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  • L. D. Neal

Week 9: Further Expansion, Creation and Exploration of Game Ideas (26 - 27/11/2019)

Updated: Dec 8, 2019

All physical work on this topic can be found on pages 11 - 16 of the black sketchbook, and pages 5 - 6 of the black backlog.


Disclaimer: Be warned, this is a long post.

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Sketchbook (pages 11 - 16)


(page 11)


Current game ideas:


A card and board game where each player assumes the role of a character from a frontier town, (choosing from the available list on page 6) and each character has a list of statistics to either combat or aid each other. Each player is trying to achieve a certain (or common) goal.


A game where you play as a doctor or travelling surgeon to showcase the healthcare and medicine of the time - could be a single-player game.


(page 12)


Not a 'game idea' per se, but I do want to include the idea of adaptive difficulty in my game. Each character has their own motive (Sheriff isn't making enough money, gunslinger is trying to be feared etc.)


Common Western game & film themes

  1. Bank/train robbery

  2. Revenge story (Unforgiven, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger)

  3. Bounty hunting (For a Few Dollars More)

  4. Homestead/town defence (The Magnificent Seven, High Noon)

  5. Treasure hunting/looking for gold

  6. Rebuilding a life from a felonious past

  7. Combating outlaws or lawmen

  8. Maintaining a farm/ranch, building one from nothing

  9. Cattle driving, travelling through towns (Rawhide)

Most of these are money-driven, obviously.

Aim for a mixture of realism and romanticism.


Remember:

  • Classic

  • Spaghetti

  • Modern

  • Space

... Western


These will give you constraints and parameters to work from as their tropes will define your game.


The Space Western subgenre has not been explored much in board games


Play as a long-suffering bartender in a rough town and manage handling drinks, keeping your saloon relatively clean, dealing with rough customers and bar fights


List of encounters


Play as different characters in one life.


List of encounters


Encounters are typically defined as "Unexpectedly experience (ing) or be faced with" or "An unexpected or casual meeting with someone or something."

Encounters are usually applied to Dungeons & Dragons situations, but I want to avoid this.


(page 13)


Characters


Sheriff (morally good)

  • A1: A brawl is going on in the town. (Saloon/outside etc.) Go and deal with it.

  • A2: The hideout belonging to a gang of outlaws has been discovered. These are very wanted men, so you form a posse to deal with them.

  • A3: You hear gunfire outside and run out of your office to investigate.

  • A4: You have a whole load of wanted posters to pin up around town.


Sheriff (morally evil/bad)

Use your authority to bully, extort, harass and gain.

  • A5: You arrange to meet some criminals to collect your bribe for looking the other way.

  • A6: It's time to extort some more townsfolk out of tax money.

  • A7: You arrest the wife of a homesteader who refuses to pay you some protection money, and refuse to release her unless they do as you say.

  • A8: A wanted man enters your town, but you reckon he could be of some use to you, so you go out to meet him.


Cowboy (morally good)

  • B1: You come across a family stranded out on the trail due to a broken wagon wheel. You stop to help them fix it.

  • B2: A shopkeeper is running low on supplies due to their supply wagon being held up by inaccessible roads. You offer to bring back some supplies on your horse for free.

  • B3: You meet a badly injured soldier lying next to the road. You decide to take him into the nearest town and find him a doctor.

  • B4: A fellow cowboy gets engaged from doing his daily ranch chores. You decide to do them for him for free.


Cowboy (morally bad)

Remember: you are not an outlaw. You are technically an employed drifter. We are interested in petty crime at best

  • B5: Another cowboy looks at you the wrong way whilst you are enjoying a drink in the saloon. You give him a good hard punch to the nose, starting a brawl.

  • B6: You get exceedingly drunk in the saloon and, when leaving, you fire your gun at several building exteriors. This disturbs the peace, and alerts the sheriff.

  • B7: When nobody is looking, you rustle a few cattle for a private sale taking place in a few towns over.

  • B8: When out on the trail, you decide to rob a single passerby for some extra private funds.

  • B9: You kidnap a prostitute for fun.

(page 14)


Prostitute (leaning towards good-hearted)

'Morally good' is out of the question...

  • C1: You give up more of your personal tips to help fund the saloon/brothel/bordello when its low on funds

  • C2: You offer to take longer 'hours' when one of your fellow prostitutes falls ill

  • C3: Your saloon owner asks whether you will serve drinks one particularly busy day and you say yes.

  • C4: You aid the sheriff in giving information about a wanted man who requested your 'services' that day.


Prostitute (morally bad)

You can't kill anyone or start fights with your boss, as doing so would send you out on the street.

You can't start fights with patrons or get into fights with your fellow prostitutes. This would be bad for business.

  • C5: A rough and rude cowboy refuses to pay you. In response, you knock him out cold and rob him before throwing him out of the saloon.

  • C6: When nobody is looking, you steal funds from the saloon safe.

  • C7: You don't pay as much for the prostitution tax so someone else has to foot the bill.

  • C8: You do some untaxed prostitution work for various criminals and outlaws who pass through town during night


Outlaw (with moral compass)

  • D1: You pass by a decimated town on your travels and notice several townsfolk trying to salvage what they can from the rubble. For your sense of justice, you enquire who did such a thing and set off to hunt them down.

