A game design emerges. What do you do, player?

saluk on 2011/09/08 21:30 of Fruitbat the 13th

Like some of you, I have been working on coming up with workable plans for each of the 5 themes under contention. I also did some brainstorming in the weeks before, to kind of pick a direction I wanted to head. All of my plans are meant to be manifestations of the same idea, but colored and shaped by the theme. There are a few concepts I am aiming for to explore with my design this week:

Clear and meaningful player choice
Be inspired from abstract concept rather than other games
Flexible game system
Emergent simulation
Light on time consuming elements such as graphics

And here are some very brief statements about the more concrete plans I have for the themes.

More criticals - change a populations viewpoint on a topic (critical mass to sustain the viewpoint) through social networking. Primary inspiration: political campaigns.
Mr Fixit - take jobs to fix clients broken devices, but parts can be hard to come by, and when the devices get strange, you may wonder if you should accept the jobs at all. Primary inspiration: Brazil
Mutate - fight the spread of infectious disease without causing it to mutate and invalidate all of your work. Primary inspiration: pandemic. Ok, so it IS a game, but at least it's not a video game :)
Mysterious stranger -You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now are caught between rival factions and their turf war. With no fighting skill or any skills of note for that matter, survival lies in turning enemies into friends. Primary inspiration: Enemy Mine
Negotiator - You are used to receiving some pretty strange and difficult calls working for the local counseling and crisis hotline. But through negotiation with a few callers you become aware of a dangerous situation that seems to be brewing in town. Trapped in the crisis center and armed only with a phone, can you make a difference? Primary inspiration: natural disasters

So far, I only have real gameplay planned for criticals, fixit, and negotiator. For those games I can visualize what the interface looks like, and how the game proceeds. Mutate has not yet taken complete shape in my mind, but I have an inkling of what it may be like. Mysterious stranger is the theme I have had the hardest time with, and it was the last one I came up with an idea for. I have no actual gameplay idea for it at all at this point.

Also, each idea I came up with I thought was better than the last, until I got to mutate and negotiator, which I feel are weaker. So please, vote for more criticals, negotiator, or mr fixit :)

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Comments

saluk on 2011/09/10 06:03:

And some modifications. I just realized my plan for More Criticals fits Mysterious Stranger perfectly. You are a mysterious stranger to the net trying to make friends and gain influence, in order to change the timestream somehow. So I'm going to do that game for either of those themes, just with a slightly different goal. I'm much more interested in that idea than what I wrote above, which isn't even a game idea at all.

Still pretty light on details for most of these, but half the fun is figuring it ou!

Hugoagogo on 2011/09/10 10:43:

Also pandemic is a computer game to (a flash one at least) http://www.crazymonkeygames.com/Pandemic-2.html

saluk on 2011/09/10 17:07:

Yes well that's not the same. Here is the pandemic I am referring to: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30549/pandemic

If you like board games and haven't yet played it you are missing out. Also, if you are interested in game design but only play video games and not board games, you are missing where a lot of great design is happening these days.

saluk on 2011/09/10 17:09:

On the other hand, that version of pandemic is a pretty interesting idea :)