Please treat this text as notes, or a thought process, not an article.

It struct me. When I want to have a perfect game, I can not think so much about the design. The design has to be clean and simple and allow for many possibilities. I can not overthink it. So here we go, I will not refine the design, just try to make it cleaner and simpler with powerfull gameplay systems.

It is a roadtrip vampire simulator.

I want it to be able to have a story.

A vampire has stats and those are used when determining the availability and outcome of actions.

Maybe all actions should be car related. Maybe the vampire will never step out of the car. He’ll be bound to the inside of his current car.

Possible actions: - car related - conversations - hunting

To hunt, he’ll stop by and snatch people off the streets, invite them to his car.

So, it’s all about the car and it’s insides.

No, wait. Thinking about a game is just not the way to go. I should go back to the first post in this series where I was looking for a game that I wanted to base on, refine and improve.

I have chosen Out There as something I will base. What happened between that post and here. I was completely figuring out a new game, it was overwhelming… What happened was I presented the idea to people and they started to suggest different things and the original idea to improve on Out There was lost COMPLETELY.

I think that if I am making a game that will improve and refine another one, I can not present the idea to people yet, I have to present already a prototype.

So, going back to Out There. What is my improvement and refinement.

Viago will have a different theme. A vampire in a real world instead of a space ship looking for a place in cosmos. But this theme is not an improvement, there has to be something more to it.

As I mentioned in the “Designing a new game - Preparations” post, there are some things in out there that i didn’t like.

Out there was:

  • too random
  • encounters were too passive
  • ship cargo was claustrophobically small.

What does it mean that the game was too random? It means that the player could do very little to steer his fate, he had to go with the flow of the game and take what was randomly thrown into him. In my game I want the player to have some randomness, but be able to choose the type of adventure that he will play.

Hmmm…. I can now think of the improvements of the desing in those three mentioned above areas or I could try to first create my Viago game based on Out there and go from there. Only when I finish the first prototype, I will see what will work and will not work.

So, I am starting to develop it and see what will it lead me to.

Do I have an artist to create all those graphics? I can hire someone after the prototype will be finished so that I will know exactly what I need.