Game Design Decathlon - Week One

I’ve been thinking about a game. A game about patterns, money and a whole lot of candles. As people we invariably buy a fair amount each day. Every so often though, someone who isn’t us tries to buy things pretending to be us. It’s happened to me once before. Someone tried to buy £700 worth of cigars in Sweden using cloned card details.

So I think I can probably work with that. Let’s see if we can make a game out of it. I’m envisioning this as a mobile game, styled to resemble a banking app. In a given round or level, the player is given a basic profile on the account owner, consisting of vague details like age, gender, primary currency and country of residence. Over a given time, transactions are added to a scrollable list probably resembling something like this:

From left to right we have the following:

• Currency Type

• Transaction Amount

• Transaction Type

• Transaction Name

• Transaction Location

• Big Shiny Red Fraud Button

There’s enough variables there to build some interesting patterns and puzzles. I’d imagine that if the player flagged legitimate transactions, they’d be penalised at the end of the level in some way, as well as if they let a fraudulent transaction slip by. This suggests that each round would require some form of time limit, or incentive for the player to choose quickly.

Other aspects that could make a round harder would be to include the occasional red herring such as rounds that don’t contain fraudulent transactions, or legitimate transactions that don’t fit a separate pattern.

This could be complicated by the inclusion of any number of variables, such as transaction dates, travel notices, or spoof locations. On the one hand this could result in a messy experience where the user is having to juggle numerous windows of information. On the other, this could be folded into the overall design in a similar fashion to Papers Please.

Another possible addition I’m contemplating is the inclusion of a messaging app style conversation mechanic after selecting a transaction, which would involve you selected pre-written responses in a conversation with the account holder. This is an opportunity to include a lot of charm and character in an otherwise dry game.