Preliminary plans for NaGaDeMon 2020

I have enjoyed participating in National Game Design Month (NaGaDeMon) for the last two years. Last year, I made KAPOW! The Campy Superhero Roleplaying Game, and two years ago, Heroic Uncertainty. For this year, I have had two ideas tickling the back of my mind. The other day, when I was in a conversation about them, I actually forgot what one of them was. That's a good indication that it's time to write them down! This has been a great month for blogging, and I have this afternoon set aside for thinking and writing. Even though I just finished a post about something completely unrelated (or is it?), there's no time like the present.

Idea #1: Character-Interaction Generation

This has been at the back of my mind for some time, but it's pretty amorphous. The inspiration is a somewhat formalist approach to the relationship between characters in a world, simulating the changes in their relationships over time. For example, given a tableau of six characters, and drawing a "secret enmity" card, you could roll a die to determine who is secretly plotting against whom. Perhaps later, though, a "false rumor" card comes up and targets the "secret enmity" card, changing the table again. Now, maybe there are no cards and maybe there are no dice, but that's the basic idea of the setting, although my idea was that the players would actually be doing a different game for or with those characters. For example, maybe players are striving to earn the favor of one character who may become king of the popes, but their actions are interpreted differently based on the political, interpersonal state.

That's a bit vague, I know, and it also hints at suffering from the same problem as Heroic Uncertainty, where the thing I want to play with is a secondary system rather than a central system. However, something that brought this idea to mind was reading about A War of Whispers, a game in which the players are manipulating resources on a map, but that's actually secondary to their victory condition, which is ensuring they are backing the right political power. That's very much in the spirit of what I was considering, and in fact, I backed the recent Dark Alliance expansion Kickstarter. My copy of the game will be here sometime, though definitely not with enough time to study it as an inspiration before the beginning of November.

Again, a lot of uncertainty here, maybe even a heroic level. It's not clear in my mind even if it would be tabletop or digital, so that means it would have to be tabletop. See, writing is epistemic.

Idea #2: Roguelike

I came across Bob Nystrom's talk about ECS at Roguelike Celebration 2018 through, I think, YouTube's recommendation system. Nystrom is the author of the wonderful Game Programming Patterns, a book which I've said before I wish I had written. I have done some research and development around Entity Component Systems as well, and I've long said that Nethack is one of the greatest games ever made, so I loved hearing his talk on ECS in Roguelikes. In fact, I just put it back in my watch later queue to listen to it again. His talk got me thinking about making my own roguelike, which is a genre I have never explored. I have been recommending Kenney's excellent public domain artwork to my game programming students, and I know that he has a few different asset packs for 2D roguelikes. 

I don't have any particular ideas for innovating in this space. I think if I went this way, I would just take inspiration from the art that is available and use it as an excuse to work with some of the classic dungeon generation algorithms and data structures. Heck, maybe I could even dust off my knowledge of ECS to flex those muscles, although deploying ECS was much easier when I was using PlayN than in GDScript or UE4.

That's it, my second blog post for the day, and a place to come back to if I find once again that I have forgotten my own thoughts. Feel free to leave a comment if you have a suggestion or preference. I expect that on Sunday, I'll be able to do a more focused cost-benefit analysis and choose a direction to start working on NaGaDeMon.