So, I’m working on an ‘investigative’ game where the player has to rummage through the locker of a ‘new kid in school’ to determine if they are a jock or a nerd. This is tounge-in-cheek but it’s meant to create the experience of trying to judge a person based on circumstantial evidence.
I’ve decided I want to use procgen to generate the locker contents, hoping for replayability and emergent narrative experiences out of the combination of variables.
I’m going to share the gameplay loop and then a graph I built to plan out the connection between the variables. (I’m pretty sure this isn’t the ‘graph’ described in procgen computer science, but I’m working up to that!)
I’d love feedback and questions on the graph, either generally or if there’s a mistake or problem in my flow that I haven’t anticipated!
Gameplay loop follows.
1 - Investigate Locker: provide player with a large amount of items in the locker, all of which have some level of semiotic connection to the faction question.
2 - Player chooses from among the items in the locker (let’s say 10) that help prove the faction allegiance of the locker owner.
3 - Player submits this list to a judge of some kind. (Perhaps a teacher or Mean Girl queen of the schoolyard.) The judge evaluates these submissions, and then also releases the actual faction allegiance of the student, at which point the player has succeed or failed.
Some of my points of inspiration have been:
https://www.rcveeder.net/blog/2017/05/17/procedural-generation-of-dinosaurs-in-inform-7/
