P2: Map, Premise, Project Plan

Hello everyone! Here are some notes I’ve made in an effort to try and flesh out + build the foundations for my P2. I’m still unclear on a name, but I know it will probably look very similar to Animalia due to my lack of artistic ability….

Premise

Year: 20XX (present day-ish, not particularly important exactly when)
It is a time of rising sociopolitical tension across the globe. The Pope of the Catholic Church, beloved in his time and considered by many to be a positive influence pushing the Church into the future, passes due to natural causes. All cardinals from across the world rush to the Vatican City to form the papal conclave and select the new Pope (1). Though the Sistine Chapel is meant to be a safe haven from the tumult in the outside world, there are some looking to foment unrest within the college and take advantage of increasing division.

Player Role

You are a Catholic cardinal, called to the Vatican to participate in the papal conclave. The player chooses their character’s spiritual and regional background at the beginning of the game, which will give them certain advantages in creating relationships with and understanding the spiritual perspectives of other cardinals in the conclave. The classes (“orders”(2)) you can choose at the beginning of the game for your character are: Secular (no affiliation), Jesuit, and Salesian. In terms of player actions and resources, I wanted to include a way to represent the different orders through certain boosts each would gain in their relationships with other cardinals, the anecdotes and spiritual experience that inform their perspective and conversation, and the lenses through which they frame theological debates. I have simplified and condensed these incredibly complex theological arguments and perspectives to give the following buffs:

1. Secular (no affiliation)
   1. Relationships: You do not belong to a particular order, so you begin the game in a Neutral relationship with all cardinals.
   2. Talking/Debating: Although you don’t belong to a particular order, this flexibility has allowed you to come to your own perspectives on your spirituality.
   3. Perspectives: Start the game with a bonus Open-Mindedness Perspective that allows the player to gain any Perspective without restrictions. Choose 3 Perspectives of any kind.
2. Jesuit
   1. Relationships: You begin the game with an Excellent relationship with other Jesuits, but a Poor relationship with Salesians and Franciscans.
   2. Talking/Debating: As a Jesuit, you have studied the natural world a great deal in addition to theology. You gain specific responses during talking and debating that appeal to science, reason, and questioning the status quo.
   3. Perspectives: Due to belonging to an order, you are Restricted in what Perspectives you can gain. Perspectives counter your beliefs cannot be gained through conversation until gaining an Open-Mindedness Perspective. Begin the game with two Jesuit Perspectives and one Neutral Perspective.
3. Salesian
   1. Relationships: You begin the game with a Good relationship with other Salesians, Franciscans, and seculars, but a Poor relationship with Jesuits.
   2. Talking/Debating: As a Salesian, you have spent your life working with the poor and disenfranchised and as such have a deeper empathetic understanding of the worst living conditions across the globe, particularly in the place of your ministry (TBD). You gain specific responses during talking and debating that appeal to empathy, generosity, and defending the rights of marginalized people.
   3. Perspectives: Due to belonging to an order, you are Restricted in what Perspectives you can gain. Perspectives counter your beliefs cannot be gained through conversation until gaining an Open-Mindedness Perspective. Begin the game with one Salesian Perspective and two Neutral Perspectives.

Player Goals

Your ultimate goal is to become Pope! You are motivated to impart your spiritual perspective to lead the Church in a time of strife and social division, using your influence to bring positive, stabilizing change to the world. Naturally, you cannot become Pope on your own, as the conclave is (somewhat) democratic. Using actions through this game, you can improve your relationships with other cardinals, learning more about their spiritual backgrounds and convincing them to vote for you due to your common ground and ability to understand different spiritual backgrounds.

Player Conflict

Of course, you’re not the only cardinal interested in becoming the next Pope. There are others that are interested in influencing the Church from their own spiritual backgrounds, which may conflict with or even directly oppose your views.
Although there are many actors vying for the papacy, there is one cardinal that stands in stark contrast to yourself. This person represents everything wrong with the Church – he is racist, misogynist, homophobic, and islamophobic, among other things. This cardinal is out to destroy your credibility while bolstering his own, and, through conversations with him, the player discovers that he wasn’t as big of a fan of the previous Pope.

