Immunity: brainstorm and outline

saluk on 2011/09/11 00:34 of Fruitbat the 13th
— edited on 2011/09/11 01:03

As a manager at the CDC, it is your burden to ensure that you have hired the right people to the right positions around the country. You never know when the next outbreak may occur, and when it does, you want to know where it came from, where it is going, and how to stop it. Little do you know that the next disease is already here, and it's going to be the toughest fight yet.

Basic premise: You are the manager of the CDC, or a CDC like organization. You have a limited budget and staff. A viral infection is on the loose, claiming victims across the country. During the game you will hire various agents to posts around the country from a map like interface. Each agent exerts some influence over an area. Their work will find out causes of the disease, lobby local governments for actions to help stem the spread of it, and research and implement of cures. As the game progresses, and you think of solutions to the problem, the virus is also thinking. It will react to every action taken against it. Cures used will no longer work, it will change its attack vector to avoid detection, and it will spread in different ways to help it reach places that you aren't looking for it.

Can you stop it before the nation - nay, the world - is completely wiped out?

Phases:

• Exploration/planning - recruit and position your team, try and spot when the disease hits and from where
• Curb and slow transmission - use media campaigns and travel restrictions from keeping the disease from spreading, while also investing in keeping the infected alive as long as possible to allow proper study
• Develop and implement a cure - try and save as many people as possible and wipe out as much of the strain as possible
• Immunize the rest - if you are successful, you will have stemmed the spread before it mutated. If not, be prepared to restart the cycle with a variant of the disease :)

Actions:

• Hire/fire members of your team
• Assign workforce to the locations on the map
• Give members of the workforce a job focus
• Follow up on incoming information to be able to react
• Initiate specific special action plans

Disease modelling:

• Each location has an infectable population, divided into 1000s
• Each of those infectable population groups belongs to a demographic
• Population groups move around the map
• Disease starts with certain characteristics - spread vector and rate, time to symptom, symptoms, time to live, death rate, and resistances
• Disease will latch onto a population and be represented as a number of infected in that population
• Based on the activities of the population, and the spread vector and rate, the disease can be added to another population in the same space
• Local situations on a space, influenced by the agents there, will adjust these spread factors
• Cures or treatments can lower the infected amount in populations
• Diseases that are attacked (cures, immunization) but still alive, will tweak their characteristics

Style: 

• Not too realistic - have fun with it
• Interesting symptoms!
• icons and interface clear enough to have an idea of whats happening, without being too transparent (hidden information is an important part of the game mechanic)
• Pixel art for various things, but low on animation. A shot of someone in a hospital bed for instance. Only the bare minimum of art.
• Exciting interface to make up for lack of art, icons moving from place to place, color cycling, etc
• Creepy music stolen from ccMixter. Lots of it on a cycle.
• Nice interface sounds, clicks, pops, etc that feel good

Development plan:

• 1-2 days of design. Breadth and depth. Occasional programming, but only to check if an idea is worth pursuing or not. NAIL DOWN SCOPE - What is absolutely necessary? What isn't?
• 1-2 days engine work. Focus on the feel of the game. The icons and menus. Basic basic graphical elements - but not so programmer arty that they can't be used in final. Don't worry about being able to "win". The game may ultimately not be winnable anyway - the virus keeps evolving until it is unbeatable? Ensure all of the REQUIRED elements are in, even if not tweaked well.
• 3 days of tweaking and additions. Add elements that are not required. Make game fun. Must stress again. Make game fun. Identify potential problem areas early on and get them taken care of. First 10 minutes, not the third or fourth 10 minutes of gameplay. Engine should not have obvious bugs by this point.

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Comments

saluk on 2011/09/11 01:05:

Yeah we'll see if I can avoid programming the first few days, but going to try. Almost every game I have made for a contest that I was unhappy may have been fixable in the design phase, but by the time all the code was together there is no saving it.