Concept

The player embodies the leader of a community of survivors during a civil war. He has to make decisions regarding life within his shelter and its survivors to prosper as long as possible.

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Challenges​

• Create an idle game built around the constraint "Hyperactive".

• Add a strong narrative aspect in the game.

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Solutions​

• The constraint "Hyperactive" meant that the player always needed to make something during his playtime and to be encouraged to come back to make progress in the game. We chose to turn the instructions around and to punish the player for his absence instead of rewarding him for his presence. To do so, we integrated a system that displays events whenever the player is inactive for too long (whether he's in the game or out of it). Most of the events are bad and they bring maluses whose impact depends of the time spent away from the game. On top of that, we added a classic "click to collect" feature that force the player to stay in the game and do something to collect rewards. These two mechanics make the player the come back but also keep him active during his playtime.

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• Our main intention was to make a narrative idle game in order to invest the player. Creating convincing stories about life in the shelter felt like a powerful way to engage him and make him come back. I was in charge of writing all the flavour texts in the game, whether they were about upgrades, tasks or events. Each text feels like it's been written by an inhabitant of the shelter, however I wanted to show different moods according to the type of text I was writing, Upgrades and tasks flavour texts explain what they consist in with irony and cynicism as a way to hide the horror of the situation. Because of the gravity of the situations however, events flavour texts are completely unfiltered and always depict tragic stories with the touch of despair that is expected. Writing these stories made me improve a lot on narrative design because of the need to be accurate and straightforward in my flavour texts while retranscribing people's misfortune from a survivor's perspective.

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