This game will feature highly detailed simulation (like roguelikes) in a restricted environment (like roguelikes), but isn't so focused on challenge as on giving you a lot of neat mechanics to play with (like...life sims).
I'm making it with
LiSE. It more or less shares its setting and its graphics with Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
It's my first game, made in part as a way to demonstrate LiSE. It may end up being my only game ever, because the premise is sort of infinitely expansible. So, while I'd appreciate any and all feedback, I'm especially interested in what of the below I should focus on to make the game playable and fun.
* High Concept
School life sim IN A DUNGEON! where you must manipulate your own
mental state to use magic, make friends, and appear human
even if you're not.
** Manipulate your own mental state
*** Perception
You may on occasion want to see through a glamour. To do this you
need top focus and few expectations.
I think the expectations should be a category of Interest
(described below) which, though useful to have, also make you more
vulnerable to being fooled by glamour.
*** Emotion
Your commitment to your studies may waver if you burn out or get
too interested in other pastimes.
Specific schools of magic go well with specific emotional states,
but intense emotions make it harder to sit down and study.
Your character expresses themself best when in a particular
emotional state chosen at creation. This is the state you want to
be in when you socialize.
Remaining emotionally neutral isn't difficult, but basically no
buffs will work on you in such a state.
** Use magic
The magic points are actually tiny tiny bits of your soul, which
regenerates at about the same pace that your bloodstream
refills. Your emotions affect the *quality* of your spellcasting
rather than the quantity.
The general absence of combat-related magic is deliberate, because
the game's not about that. I guess it's just not that kind of
school.
*** Illusions and Glamour
Nonhumans have to keep up a glamour 24/7 cos this is a human school.
Some humans do this as well, because they want to look good.
Glamours are responsive to the aesthetics of the observer, and are
therefore harder to keep up with multiple observers, particularly
if they are in different emotional states.
Best when you are in a worrying mood.
*** Mentalism
The most useful for altering your own emotions. It's possible to
alter those of others too, but doing that without consent is
considered assault.
Theoretically includes mind control, but it's
a high-level deal, and even if you can do it, getting someone to
follow a specific non-trivial command through mind control
requires precise timing: a command that arrives while they're
already doing something unrelated, or that doesn't jibe with their
emotional state, will make them confused, which makes the mind
control that much harder to maintain and might just cause them to
guess that they are being mind-controlled.
Best when in that mood associated with intellectual
fascination. Curiosity perhaps.
*** Life Magic
Heals wounds, resurrects dead, promotes growth, and inflicts
cancer. Because cancer is uncontrolled growth.
You can use this to convert ambient magical energy into magic
points you can cast.
Best when in a kind, happy mood.
*** Death magic
Kills stuff, including eg. bacteria, so this is the school for
curing disease. Does not have any special effect on souls,
however--only biological life. To affect souls you want mentalism.
Best when feeling rage.
** Use the dungeon
All sorts of random junk teleports into the dungeon for no
reason. Much of it is vendor trash, but you do get the odd
spellbook or scroll you might study from.
*Living creatures* can only enter via *stabilized* portals, which
you can create yourself--though doing this on-campus presents the
risk of a monster invasion, and is therefore grounds for
expulsion. But when you learn the spell for it, you can do it
anyway, and thereby eg. summon gnomes to help you cheat on your
homework.
** Make friends
Apart from being desirable as such, friendship will make your
studying a lot more effective, and it will help you get more
information as to what's going on around you, potentially helping
you spot eg. who's a vampire and who ain't.
*** Social actions
You can generically "socialize" with anyone, or with no one in
particular, in which case you'll try to make nice on anyone who's
in the area and not otherwise occupied.
Get food and alcohol together and you can throw a party. These
work best when there's an entertainment on offer.
*** Entertainments
Magic is actually pretty boring when you have to do it day-in and
day-out.
Remote viewing can suffice for television, though it relies on
already knowing something entertaining to look at. There are
illusions you might cast to show like a movie or a TV show, but
these rely on the caster having memorized the particular film to
show. So it's a good idea to build up an inventory of castable
memories to entertain with.
