Since I first posted the definition and scope of our game, the design has gone through some changes. The major changes were de-emphasizing the social and multiplayer aspect (to the point that these are no longer in the scope of the capstone project) and focusing instead on the single-player experience and the dynamic missions/stories. Rather than edit the original definition, I though I would post the new version separately. That way, this blog will better represent the changes the game goes through as it's being developed.
A single-player casual game that combines frantic, silly mini-games into story-based missions. The stories are dynamic in nature, and are generated and modified in response to both player actions and the current world state.
In most mini-game collections, the individual games are either pass/fail or score-based. The mini-games in Micro Missions instead have a qualitative effect on the overarching world and story. For example, some mini games may allow you to travel in the world, while others are fighting mini-games to resolve conflicts with enemies, and others represent side-quests of a sort. At the same time, these games also take input from the overworld - where you are at the moment, whether you have encountered an enemy, what actions are available in the current location and story context, etc.
These mini-games are tied together into missions, and each mission outlines a story through the sequence of mini-games and short informational cut-scenes. Particular missions are based on encoded templates that define what the goal is, what the different roles are, and what must happen along the way. For example, the Hero’s Journey can be encoded into a very flexible and scalable template for missions (but not all missions have to be based on the Hero’s Journey).
Missions are presented to the player as a sequence of quests. Quests are in turn a sequence(or several possible sequences) of actions - mini-games in various locations that the player needs to play and achieve a certain result in. When the player completes a quest, the next quest is selected based on player actions, inferred or indicated player preference, and most importantly story progression.
Selecting mission templates, populating the missions with particular quests and mini-games, and reacting dynamically to player actions will be the main source of “intelligence” in the system, and the major research topic in this project.
Missions within the same mini-game world are further tied together through recurring characters and other persistent effects, for example passages that have been closed off or opened up in previous missions.
We are using Flash and ActionScript 3 to build this game for several reasons. Flash/AS3 is a great rapid development tool, allowing us to worry less about lower-level issues and concentrate on design and architecture of the game itself. ActionScript 3 is an object-oriented language with functional elements, which should work very well for the architecture(s) we have in mind. Finally, Flash makes the game really easy to distribute, and leaves the potential for social network integration if we want to return to it in the future.
A note on the definition of the term "mini-game" as it applies to this game: I imagine our mini-games to be somewhere between Warrioware-style microgames and traditional "mini-games" in terms of scale and length of play, perhaps closer to Warrioware. For the pace of the game that I have in mind, I'm imagining games that range in play length from several seconds to a minute or two at most.
The definitions of the mini-game/overworld architecture and dynamic story system are intentionally left vague in this overview; they will be the subject of future posts. The overworld architecture is fairly well-defined at this point. The story/quest architecture is what I am working on now.
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