@mapacible thanks for trying it ! My prototype is done in spare time, so there are a lot of rough edges to fix, so really appreciate any thoughts, in particular on someone that are same path as mine (but more professionaly as far I can see). For more info about my project, you can read previous posts in this topic, in particular long posts that are reasoning on this topic. You can take a look on my blog too, in particular here:
https://randomtower.blogspot.com/2018/09/infiltration-open-design-points.html personally I've found really useful to drawn a tree/like structure for game mechanics as suggested in the book " Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences, by Tynan Sylvester."
My goal as said in first post is to create "
a turn based single player asymmetric game where player take control of an agent and manipulate actors and organizations to obtain victory", not sure if your concept is similar or not.
About world that is more interesting, currently there are some "major" systems that are outside of normal agent lifecycle in place:
- clue system: more player actions do, more high is chance that an agent try to investigate about it
- faction system: like you said, factions/guilds has relations in place and can do wars
- food system: wars between guilds and some random values in place move foods (think about seasons for example) and this could contribute for rebellions to start if there is no enough food in a city
- rebellion: a city accumulate over time from player and agent actions or another system rebellion points and after a threshold a rebellion start. My idea here is that a rebellion could "infect" another cities and cause government change, but for now is out of the scope for this prototype
- recruitment: from time to time, new actors will popup to keep world interesting
- I'd suggest that you exert extra time thinking about more ways for the player can interact with the world. This was also a previous issue with our game. Since the game is simulating NPCs, you may get caught up and be focused too much on the world as a simulation but may neglect that the player must have interesting ways to interact with it and not end up mostly just watching the events taking place. From what I can see right now, there are three available actions: Corrupt, Calling and Move. I'd love to hear what your other future plans for player interaction.
Yes, you nailed Infiltration main problem right now! I have a clear roadmap for this prototype, but for sure on next iteration (or next game) this will be main focus.
You miss maybe a thirt action "Manipulate", when you click on a relation between a corrupted actor and another actor, you start an action between these two based on how much madness target has.
- It may be difficult for the player to keep track of everything that occurs in a tick. Maybe you can also do it like we did where each character and location has their own log list. Like this:
I appreciate your suggestion and there is a similar concept already as "quest log" in actor screen:
there is also a general log that you can filter for each city on bottom part of the screen, nothing fancy, but do the job.
Thanks for your time!