You could take a trip through a stable portal and see what
entertainments are on offer outside the dungeon, but to do that
within school rules you have to dress and pack in a way so that
you don't draw attention to yourself wherever you're going, and
you need to satisfy an instructor who is from the world behind
that portal that you're familiar with the customs and traditions
there.
You could of course try to sneak through without permission and
risk expulsion.
In any case the worlds beyond the portals are simulated only as
random event tables.
*** Relationship model
The game makes no hardline mechanical distinction between
eg. friendship, romance, professional respect or whatever.
Every relationship has some level of Intensity, Trust, Respect,
and Commitment. Every relationship is bidirectional, so one
party's levels of these may be entirely different from the
other's.
Intensity makes people *want* to do things with each other, or
just spend time together.
Trust affects what they are *willing* to do together. Activities
that require high levels of it include dungeon-delving (trust
someone to protect your life), independent study (trust someone to
do their share of the research and so forth), and nookie (trust
someone to touch you only just so). You might want to bone someone
but not trust them enough to actually do it.
Respect mainly affects how people treat one another when their
emotions get heated. Any intense emotion can provoke a person to
do something careless, though some emotions are riskier for your
friends than others; high Respect will make you stop yourself
before yelling at them when you're angry, and will make you pay
attention to them when you're otherwise too blissed out to care.
Commitment is a defense stat. When something happens to damage a
relationship, Commitment reduces the damage, regardless of which
of these four stats is taking damage. This isn't necessarily a
good thing, as you might be highly committed to a character who
doesn't have much respect for you.
Irrespective of any of these, people have Interests--energy
reserves, sort of like mana bars, but there are many types, and
each person has access to only a few. You fill up the Interest by
doing things related to it (so you can eg. talk about it) or
possibly just waiting.
Some interests are linked, such that you have to spend them all at
once or not at all; this helps simulate highly specific interests
while only actually defining general ones.
It is difficult to form a strong relationship with someone you
don't share any interests with. It's possible, but you have to
make do with only the social bonuses you get from emotional
states. Interest bonuses are each somewhat harder to get than
emotion bonuses, but there are more interests than there are
emotions, so interests are better for stacking modifiers.
** Appear human
The school's attended by dragons and the like, but in human
form. The administration knows this, and indeed there are classes
for keeping up your disguise; but not all of the *students* know
this, and some of them may try to kill you if they find out your
true nature.
Actual humans may have the reverse problem, getting bit by vampires
(non consensually) when it becomes apparent they have a human soul
(tasty, we is). So it is generally advisable to maintain a glamour
even if you don't have a special need for one. It creates ambiguity
over your humanity.
* Gameplay
Each day you have some classes scheduled for you but may override
those with other actions.
Each class has several tests you have to pass. Each test has certain
skill requirements, which you may reach by book study, practice,
tutoring from a TA, actually attending the class and so forth. The
motives for attending the classes are, first, that in 100 level
classes your attendance is in fact part of your overall score;
second, your familiarity with the class (and not the content) gives
a modifier to your performance on the test; and third, it really
helps your relationship with your teacher, which is the
best avenue for skill leveling.
* Interface
** Map
*** Portals
*** Classrooms
These have random shapes, meaning random capacity and random
suitability for the classes.
They are more o less randomly connected although you can *make*
new connections between them by winning at certain adventures.
As in ...that Kairosoft game... students may use rooms for
practice when there's no class, and indeed there are rooms that
have that purpose only. Many, perhaps most rooms have permanent
enchantments on them that you only get partial information on what
they do.
*** Shops
Permanent storefronts are rare due to the whole wandering-monster
thing, but there are lots of adventurers willing to trade. For
game purposes they all act kind of like traveling merchants even
when they're really looters.
*** Dorms
You sleep in these.
You might have to set one up correctly for your species --
vampires need coffins, dwarves need a secure way to stash extra
gold to keep their spirits up.
** Cards
Each represents something to do. Play it where you want to do it.
** Scheduler
Upon playing a card, you "pencil in" your next actions to the
ingame planner. A "Go" button appears on the next action, and you
click it to advance to the end of that one action.
Developer
