by Ananya Navale
My team is gearing up towards creating a semi-cooperative story-building role-playing social deduction game (phew, that was a mouthful). What that complicated phrase would look like is: each player receives a character role with a certain contribution requirement (perhaps, a speech restriction or certain type of behavior they must exhibit). As play begins, the players collaboratively concoct a story through the voices of their characters. But wait! The plot thickens.
Each player is given a number of quests to complete to add points to their total score at the end of the game. These quests involve coercing fellow storytellers to use certain words or add particular plot twists to the story. After a certain number of rounds, players tally up their quest earnings, and make note of which role they believed each other player to be. Roles are revealed, and points are lost or won. The winner is the player with the most points at the culmination. That part is simple.
Now… our prototypes will be testing for some very critical assumptions that our design is making:
- What is the ease of on-the-spot story generation for players? This is absolutely fundamental to the game play – are players willing to participate in this story-building mechanism? Is it even fun? Ideally, a game like this would result in the most outrageous stories being created, with no clear direction and as many twists and turns as you could ever dream of. All reliant on the creativity of the players themselves. To test this, we might start with giving some optional starter cue cards to get the stories off on the right foot, and assess whether players utilize or discard these suggestions. I anticipate once the energy picks up in this “magic circle”, the story will form on its own through the creativity of the players, and cues will be unnecessary.
- Should quests be focused on having the player complete an action or encouraging a different player to complete an action? This variation in mechanism could change the game completely. If certain prompts are too difficult to have other players complete, the game falls flat. On the other hand, if prompts are too easy to accomplish for the current player, there is no challenge aspect to the action. We might try to create a wide range of quests, both ones that individuals need to complete themselves and ones that they need their fellow storytellers to complete for them, and see which quests are being preferred over others. Although I would love to find a way for the inter-player questing to work, I believe that self-questing will prove more popular and successful.
- Which sorts of quest prompts are most accessible? Which are second-tier, reach prompts? The majority of points are expected to be earned from completing quests – as such, these quests need to be scaled correctly to their corresponding point values. Having a simple quest be worth 10 points while a hard quest is also worth 10 would create imbalance in the game. Based on the genres of quests we see being completed more frequently (from the previous prototype), we would attempt to generate more prompts in those varieties with slightly increased nuances and challenges and proportionally scale the points. We would also listen for pain points during play-testing (e.g. “That’s not fair, that was too easy but you got so many points…”). My hopes and expectations are that this task of classifying prompts won’t be as difficult as it seems now, and points will be straightforward to assign.
- Is it possible for players to keep track of which character they think each person is? What would that process look like? Should each player have a notepad to document their observations during the game? And how do they know which characters are in play if the player numbers are less than the number of roles available? This is the Mafia aspect, and will dictate the enjoyment and surprise at the end of the game when roles are revealed. To see how to facilitate this process, giving each player a paper and writing utensil to make their notes would be the best option, and observing whether they use these tools to remember their guesses. I predict that players may use these tools, but grudgingly, since the act of writing seems to me that it would pull them temporarily out of the game mindset…
