Quote Originally Posted by AthenaOfDelphi
3F
Genres : Action (Red)/Building and Management (Cyan)
Quite a lots of thought gone into this. The action part sounds like some classic Atari 8-bit games 'Sea Dragon' and 'Nautilus', they were both great fun so I'm quite looking forward to playing the game. My only concern comes from your comments about the operation of the port aspect of the game. My take on it is that building and management implies you have full control over the choices (within boundaries governed by say available technology), but part of your document makes it sound like the port will be a guided set of choices that you must work through to open up new action levels. If it is guided and there is a strict order in which things occur then I would question whether its a multigenre title (For example, if action level 1 opens option A in the port... option A opens action level 2 and so on) because actually, you as the player have no choice at all in that case. Also, based on the genre definition of 'City Building', there is a certain implication that your choices have implications for your 'citizens' which in-turn has an impact on the game.
I like that "lots of thought went into this" bit. The truth is that I decided to enter at 12:00 midnight the day of submission and wrote my design doc in about an hour. :lol: So I don't know exactly how the port/building system will work out. But to clarify, it will NOT be strictly linear. Examples of scenarios I might include:

-A friend asks you to lend him money to open a business. If you have earned the money at that point in the game, the option to give him money appears. Doing so opens a new location later, while refusing or being unable means that he tries to earn the money himself, leading to a mission where you have to rescue him.

-You are doing an escort mission for the government. You fail the mission. This does not end the game, but instead means that you cannot access government facilities or equipment later on.

One thing I would like to try is to never completely punish the player for their "big decisions." Failing the government mission might open up black market/criminal missions and bring about another path.

That style of gameplay is more like "adventure" or even "interactive movie" since it's mostly about dialogue trees, but I may also do something with numbers in it, which I'm sure is what most people think of as "city-building." But I don't really have ideas there...yet. The idea of opening new locations is what led me to think of "building" as the genre, but I'd like to focus on people more than numbers, so maybe I was thinking of the wrong genre