Game Design 2018-11-09
In this post:
- Admitting I published this late.
- A summary of my design sketch from last night.
- Analysis, and future plans.
- I wonder if it's possible to extract information from a lot of bitcoin wallets involved in similar illegal activity.
Okay, I meant to write this last night, but that wasn't how time shook out. What I got done last night was to sketch up an idea of what the journey interface could be like. It's a series of waypoints that represent resting for the night, connected by lines that represent a day's travel. Each waypoint and connection, including the source and destination, are annotated with a short explanatory snippet. The connections happen to be such that they'd fit on a hex grid, which might be an interesting way to take the map.
The annotations are short and to-the-point. They include:
- A mundane event while traveling
- Minor hardship while traveling
- Several quest hooks to revisit later (I think the game should push the player towards completing the current quest before rushing off to fulfill other hooks)
- Meeting other caravans on the road
- Bandits
- Mysterious events with no obvious course of action in response
I don't know what's a good proportion of these in an actual game. So far as length, I want to have what the player sees be short and to-the-point. Perhaps there's some way to drill down, but I don't think I want to lean on that idea.
I think to build on this, I'd next need to translate this framework—GOD FUCKING DAMMIT I JUST GOT ANOTHER BITCOIN EXTORTION EMAIL (it's from about half an hour in the future)—to an Ink file where I have an approximate category for each step of a journey, and just start filling in stuff for the categories, see what makes sense. That, and make more of these as I figure out which systems I want to flesh out.
Next time, I should look over some actual design documents and figure out how hard to go with this stuff.