Moodboard: 
Spotify Playlist (whoops it’s 1hr 10) min long:
Three Directions for our game (ex: sketches, types of fun, or narrative approaches :
- One direction our game could go in is a DnD type game where you share the computer with multiple people. Each person would assign a role to themselves and designate it in the terminal so the game knows what role each player is. The game could connect to some LLM like ChatGPT to procedurally generate storylines based off of character roles and their chosen adventure topics. Interspersed in these ChatGPT storylines would be short puzzles and minigames relating to whatever storyline the LLM has chosen. Imagine you’re robbing a bank, you might have to navigate through a lock picking puzzle to break into the security room and then a wire cutting puzzle to hack the cameras. These games could be made using Rust and animating the game in the terminal, or the LLM could prompt the players with text and solve the game that way.
- A second direction for our game is to have it be a single player game with one story line. This is probably a lot easier since we could probably hard code the whole game with decision trees leading to different endings. Some drawbacks would be that you’re playing alone (but maybe you like that) and you can really only play it once before knowing the whole story line (unless you want to speedrun it) until we add multiple endings. But even with multiple endings, not all players are interested in replaying the same game twice unless it’s drastically different. Similar to the first direction, we would have related puzzles/mazes/minigames within our game that users get to see visually in their terminal. We could also still add in some LLM challenges where we as designers forgo control and leave it up to the LLM and player to interact in a challenge.
- We really want to have a “hacker” vibe to this game that makes you feel like you’re doing something complicated like attacking the Kremlin’s mainframe, but without requiring any prior knowledge of computers, so anyone can play and have fun. A lot of this will be done through the game platform (Terminal) as a lot of non programmers feel very intimidated just typing something simple into this. We want to have some funky Matrix-esque animations happen when you start the game, like having a bunch of zeros and ones fall from the top of the screen (see mood board). We really want to make sure that players don’t think of the puzzles as being too similar, as this would get boring (players tend to hate simple reskins of recent games, so they would probably hate seeing the same puzzle in different variations over and over again). This differentiation in puzzles would likely make it more challenging, since the user isn’t using the same skillset on each puzzle and can’t pattern match as easily, but I think it’ll turn our relatively short storyline game into something more thoughtful, satisfying/gratifying to solve, and compare potential solutions online or with friends.
