For our game (Congrats Grad!) we decided to focus on modeling the journey of life after college, especially when it comes to moving. We wanted players to experience and get a sense of the complexity that is often overlooked in this aspect of post-grad life. Our elements include the main goal: to actually decide STAY or MOVE, which is accomplished through accumulating 15 points. The relationships are kind of left to the players to build, through the scenarios they’ll make up as the game progresses. The objects include the dice, which players roll to see if their scenarios succeeds or not, the initial traits, which makes the character’s initial profile, Our architecture is very simple, with immediate feedback (dice roll results) that determine whether or not players’ actions (made-up scenario) succeeds. This creates a loop, as they aim to earn 5 points through repeating this process. The arcs would be when players align their values, and when they reach 15 points (which ends the game).
Not all scenarios are the same, different scenarios will be assigned a difficulty level (easy, medium, hard) which is agreed upon by the other players. Harder scenarios reward more points, but also are riskier (ex: roll 1 to succeed). This encourages players to choose with caution and randomize their scenarios more. At the end of the game, players will summarize their journey (what they started off as, what changed, what scenarios happened).
