Fair Play

A New Idea

I’m ruminating on a new project as we’re prepping the Roach for production. It emerged from my most recent game of Dogs, where I found myself (as I always do) feeling real sympathy for the town. What, I thought to myself, if instead of playing the all-powerful Dogs, you played the poor Steward of a town in crisis?

So in this game, you are just trying to keep your village from falling apart - things are constantly spinning out of control due to natural entropy, and then you’ve got these powerful “angels of God” who show up unannounced to pass judgment and order you to do stuff. It’d use the socially ablative damage Shreyas Sampat first suggested, like I use in Grey Ranks. So you can get hit over the head by a bandit and it may cause the crops to fail.

Right now I’m mulling over how to handle session design in some way that is as elegant and beautiful as town-building in Dogs. I need to think a lot more about what the game is about, which will probably suggest a solution.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 9:59 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.