When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.
At the end of this post, we will have:
All the final documents can be found here.
As a hobby, I write concept documents for games. This is first in English. I have a few more in Russian and will eventually translate them.
One more concept for The Tale 2.0.
Lords Captains MMO
Yep, it's a rip-off from Warhammer 40k and Rogue Trader, but it will do for the concept.
Explore the infinite universe on a starship with millions of souls on board, unite and develop abandoned worlds.
Browsers, mobile.
Exploration-driven trade-political MMO PVE sandbox.
EVE, Sim City, Crusader Kings, 4X games, Rogue Trader.
It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.
But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.
I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.
ATTENTION: SPOILERS!
If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.
I continue participating in World Builders school. For the last month, I've created a technical prototype of game mechanics for manipulating public opinion.
You play as the chief editor of a news agency, who sends journalists on quests and publishes articles based on the results of investigations focusing on themes that you want to promote.
The top video is in Russian, so I'll go through the main points below.
From the player preference survey, I gradually moved on to working on a game prototype.
The game will be about a news agency. You will be the chief editor, and your task is to manipulate public opinion by investigating events and choosing a connotation of news: where to draw the public's attention, what to hide, in what tone to present themes, etc.
Therefore, the whole game will be around the text of news.
Creating large blocks of detailed text for each news item looks pointless — the game is not about reading news but about managing them. Therefore, it makes sense to build interaction only around headlines.
But how can we make the displaying of news both interesting and simple?