  • D2: You hear word of a corrupt sheriff who is ruining the lives of their townsfolk. Time to kill you a bad lawman!

  • D3: To escape a jail sentence, you are set to defend a town by local law enforcement.

  • D4: You defeat a rival gang member in a gunfight, but convince your fellow members to spare their life.


Outlaw (bad as Hell)

Remember, outlaws can kill, commit grand larceny, rustle cattle, steal horses and do pretty much anything illegal.

However, most cannot kill Marshals

  • D5: You and your gang decide to hit the largest bank in the state of Missouri.

  • D6: As you walk through town, you are recognised and the town's law enforcement arrive to arrest you. You duck under a barrel and start firing, killing a few innocent people in the process, some intentional and some not.


(page 15)

  • D7: You and your gang rustle an entire herd of cattle from a rancher who reported you to the badge. You steal all his possessions and leave him tied naked to a chair.

  • D8: You start a deadly gunfight in the saloon which results in several people being killed. Can you escape?

Writing encounters advice


Balance of good and bad things to happen to the character.

Some of them should be optional or implied

Think about environmental implications as potential routes for the current encounter (They don't have to happen in front of the character)



Depending on the character, you seem to have freedom in different areas.


Morally Good

Freedom in society

  • Walk unafraid of legal action in towns and settlements

  • Use more town services

  • Be trusted by local authorities

  • Be trusted with jobs


Morally Bad

Freedom of choice

  • You can kill

  • Rustle cattle

  • Commit grand larceny

  • Generally get richer than those in legal professions

  • You are unrestrained by law


Is your game an RPG? (Role-Playing Game)

Can your characters level up?

Isolate the mechanics out of your encounters (encounter analysis, make one of these)

What core mechanics are prevalent in all of them?

How can you make these encounters more interesting?


Encounters I like:


This part of my sketchbook work is in pseudo-code/diagram form better shown as such. Normally I would write out what is being said, but I'll add a digital version here later.


(page 16)


Freelance game ideas (26/11/2019 - 27/11/2019)


I.

You play as one of two to four criminals who have been locked up by the sheriff. You sit at either end of a jail cell and cannot communicate by voice as the sheriff will hear you and notice that you are trying to escape. In order to escape, you must use a series of action cards to try to communicate with your cellmate. For example, you might try to ask your cellmate for a wooden stick that is lying by their side.

This is in order to grab the keys off the sheriff or off his desk. You could hand them a card with a few wooden blocks on it to signify this.

You must give the other player a card symbolising this. This is kind of like the vision cards and 'muteness' of the ghost in Mysterium.

However, you must hurry as a prison wagon is fast approaching to take you both away, and the sheriff can occasionally look back at you to see what you're doing.


II.

Murder mystery set on a train


III.

Cannibal vs 3 civilians of a town, try to escape their tunnel by either killing or incapacitating the cannibal.


Backlog (pages 5 - 6)


(page 5)


Tuesday 26th November


Today I endeavour to come up with some more game ideas.

By the end of week 9, I need to have come up with a list of semi-solid game ideas to present back to the class. This is what I am trying to achieve by the end of today, to get the ball rolling.

I also want to do some more research on current existing Western board games.

Discussed with Matthew how to improve my 'adaptive difficulty' idea by making the cards more interchangeable, lowering the deck numbers and listing the difficulty on the back of the card.


To generate ideas, I am identifying the common Western game and film themes so that I can divert from these.

I have decided that by deciding what subgenre of Western I want to use, I can give myself constraints and parameters to work by.

I need to think about how to make my game different from other people's.

Writing down names of current Western games, and I am noticing that lots of these existing board games share similar themes.


Coming up with a list of encounters after having a small talk with James about how to make my game different.


(page 6)


I am really thinking about the type of character I'm writing about, and thus the types of encounters they may have.

Prostitutes are difficult to find encounters for without being too graphic!

Sam (Wright) suggested I research the age ratings of board and card games to give myself a better idea of how much I want to inform my audience.


Some of these classes are more versatile than others, and some simply can't do things that others can (for example, a cowboy shouldn't kill but an outlaw can)

Some characters seem to have more freedom than others, depending on their class.

Talked with Matthew about how to come up with better encounters, as well as some background knowledge on those attributed to D&D.


After looking at the list of encounters, James suggested I choose the ones I find interesting and identify the core mechanics out of these.

This is what I'll do now.

I have now labelled all of my encounters from A1 to D8 to write about them in my sketchbook. This makes it easier to talk about the core mechanics.


When deciding which characters to choose for encounters, I chose from the 'morally grey' list in the centre as these characters can go either way, and as such, so do their encounters. It gives me more variety.

I'm beginning to wonder whether I should make an RPG board game.


I have written down a flow chart about 1 encounter I liked.


23:30

Working out more game ideas with Archie, came up with 3 more.

Discussed interesting game mechanics.




26 - 27/11/2019

Phase 3

Week 6: 04/11/2019 - 10/11/2019

Week 7: 11/11/2019 - 17/11/2019

Week 8: 18/11/2019 - 24/11/2019

Week 9: 25/11/2019 - 01/12/2019

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