In an attempt to restate my r1 ARG companion idea I will be typing up a summary of the points I have talked about and my design philosophy so far.
The adventure companion is designed to bring each user a unique and immersive fantasy narrative, bound under the same world. Each user will be playing a character in a world that mirrors earth, with a focus on world building and character creation that crafts an immersive and engaging experience. Pulling heavily from MUD style RPGs, I want the game to be a multiplayer collaborative effort in creating a world and story that players feel encouraged to contribute to in a meaningful and impactful way!
The adventure companion uses GPS data to pull the users current location, and give them a narrative that fits their current location. This data can also effect the types of resources they have access to at any given time, allowing for dynamic gathering mechanics. I would like the game to mirror the real world in as many ways as possible. This leads to each users character acting as an alter ego of sorts, and giving them more reason to craft an engaging narrative behind their character, their actions, and their motives. This will also help create gameplay loops that are complex enough and unique enough to allow each user their own interests and the ability to engage with their preferred mechanics in more meaningful ways.
I would like to break the real world up into several “areas” to help dictate what narrative information, as well as geographic info, and zone of influence is relevant at any given time. To start, typical borders found in the real world can be applied (such as countries, continents, states, bodies of water, etc.). Zone of influence refers to the area around any given user that their actions are able to impact.
These areas will be handled much like LoD in a traditional game. Greater regions may house several “areas” to help categorize and maintain consistency in the world building and multiplayer aspects of the game. Initially these areas can just have generative names. Before we have any actual worldbuilding in place, we just need to be able to reference the different areas and how they relate to each other.
Each area will have a set of labels to categorize it into a small set of reference points. For now I would like to make sure we have labels for different biomes, elevations, and relaxant “static” data types. A separate set of labels will be made for “dynamic” data types like weather, humidity, temperature, etc. These variables will help decide what narrative prompt will be used to describe the location a player is in. We might also want to consider when a player is close to urban, suburban, rural, or uninhabited spaces. This information can help decide the % chance of certain events, area descriptions, and background info like marketplace demand, or resource scarcity.
Once we have areas in place, we can start narrowing in how the “filter” prompts will be decided. We MUST keep a consistency in the descriptions generated for each user, especially once we have multiplayer gameplay. Attaching key information to specific LoD areas to ensure accurate and dynamic world building is key. Users will have a “line of sight” that determines how many “areas” to take into account when generating descriptions of what the character can see. Different levels of action might change what LoS we use. Investigation actions will search the finer LoD and perception actions might search a broader scope.
I believe the best design is to teach each player how to start their own server. Their own ecosystem.
The messages you leave, are yours.
The moments you see— are yours.