The Making of Game01: Story as Core Mechanic

Game01 has story as its core concept. It was born out of the idea of having a game in which the player is “the commander of a trade station at the edge of civilized space, having to making tough decisions on a daily basis.”

That sentence is pretty vague. A thousand different games could come out of that concept, but I had a few other guidelines to work with:

• The game is story-driven first, resource/city management last;
• Decisions in one storyline affect the others;
• Players must realize getting to know his team members is essential, even if it means doing less “work”.

This last one was something I learned leading creative teams. You can distance yourself from the people that work on your team, but that may cause conflict later on. You are not “not doing your work” when you step back from the keyboard and get to know the people you are managing. In fact, doing that may actually help the project on the long run, either because you find out what that person wants and needs, but you end up motivating him/her to do it better. And I wanted that notion to be part of the game in some way.

Alright, so, how do I do that?

During this week I have been working on how to turn that tagline concept into the game’s core mechanic. And the first thing that I realized was that the first version that system, the one I described last week, didn’t work.

The first main issue was that there were too many variables per storyline, and each story was too short. It also was an issue with how companions/officers interacted with the story.

I had to step back to the concept level and list what were my variables at that moment:

• trade route the player has open;
• level of freedom given to every route;
• companions you had active;
• Is that companion relevant to this storyline;
• is he available;
• did you resolve his personal crisis?
• built station modules;
• value of attributes.

My first instinct was to ground the storyline on what trade routes were open. In that way, the player first opened a trade route, which defined what stories would be randomized to come up. Also, modules and attributes would come in as a “third choice” available only if you met that story’s criteria.

But it didn’t fix the issue with the companions, and it also presented another issue: isn’t there a main plotline to guide the story? To give it a beginning and an ending?

Another step back, and this time I looked at the big picture. What if I framed trade route and companion stories with a main plot? The TV series that inspired this game always had a season plot that moved forward mixed with “monsters of the week” events, right? Could I do it in a similar way?

Well, it was a mess. For starters, that graphic doesn’t even make sense. So, trade route events happen in between main storyline events? Well, maybe, but it felt too artificial for what I had in mind. I wanted it to be more organic, more natural... So I tried something a little different. What if I used a variant of the Bioware formula?

Bioware games usually follow a pattern. The player first plays on a single location with a main plot storyline where (s)he learns the basics, then (s)he has 3 places to go (in whatever order the player prefers), each with its own story. Once those three were dealt with, the player moves on to another predefined location, and so on.

And while that looked better, it still wasn’t what I was looking for. This made it too much guided and might actually hurt replayability, which is not on that list of guidelines up there, but is a very desirable feature in this sort of game. Could I do something better?

Well, I tried.

As of this morning, October 1st 2014, this is the current version of the story mechanic.

Events on the main storyline happen on predefined dates. Main storyline events are affected by what players have done so far.

The player may invest time on four things:

• Trade routes with independent star systems;
• The station’s star system;
• Space station section (for now Security, Science and Engineering);
• Officers (one per sector).

Each time he does any of these things, time advances.

Now this system actually ends up defining a lot of the how the rest of the game would work. It means modules and station attributes are now the same thing. You don’t build specific modules (which removes a lot of other issues); you upgrade a section, increasing its level. It also helps a lot with the Trade Routes. On the previous version there was nothing to guide how many and why you opened trade routes. There was a tentative resource management and trading mechanic, but it didn’t really seem connected to the rest of the game. This decision helped me cut (for now, at least) that loose thread.

There was, though, something missing. How could I made the main plot be influenced by other decisions in a way that didn’t make content too complicated for a single developer to handle?

I brought up an idea from another game prototype I made earlier this year: the Risk Factor.

The game is all about you handling a powerful civilization’s gateway to independent star systems. Where is that risk you feel while playing Papers, Please? After all deep down the core (lore) concept is the same, right?

Every time you invest on a trade route, you increase the number of people coming in from that star system, which exponentially increase the risk of something going on inside the League: piracy, smuggling, terrorism, etc. So investing on a single trade route may mean more profit, but it also means more risk. Investing on your station sections help balance this out.

Now this game mechanic adds another element of management and decision making: do you invest a lot on one or two trade routes for fast profit, but high risk? Do you invest a little on many routes? Do you invest on your station and officers to contain this risk?

This is where we stand now. Let’s see how this evolve as we get to work on actual game content this week.