would make the character faster and give him a larger range of sight, while raising Fighting would make the character hit stronger and give him more hit points.

Controls

The point of view of the camera in the game and the controls are similar to those in a RTS. You can select one or more characters and assign them to a task by clicking an object (the trees to collect wood, an animal to attack, etc.).

Left to their own, the characters will act in a sensible way according to their highest skill: an explorer will explore the surrounding area while a resource collector will go collect missing resources. At the start of the game, characters won’t have any skills and will require closer management. As they gain skills, they will become more and more independent.

At the same time characters become more independent, managing the tribe becomes more complex because there are more individuals and more buildings to take care of. That way the complexity of playing the game doesn’t become too high, you just shift from controlling individual characters to caring about the tribe and island as a whole.

If left alone, skilled characters will be able to keep the status quo but won’t make any breakthrough. A builder may repair the existing buildings or even create a needed hut to sleep in, but creating a new type of building will require your specific order. Likewise an explorer would explore the surrounding area but wouldn’t go deep into the jungle without your instructions.

Technology

As characters get better at their skills, they gain new insights and ideas. These ideas are reflected in the discovery of new technology. That’s how the tribe improves: when a character reaches a threshold level in a skill, he invents a new device. If he comes back to the city to tell everyone, then everybody will be able to use that new technology.

Here are some examples of technologies for each skill. The full game would feature more.

• Exploration
• Backpack: It allows the explorer to carry food with him, so he can venture further before having to return to the camp.
• Aboriginal Language: Allows the explorer to communicate with the natives of the island for diplomacy
• Machete: Makes the explorer walk faster and makes him better able to defend himself
• Building
• Tools: Increases construction speed
• Building Types: Each building type is a new technology to develop
• Better Planning: Reduces the amount of resources needed for construction
• Collecting Resources
• Mining: Allows collection of metal (outside of from the remains of the wreckage)
• Tools: Increases collecting speed
• Plantation: Increases food production
• Fighting
• Weapons: Increases damage dealt
• Armor: Increases resistance to damage
• Bow and Arrow: Allows to attack from a distance

The End of the Game

So how does this game finishes anyway? There are four paths to victory, one for each skill. Finishing the game will thus require thorough mastery of at least one skill — although they’ll all be needed to some extent during the game.

• Exploration: Make peace will all the tribes on all the islands of archipelago and become influential enough to become the ruler of all the islands.
• Building: Create a boat that’s sturdy enough to travel on the high seas, back to civilization.
• Collecting Resources: Become self-sustaining enough that the tribe could live comfortably on the island indefinitely.
• Fighting: Exterminate everybody else in the archipelago.

Even when one of these goals is reached, the game will still let you keep playing for as long as you want. Some players like a directed experience with a specific goal, others like a more sandbox-like game — this way we please both types.

The End of Day 3

I hope you get a better understanding of how this would play. There still plenty of questions unanswered however — but that’s why we still have 2 days left to this exercise.

I’m pretty happy with the direction this game is going in. I got a few positive comments from friends — including some pressure to get today’s post done quicker — so I’m guessing it could make a pretty popular game.