Game Design Decathlon - Week Five

There’s something about small towns that I find interesting. Not interesting enough I’d want to live there, but still intriguing. It’s a pretty common trope, but I love the idea of somewhere that seems sleepy and forgettable actually having some kind of terrible secret. The good thing about fiction is that these secrets can be things like aliens, not a rapey highschool football player or a corrupt sheriff.

It's malleable too, transplant it from the midwest into Maine, you've got literally everything written by Stephen King. Drop it onto a remote Scottish island, you've got the Wicker Man. Sleepy English village? Now it's The League of Gentlemen. Maybe it's down to the fact that it’s something further away from my own experiences but I'm picturing some sleepy American town out in the midwest. A quiet rest stop just off the highway, nothing remarkable, maybe a motel, a 7-11, probably some kind of tourist trap to get people to stay a night or more.

The kind of place where if it had just a little more, you'd want to stay and stare into the infinite black of the night sky. Problem is, who knows what's staring back?

So we've got a setting, some spooky dust bowl town, now we just need a way to anchor the player into the world, and what better force than capitalism, your very best friend™ I'm picturing some loose narrative where the player has recently been hired as part of the towns convenience store. Let's call it 5-9 to avoid any copyright issues for the moment. So you've got the setting, you know your role, and now all we need is some game mechanics.

What I want to experiment with is tying the narrative to the game mechanics themselves in a hopefully elegant way. I'm picturing a system where throughout the course of an in-game day, customers arrive, peruse the store and maybe make a purchase. Should something stop them from doing so, that initiates a dialogue system, probably with limited responses from the player for simplicity's sake.

My challenge arises from the fact that I don't want to force a revelation onto the player. Ideally the concept that some of their customers are up to something should be inferred, not forced. If someone walks into the store and they don't cast a shadow, or it's going in a different direction to all the others, that's something that should be discussed. Forcing the player to pay attention by giving it to them as a dialogue prompt defeats the purpose of being subtle.

One possible solution would be to give the player an 'investigation' mode on the UI, which when selected allows prompts like 'Ask About: Weather' or Bloodstains, odd shadow etc. This gives the player agency to act upon their realisations, but conversely also allows for the typical hidden object game behaviour of 'tap on everything, hope for the best' a potentially easy way to go about this would be to give the player a limited amount of selections. This also creates an interesting interaction in normal play. How do you rank talking points if you only have three (for example) selections, but five aspects you're interested in pursuing?

An interesting interaction between mechanics and narrative occurs when considering the above conversation mechanic with the more loosely defined mechanics surrounding the actual running of the store the player is in charge of. You'll need to make enough money during each shift to support the business, which is resolved through successful sales from customers. However, choosing to talk to each and every customer in full, to glean as much from the narrative as you can will result in you potentially being unable to earn enough money, ultimately ending your foray into the story early.

The interplay between investment in the mechanics versus investment in the story will need to be fine tuned to pose an obstacle, but not to overtly punish a player for engaging.

What the narrative actually consists of is probably out of my remit at the moment, though I have a soft spot for it being real spooky.