Well, I finished...something. It's a working protype of a bigger project, and there's loads more I'd like to do to it, but I'm so proud to have got to this point and made something to share. I hope you enjoy it!
I've made a start on the game and have put together a really basic engine that lets me choose actions for a single character. It's taken a bit longer than I thought, partly because I got sick and partly because I had to teach myself how to parse JSON, which turned out to be trickier than I expected. I want to borrow the idea of multiple playable characters for the game, so the next step is to build an engine for multiple 'agents' who can be assigned missions each turn. Each agent should have different abilities - some are better at persuading people, some are better at getting things done without being spotted. So then not only are you choosing missions, but you're also choosing who's the right person for each mission.
Thanks! It's really fun to be thinking about how theatre and games can build on each other. And making this game forces me to make decisions that, in theatre, I'd probably be putting off - like story, characters, all that kind of stuff.
I've made a couple of semi-finished games in Unity, still looking to develop my skills, and so I definitely feel like a beginner even if this isn't *quite* my first game.
In my other life I work in the theatre and my particular specialty is 'playable theatre' - stuff that uses game mechanics to create interactive story based experiences. For this jam, I'm thinking of making something that spins out from a theatre project I worked on last year. In Red Planet Revolution our audiences became the leaders of a newly independent human colony on Mars. For this new game, I want to track back on my storyline and think about how Mars became independent - I'm imagining it as being ruled by a corporate oligarchy based on Earth, a bit like the whole colony is some souped-up Amazon warehouse. And have the player be caught up in the middle of all those events.
I'm not quite sure what the game actually is yet. Maybe it's an escape-room style decoding game (which fits with the theme of this jam quite nicely), maybe it's a more strategy based game. I loved Through The Darkest Of Times last year, I'd love to create something which inspires some of the same feelings.
Maybe this game combines both those elements? It's a mission-assigning game and a puzzler? That might be quite cool.