Player Choices

Although your explicit goal is to become Pope, there are other choices you can make that change the outcome of the game. In other words, the “true” ending of the game may be to achieve the papacy, but other endings can occur based on player choices. If a player decides to befriend another cardinal and decides they should become Pope instead of the player, a series of actions must be taken by the player in order to not only improve their own relationship with this other cardinal, but also to encourage other cardinals to vote for this third party. Additionally, I am considering an explicitly “bad” ending in which the player supports the antagonist for the papacy, but I’m not sure if I have the writing chops to make that work well…. Either way, these distinct endings may be too much to write in the time we have, so I will make sure I at least have a good ending in which the player is elected and a neutral ending in which someone else is elected.

Player Actions

This game is a time management social simulator, similar to games like Monster Prom or later entries in the Persona series. The game will be separated into Days since the conclave started, starting with Day 0, the day before the first official day of voting. On Day 0, the player won’t be able to make any progress with the other cardinals, and instead will be onboarded by a friend of the protagonist who is not a cardinal elector (just a regular cardinal). With this friend, players will get practice with the three main actions (that they will use for the rest of the game):

• Talk

1. 1. 1. The player chooses which character in a room to interact with, striking up a conversation. Conversation topics are determined by your relationship level with the cardinal, the protagonist’s background, the location of the conversation, and the point in the story.
      2. Talking is one method of improving relationships with other cardinals, but isn’t the most effective. A good conversation can’t hurt, but giving insight on a situation and giving other people a deeper understanding of your perspective is even better!

• Debate

1. 1. 1. After engaging in conversation with a cardinal, the player can then choose to engage in a theological debate. Debates are contextual and are responses to comments made by the character the player is talking to at the time. Other characters cannot engage you in debate first (subject to change).
      2. Debating is a higher risk interaction than talking, as it can negatively impact the perception of you by the cardinal you’re debating (as well as their friends), but a successful debate will greatly improve your relationship and the odds they will vote for you as Pope.

• Gain/Share Perspective

1. 1. Occasionally, through both talking and debating, a cardinal will say something the protagonist finds particularly insightful. When this occurs, the player will have a choice to Gain Perspective, learning from the conversation and adding the experience to your Perspectives. This will give the player more variety in the responses they can have with other cardinals by Sharing their new Perspective.
   2. Sharing Perspective occurs during talking/debating. Once per conversation, the player can share a Perspective they have to try and improve their relationship. However, not all perspectives are understood or appreciated by all characters, so this action also has a potentially negative effect on relationship level.

In addition to interacting with characters, players will be given the choice of which location to visit during each time period of each Day (discussed later). This will determine the characters they can meet (as not all characters will be in a single location).

Resources

Perspectives are the main resource in this game. In traditional social/dating sims you can collect and give gifts to other characters – something that is obviously very taboo in the context of a papal conclave, as you could be seen as bribing your fellow cardinals. Instead, in this game you gain and share Perspectives from other characters (whether they’re cardinals, priests, nuns, etc). Perspectives are everything – a buff system that gives the player certain gameplay benefits, a way of improving relationships with other characters, and a way to deter bad actors from disrupting the conclave and fomenting unrest.
Perspectives have different identities based on who they’re gained from. I haven’t fully fleshed out this system, but I’m thinking that I’d make something like:

• Neutral. These perspectives can be gained and shared by anybody to anybody.
• Ordered. These perspectives are specifically from Ordered cardinals and align with their philosophical and theological backgrounds. These include Jesuit, Salesesian, Franciscan, and others (I don’t want to add too many out of fear of scope creep).
• I feel like I should add perspectives that are outside of these options, but I need to brainstorm more. I’m going to try and talk to some folks in Religious Studies to gain some perspective (haha). I really would like to include perspectives outside the Latin Church, e.g. the Ethiopian Church, but I want to make sure I can get a better understanding of them before I commit to writing them.

