A New Day, a New Start

Alright, next day. Bad news: I wasted the night trying to fix a stupid bug in my iOS app (turned out to be an AutoLayout issue), and after doing a bit of necessary shopping it's already 4 pm. Good news: Borodust has already fixed the issue that prevented me from using his trivial-gamekit yesterday. Time for some prototyping!

Pen and Paper Prototyping

I figured it would be more productive to develop the gameplay idea using pen and paper; coding (and typing) just takes so much longer than scribbling something one a piece of paper.

A few hours and two A4 papers densely covered in writing later, I have a rough idea of how the gameplay mechanics should look. Basically, the internal state of the game is represented by a graph together with a set of internal variables of the player, representing his emotional and mental state. So, the graph represents the externally visible state, whereas the "hidden variables" the subjective one.

Each vertex of said graph represents a situation/scene (e.g. player lies on bed, player sits on bed), and where each edge presents an "action" (visualized by an appropriate animation). Such an action can lead from one situation to a different one (e.g. action get up transitions from player lies in bed to player sits on bed) or lead back to the same situation (e.g. keep dozing), only affecting the internal state.

The internal variables are:

• Awareness/Consciousness
• Arousal/Calmness
• Mood
• Wants (hunger, thirst)

With the exception of the last variable, which is discrete, all these variables are continuous and one-dimensional (i.e. real numbers), and they effect the gameplay in different ways.

For example, Awareness has two effects. First, a sufficient level of awareness is necessary to even make decisions. Otherwise, these "decisions" (i.e. actions) are solely determined by habits and wants, i.e. which edge transition is chosen is determined randomly, with pre-set proabilities that are influenced by the wants. Higher levels of awareness dampen the influes of wants, and increase the probability that the players choice coincides with the action his character takes. Second, awareness allows the player to recognize the emotional state (internal variables) of his character, and open up more, less stereotypical choices.

The effect of Mood is that a positive mood makes it more likely to be able to take an action that is perceived as unpleasant (e.g. cleaning up your room).

The effect of the Calmness variable is that it influences the influence (yes, that's meta) of the mood variable. To wit, having a good mood in a state of extreme excitation is ecstasy, whereas having a bad mood in the same state is insanity.

The Sketch of a Sketch

As I said Yesterday, I envision this game to be the movie Groundhog Day turned into a roguelike (if this roguelike was a text adventure). More concretely, the game should take place in the apartment of someone who is continually kept in a vicious circle of unhealthy decisions, and should focus on his daily routine. Of course the goal of this game (if it will ever exist) is to gain control of one's life, that is of the actions of the player character, by making appropriate choices that lead to more internal freedom and less addiction.

That's the rough idea at least. We'll see whether it will stay one.