Of feathers and grit
This was one of the prototypes we worked at Swing Swing Submarine in 2017.
The same ideas used here were also developped in two other prototypes :
the great answer
boats
In short : it was a choose-your-own-adventure-style video game featuring small replayable game sessions where the story might differ based on selectable items, characters, etc.
The story was about infiltrating a mysterious ceremony of birds who gathered in an abandonned boat in a desert.
I don't have screenshots to show at hand.
I might present the project further later, but for now I'll just focus on one thing that I believe was a design mistake but I only rationalized it later.
Example 1
In 2016, we developped Cryogenic, a game in which you can "wake up" or "freeze" characters on a regular basis and only solve situations with those who are currently woken up. Because the characters had a limited lifetime if was dangerous to keep all of them always awake.
So to sum it up, the game was a series of situations phrased that way :
"You are going to enter in a guarded door, who are you going to bring (pick 2) ?"
- the strong one
- the diplomat
- the scientist
- the captain
Then let's say you choose the first two, the even would occur that way :
"There is a guarded door, what are you going to do (pick 1) ?"
- Strong one says : "kill the guards"
- Diplomat says : "talk to the guards"
Example 2
The second example if The great answer which was mainly a game about random collected items with attributes.
For the same situation, the game would typically say :
"You are going to enter in a guarded door, what are gou going to use (pick 1) ?"
- a hammer
- a ladder
- a dog
- a magic potion
- ...
Then the consequences of the choices would depend on the attributes of the items (e.g. a weapon would probably trigger a fight, a potion could be drunk by one of the heroes, etc).
I think the interesting thing here is that is was possible to take risks based on assumptions on what a specific item would do (e.g. magic potion) but still be surprised by unexpected results or additional attributes (e.g. an item could be tagged "magic" and "poisionous" without the player knowing about it).
Example 3
When developping OFAG, some of us were interested in developping characters while others (a.k.a. me) were interested in items, so we decided to merge both mechanics into one.
One difference though is that you would only choose available characters at the beginning of the game session and not on a per-event basis.
So the same situation would be :
"There is a guarded door, what are you going to do (pick 1) ?"
- Strong one says : "kill the guards"
- Diplomat says : "talk to the guards"
And if you choose the first one, the game would then say :
"What do you want to kill them with ?"
- a hammer
- a ladder
- a dog
- a magic potion
- ...
That's where the fun thing from the second example was lost in my opinion, the choice of the item was not an inferred choice of action but rather a "pick the best one" choice with one objectively best answer.
Also since there was always two (non-procedural) characters picked out of three on every game, I had to make sure a progress could be made in any case which didn't let me take that much advantage of the possible combinations.