Mutagion - day 1

saluk on 2011/09/11 09:14 of Fruitbat the 13th

I decided to change the name from immunity (kind of boring) to mutagion (mashup of hot new movie contagion and the theme).

Today I did hardly anything. I waited most of the day for theme announcement, then after a short brainstorm session, I left it to simmer. Then right before bed, I picked up my notebook and started planning this stuff out.

First, rather than having faceless population groups on the map, I decided I should add some character. Each population group will be represented by a single character. For instance, a child group in an area will be abstracted away as Sally, the 6 year old rich girl who has all of the standard immunizations. Don't hurt me if some of these are racially or gender stereotypical :( I will try not to but it's hard. Ultimately all of the characters at the start of the game will probably be randomly generated though, so that might help.

I haven't decided yet whether you will be able to monitor the status of all people (clicking on a city, you see a list of all of the representative characters), or only see the ones who have reported they are sick. But you will in some fashion be able to read about the characters and try and spot the ones who have more than just the common cold before they die. Of course you will get reports of deaths as well.

I'm also throwing out the mechanic of hiring disease center agents and placing them on the map. I'm not sure what I'll be replacing it with, but it felt too indirect. And like a different game. I know there will be some types of actions you can take, ranging from things like collecting a blood sample from a person (which will give you a piece of info about the virus, if they have it); to more drastic actions like implementing a campaign for safe sex to curb spread of std (if the disease happens to be transmitted via sex).

The former will be far less costly to you as a player than the latter, and these resources will be one of the main mechanics. One of the ways to gain influence is to simply wait for the disease to be more of a threat. I'm not sure of other ways, but perhaps spending cash or healing famous people lol.

One of the things I want is multiple "solutions" to the game. For example, I thought of a strategy where you basically pick a city, and build up enough influence to implement the most drastic actions there. You halt air traffic in or out, block the roads, and make breathing masks, water filtration, and abstinence mandatory by law. Then you wait as the rest of the world is taken over by the disease :) Not that this is necessarily a good ending, or that I plan to actually implement this strategy or make it viable, but I want the possibility space of the game to be big enough that people can come up with crazy ideas like this and see what happens.

Scope still too big. Plan for tomorrow: simplify more, and begin coding diseases, spread, and how to influence them.

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Comments

cyhawk on 2011/09/11 11:51:

You could score the player based on the number of survivors. So isolating one city might be a safe but low-scoring strategy.

saluk on 2011/09/11 17:11:

Hmm, yeah. So if you pick the biggest city to isolate, you may end up kinda ok. But it's harder to influence bigger cities than smaller ones :)

Cosmologicon on 2011/09/11 17:20:

If you want to get all controversial and topical you can have an anti-vaccine movement you have to contend with. The boss level could be Jenny McCarthy.

tnelsond on 2011/09/11 17:51:

Hey, nice to hear from you Cosmologicon from LD.

saluk on 2011/09/11 20:59:

Actually I was considering that element cosmologicon :P However at the moment I am trying to cut back the scope rather than increase it... I still am not quite certain what the gameplay is. I need to nail that down today or all is lost!