Time is another major resource in this game, as it is also about time management. There are only so many hours in a day, and each hour that passes is crucial for a papal candidate to gain sympathy and votes from other cardinals. As mentioned previously, this game will follow a similar rhythm to games like Monster Prom, in which time is separated into Days, which are then separated into time periods of Morning, Afternoon, Voting Session, and Night. 

• During the Morning, Afternoon, and Night periods, players will have the choice to move between different locations (chambers, dining hall, courtyard) and interact with different characters in each of these places. Interactions change based on setting.

• The Voting Session is special, as during this period the player is not allowed to speak with the other characters. Instead, the player watches as everyone casts their ballots, votes are tallied, and announced before the college. Not only is this how the conclave works in real life, but it also gives the player a status update on how well they are performing, inviting them to either change their strategy the next day to try and gain more votes or encouraging them to double down if their strategy is working.

• Player actions take time, so only a certain amount of actions can be taken before the time of day changes. This is subject to change because of balancing, but for now I’m thinking:
  • Each period lasts 4 hours (8am-12pm, 12pm-4pm, 4pm-8pm, 8pm-12am)(3).
  • Engaging in a conversation will advance time by at least one hour
  • Engaging in a debate will advance time by at least one hour

Game Events

As mentioned previously, game events such as the Voting Session occur every day. However, I also am interested in including the occasional scandal that changes the information the conclave has. Of course, the conclave is supposed to be separate and isolated from the outside world, but life always finds a way, especially in the information age. I would love to experiment with implementing a semi-stochastic scandal system in which, possibly once or twice per game, a scandal occurs and dramatically changes the relationships between characters.

Footnotes:

(1): The papal conclave is when Catholic cardinals, the leaders of the church behind the Pope, meet in the Vatican City’s Sistine Chapel to vote for the next Pope with a two-thirds majority. During the conclave, cardinals are not allowed to communicate with the outside world to prevent outside influences such as bribery. More info here.

(2): Within the Catholic Church there exist “orders,” which are groups within the Church that have their own organizational hierarchy and have particular interpretations and beliefs. More info here.

(3): This is not how the actual conclave works – up to four voting sessions can be called in a single day and the times in which they are called depends on the dean of the college of cardinals. I would implement this stochasticity if I had time….

Project Plan

Timeline:

• Monday, 20 October: Have finalized map, premise, and timeline ready for class. Playtest or run ideas by peers outside of class to have some changes in mind ready for Monday’s playtest.
• Tuesday, 21 October: Write intro sequence, premise, and Day 0 for onboarding players (PAPER).
• Wednesday, 22 October: Playtest onboarding section in class. Get feedback for dialogue and relationship systems with player actions and perspectives. Make sure there are no questions about how these systems interact.
• Thursday, 23 October: Make a character list with backgrounds. Try not to overscope and keep the roster small. Start writing dialogue with characters and dialogue options for the Secular class.
• Friday, 24 October: Add perspectives to the character list to flesh out the perspective system and get a better idea of what resources are available to the player. Start writing dialogue for the Jesuit class.
• Saturday, 25 October: Start trying to code up the systems we have with the characters and perspectives we’ve created. Start writing dialogue for the Salesian class.
• Sunday, 26 October: Try and have an MVP of the first day or two of actions the player can take with reactions from the characters to get feedback on Monday.
• Monday, 27 October: Have a small digital prototype ready for playtesting and feedback in class.
• Tuesday – Thursday, 28 – 30 October: Playtest and make changes to emphasize the empathetic focus of the game.
• Friday, 31 October: Finish the write-up. Make sure there’s a video!

Potential Challenges:

I am slightly concerned about having the time to write what I want given that I will have upcoming midterms by the time P2 is finished. I need to really make sure my time is well spent in writing and fixing the game systems, so I must ensure that systems are finalized by the end of this week so I can just spend the week after tweaking and writing more. I am also concerned about not achieving the empathetic goal of this project, but I hope the Perspective system will help with this, as it provides a way for players to explicitly engage with the empathetic goals of this game. As always, I am concerned for scope creep and probably will be until I submit the assignment.

Map