That Which You Must Do

Time is running out. This describes both my entry for the February Blogs of the Round Table, and also the subject of my entry.

Turning Over a New Leaf: (We’re trying something new with the topic this month, so please read carefully.) February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

So, despite two people already choosing this one, I’m taking Living Epic’s entry on Oedipus.  Only, I’m just stripping a couple ideas out of it and mixing it with a few thoughts stolen from other games and hopefully producing a design that is unique.

What I’m stripping out of his design is in two parts.  First is the idea of a fixed timeline.  Now, this isn’t new to games.  Anyone who has played Dead Rising has dealt with this: the helicopter arrives in three days, exactly, and if you aren’t there you get left behind.  But what makes this different in the second idea: that you are not the main character of the main story.  Imagine if Dead Rising wasn’t about Frank getting on the helicopter in three days, but that someone else had to be on the helicopter, and Frank didn’t matter.  In Roger’s Oedipus, you don’t play Oedipus, or even one of the other named characters in the play.  He has a fixed timeline where some version of the story will happen even if you do nothing, but you can affect the outcome by participating.

My game based around these two elements is set in a medieval world.  At the beginning, you choose a character, of which several will be available, ranging from the village drunk to a member of the city watch, from a peasant farmer to a wealthy noble.  Each character has a brief story in which they are introduced to the other people in their immediate lives, shown how little they matter to the world around them, and informed of the upcoming coronation of the new king.  The old king died, and his son, just eighteen, is set to take the throne in three days.  Just as the player finishes the introduction of their character, a haggard old wizard appears before them.  “There isn’t time,” he says, “but time is all we have.”  He reaches for the player and upon his touch a burst of energy flows from the wizard into the player.  The wizard’s voice fills the player’s mind, “There exists a fragile balance, and there are things that must be done.  The boy must become king.”  The wizard dies and the player is given access to The Timeline.

What the player learns is that they have gained the ability to affect time in two ways.  Firstly, they can open the whole timeline and send themselves back to any decision point within the game, even all the way back to where the wizard lays at their feet.  Second, in a Braid-like fashion, they can reverse time backwards at any time, up to a few minutes.  Like it is used in Braid, the purpose of the second ability is to let a player quickly be able to undo immediate actions.  Did you punch a guard when you should have hidden from him?  The purpose of the first is to be able to jump all the way back to any major decision point (quest objective) and proceed from there, wiping out everything you’ve done since then.

There are stories going on around the player, events that if the player doesn’t interfere will happen on a schedule.  If a player chooses, they can ignore the entire rest of the game, follow the boy who is to become king around, protect him from any plots against him, and win the game in the most boring way possible.  Or… the player can explore the whole city, undertaking tasks and quests and unfolding smaller stories.  Periodically, the wizard’s voice will tell the player of an event that must happen.  “The chef should cook the chicken.”  It is left open to the player how they get the chef to make chicken instead of the steak dinner he is planning.  You can steal the steaks.  You can buy the spices from the spice seller before the chef can get them.  Physically threaten the chef?  Each character (the drunk, the noble, the peasant, etc) will have different avenues available to them for each puzzle.  With any event that does not directly stop the boy from becoming king, failure doesn’t lose the game, but simply puts the player down another avenue.  For example, if you don’t stop the chef and he cooks the steaks, later you might get an objective like “The steak might kill the boy.”  In this case, you can either prevent him from eating the steak in some way, or try to discover why the steak shouldn’t be eaten and make sure the steak is safe.  In addition to the main storyline, each player character will have their own stories.  Perhaps the farmer peasant wishes to marry the butcher’s daughter.

The game ends with the coronation ceremony.  No matter who gets made king.  The prologue of the game will be crafted out of the successes, failures and choices you made along the way.  If the boy becomes king but you didn’t reveal the conspirators, he may not be safe.  If you are the noble and you steal the steaks from the chef, the drunk is blamed and is thrown in prison on charges of theft.  Did you leave him there?  Did you admit to the theft to set him free?  If you’ve played Marvel Ultimate Alliance, you’ve seen this sort of thing, as at the end of the game the “future” is told by the Watcher based on the results of your game and all its optional quests.

And there you have my idea… an open, sandbox type world, with personal and external story lines, all of which happen on a fixed timeline, and the end of the game is built out of what you did during the fixed time.

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