Of the three mood boards I made, the one that was the most exciting was a retro space-themed mood board about a game where you run a space diner. (My other two mood boards are included at the bottom of this post.)
I decided to flesh this out with a space-y/jazzy/vibey Spotify playlist. I was trying to capture a laid-back mood that invited curiosity and exploration.
My initial gameplay concept was centered around the idea of running a space diner. An emergent narrative would be told through your interactions with various patrons that you make burgers for. Your choice of which ingredients to put in the burgers affects your relationship with patrons and how the story progresses. For example, you could feed a romance-inducing space-tomato burger to the sergeant of a warfaring space nation to learn more about the military affairs of the galaxy. Or you could feed an aggression-sparking space-BLT to a traveling merchant to spark a brawl in the diner so you have time to swipe some cash from the register. This idea was partly inspired by a flower-arranging game I once played during a game jam.
Another gameplay concept I like is telling an emergent narrative through a game about being a space package delivery person. Think: UPS driver but for the cosmos. Interesting story beats could be centered around picking up packages and delivering them to their destinations (ranging from delivering a package from a worried parent to their college student on the neighboring planet or delivering contraband from a space-pirates planet to the high-profile clients on an elite, military planet). The player could also change the course of the game by deliberately delivering packages to the wrong destination. Imagine, for example, a package you suspect is a bioweapon is marked for delivery to your home planet where your spouse and kids live. As the driver, you instead decide to deliver it to a rebel nation, wiping out a resistance movement that was threatening the sovereignty of the fascist regime of the galaxy. Papers, Please kind of flavor. Here’s a couple gameplay sketches:
Other mood boards. In order: vintage suburbia walking simulator and cozy coffee shop dating simulator.
