- Our game is an animal themed social deduction game where good players must complete tasks and identify evil players before they sneak enough of their team onto the Ark. The main mechanism will be trading resources for information and voting.
1. How do we make sure the game finds a balance between logical reasoning and social interaction so it’s fun?
Games are best when they hit a sweet spot between intellectual challenge and social engagement, so answering this question is critical to producing a game that is genuinely fun to play. In our discussions, we went back and forth on how much logical reasoning to incorporate compared to dramatic elements like acting, bluffing, and deceiving. Right now our key logical mechanisms are vote trading, uncertain information, and identity corroboration. In our prototype, we will test combinations of these to decide how many to keep in order to strike the perfect balance. Our guess is that we will keep identity corroboration, as it is a very original idea, even if it may be complicated to learn at first.
2. How can we make sure players get an equal amount of participation regardless of their role?
A flaw we’ve noticed in asymmetric social deduction games is that participation is frequently unequal — sometimes the bad players face much more pressure, while good players grow bored due to limited information. We want to address this through prototyping so that all players feel equally engaged. Our current strategy is to introduce a third-party role whose purpose is to introduce chaos, providing natural cover for bad players while complicating the good players’ job enough to prevent boredom. We will also incorporate more information-gathering techniques in the prototype. Our intuition is that this approach can work, and we will playtest to find the ideal player ratio for a balanced power dynamic.
3. How can we make sure our game feels original rather than a modification of an existing game?
Our game drew inspiration from classic social deduction games like Avalon, Blood on the Clocktower, and Werewolf. We want to ensure it feels authentic and original — especially to players familiar with those games — so they are excited by the new mechanics. Our prototype will incorporate elements from all three (the voting mechanism from Avalon, role diversity from Blood on the Clocktower, and the game flow of Werewolf), alongside original mechanics like resource trading with the option to backstab, identity corroboration through verifiable but potentially false claims, and an investigator badge that reveals authentic identities. There are many elements, perhaps too many at this stage, and our goal with the prototype is to cut them down until the balance feels right. We hope to keep the envelope trading mechanic, which feels ceremonial and distinctive enough to set our game apart from its inspirations.
