Thursday, May 04, 2006

Endgame design

Ok, so after listening to the wise words of two wise game journalists in sunny Bath, I have also concluded that Kudos needs an endgame. So the game will last ten years, and that's it, finito. Stock-taking time, where you present your sacred accounts to the divine exchequer and he audits your life. I've already written some code to track a whole bunch of statistics that get presented to you when you hit age 30, such as how much time you spent socialising, how many friends you lost, how much you spent on buying stuff yada yada. And also, how much kudos you earned over this period.
The games time system has been warped so that effectively there is one week in each month, so a year is not 365 turns but just 84. so we are talking 840 turns for a full game. I don't think thats too bad. assuming a turn will (once you get going) take 20 seconds, thats 3 a minute or 180 turns an hour.
Yes this is very simplistic, and I need to get everything in place and then playtest to death to get the numbers right. The dilemma is, I am modeling individual social events on a week-scheduled basis, so I need a turn to represent a day, yet I want you to achieve great things (build a career, build up your IQ etc) which is only feasible over a ten year period. So we shall see how things progress with my current solution...

I visited the PC Gamer (UK) offices yesterday to demo kudos, hopefully there will be some press coverage of the game soon, if it's not eclipsed by the hypefest of E3 (lots of fantasy MMORPGS coming apparently - *yawn*).