Game Design Challenge: The Letter

[ddelisle]

Oooh I see now. I thought the chain was the sequence of people you track down, not the characters you play as. My bad! I am liking the urgency that you are now describing in finding these people. Very Pony Express-ish. I use the ish. Yeah I know I know.

[Retro]

Yeah, it's kind if a play on chain letters; something bad will happen unless you pass it on.

I really had fun with this challenge, more than I thought I would when it was first announced.

[cnutt]

It's probably okay if it's not called The Letter. I was being a bit pretentious there. =)

[dreamshade]

I submitted a while ago, but this is what I've got. I decided to keep it a bit more succint with this one:


The Paper Age

Yes, letters are getting more and more rare these days. What if they were absolutely extinct?

Samanster Corrol lives on outpost 317 just outside of Jupiter, where he serves as a tech support guy of sorts, troubleshooting various small issues with the station. One day, he opens the door of his pod to find a letter had been shoved underneath. The letter reads:

"Hey, Sam! Nice work on those boom tubes last week! It's a lot warmer down here now, and my glasses don't fog up as much! Drop by for coffee sometime!"

On a space outpost in the year 3201, this is odd for a number of reasons. For one, the letter isn't signed, so there's no way to know where to go for coffee. Two, advances in laser technology for eye care have made glasses nearly obsolete. And three, the dissolution of trees into thin matter to be written on was long ago discarded as wasteful and of poor service to the environment, so few people have seen pieces of paper in the last hundred years, much less seen them on a space outpost floating near a planet with no habitable growing surfaces for trees.

The day starts with Sam bringing the letter around asking people if they had any idea about it, but it soon sprawls into a Monkey Island-like adventure as Sam hops through the entire space outpost, finding clues and locks in the outdated and busted parts of the station that he can fix along the way, as well as finding other relics of the lost era hidden amongst the station - videocassettes, light bulbs, a textbook for beginner's French, a set of rock 'em sock 'em robots, and other things that leave our protagonist wondering who would have access to what are essentially museum relics.

Eventually, you'll find clues that tell you about how the space outpost system began, where the future of Jupiter's colonization lies, and how the technology of tomorrow will be lead by the technology of yesterday. But mostly, you'll meet a lot of people who are amazed that you're holding a piece of paper with writing on it.

[CrowbarSka]

** Double posted this, sorry. Please delete. **

[CrowbarSka]

All right well I've read these game design challenges long enough, it's time I actually entered one! I have a couple of ideas that came to mind immediately after reading this so I'll post the rough outlines while I work on them.

The Letter That Changed The War

Many people complain that the World War 2 setting is overdone in games, but there are so many stories that are yet to be told. All we usually see is a soldier on the front line shooting the enemy, but what about the other people involved who saw a different side to the war?

In this game our protagonist starts at the front line, but receives a letter from home bringing tragic news. His home was bombed, his family killed, a sibling lost in combat, something I haven't decided, but it causes the protagonist to desert, betray his company and become a target of his own country. His fight is not with his fellow soldiers pushing forward, but it is his own retreat through their ranks.

So a delightful tale of a fallen hero and how the war changed to him.

Any thoughts?

The Letter From The Myself

The main character receives a letter from herself from the future. It details what will happen next in her life, and proves itself to be accurate without a shadow of a doubt (describes something that could not have been predicted). The main character embarks on a 'treasure trail' of letters, fulfilling each and every event as it is written. What happens and why? I haven't worked that out yet!

In this game the letters would essentially act like 'mission objectives'. As they describe the immediate future the player is able to use them to work out what they should be doing next.

Unfortunately, the letters start to describe terrible events that the main character does not want to happen. Suddenly the game is about avoiding the future stories and preventing them from happening. Or maybe it's the player's own choice? This could develop into a deep branching story with every choice changing the outcome of events, delving into chaos or order.

Really need to work these out properly.

[Retro]

Edited for stupidity.

[ddelisle]

Originally Posted by Retro

I hate to crush your dreams, but the submission period for this challenge ended Wednesday. You have one week from announcement to submit, and then a week to wait for the results. These are interesting ideas, but unless you submitted them and I misread your entry, you won't be able to enter them.

The deadline is this upcoming Wednesday the 26th.

[Retro]

Originally Posted by ddelisle

The deadline is this upcoming Wednesday the 26th.

Damn, when did I get all out of whack? Well, this is a first for me, submitting an entry early... I seriously thought it was last week.

[bittman]

Hah, been ages since I've visited here and I instantly found a challenge I had an idea for. Will submit it in a few hours, just thinking of some extras that can go into my game idea.

The Letter - Post Scriptum