General’s Map: Design Document

Intro

Hello there. This post will hopefully give you a better sight on my new working title “General’s Map”. In an earlier post I provided a little description of the game, now I will dig deeper into the design.

Since I’ve written down the first version of a game design document I will take that as a reference. (If you want to see the actual document, please leave a comment.)

The key aspects: Prototype & Tweaking

The idea is to create a basic engine first, not very sophisticated. Then we will test various game mechanic options, features we can easily turn on and off. We will test various combinations of mechanics and test each one extensively. This way we can tweak the design to create the most fun game possible.

A side note: There are some major flaws in the design right now. It is incomplete. You are welcome to search for these flaws, it’s a good excercise. Otherwise I’ll find some solutions while developing and designing some more.

The Oneliner

A little clause I’ve added to my game design doc is the “oneliner”. One sentence that describes the essence of the game. I don’t know this is “the” best sentence, but at least it’s what I’ve come up with.

A casual strategy game where every action has an impact, trying to deliver a daily think workout.

The idea is that a player can take his time examining the map, trying to come up with the best strategy. It’s “tick” based, so a player will only have a limited number of actions in a set time interval (a tick will, for example, take 24h). Off course the time spent will get longer the more cities you conquer (which should make the game more interesting, and not boring).

Since the amount of actions is limited, every action has a serious impact and a variety of strategies are possible. This should be(come) an interesting strategy game.

Target Audience

People seeking for a casual strategy browser game to play on a daily basis. People who like chess.

Navigation & Interface

Navigation is simple. The biggest part of the screen will contain the map, and on the side a frame for info and actions. When you click something on the map (city, army, … ) information and possible actions (strength, type, … attack, send message, … ) buttons will be displayed in the frame. Simple, huh?

This will be done with javascript (AJAX) — most probably.

Winning & loosing

A player has won when he has conquered the map. This could be all the cities on the map, but more probably only a few “Capitals” spread over the map.

The basic framework

The basics of the game are laid out. The player will play on a map, with: cities, roads and armies. This could be extended with special units, castles, etc. But for the sake of the prototype we will only stay with the “magical three”, for now.

At the moment there are 4 basic “headlines”. This is a reference for as well the game elements (categories), strategy theory (factors) and User Interface & Help (clear categories).

• Economy
• Military
• Diplomacy
• Territory

Tick

The game will be played in a sort of turns, so called “ticks”. Each tick happens after a set period of time (for example 10 min, which wiould make a fast paced game, or 24h, which would make a slower paced game). With each tick new income will be generated. (so the player can do new things).

Income

For each city the player owns he will receive income. This income isn’t “stackable”. When he hasn’t used it before the next tick, it will just be “refreshed”, you could say.

There are 3 types of income:

• Action points: The most important form of income. Action points (AP) are used to perform actions in the game. So the more AP you can accumulate each tick the more you can do.
• Food is needed to pay upkeep to soldiers. The more food you can accumulate the more armies you can maintain.
• Gold / Metal / Precious resources: An income type varying from city to city. Can be used in specific game mechanics as payment.

Trade

Trade is an essential part of the game. Various mechanics will be tested.

Armies

Armies are used to travel the land / capture / defend cities and fight other armies.

Basic Battle Engine

I will dedicate another post to the battle engine. It’s rather simple, but it should fit the overall strategy theme.

An illustration

In a previous post I wasn’t sure yet what sort of map I would take: isometric or top down. To be honest I still don’t know. I titled the 2 themes “Immersion” (isometric) and “Ancient Map” (top down). I photoshopped a little bit with images from the internet, to illustrate how a game map could look like. Off course we need some good graphics for the game, but that doesn’t really matter in the example.

This illustration uses the top down method, the “ancient map” theme. I really like the map itself but off course not the cities and the army (yes, it’s a chess piece) on it… But I’m sure a good designer can make something very pretty in the right style!

There are 3 “cities” on this map, 1 army and 4 waypoints. Now you would select, for example, your army and click on the first waypoint. The army would move to that waypoint and you loose 1 Ap. You could move to another city and attack or lead them to one of your own cities to defend etc.

Game Mechanics Options

Well, that’s a pretty basic engine, agreed? But this is where the game gets interesting: the Game Mechanics (GM) options! I hipe to implement them so I can easily turn them on / off. This way I will test various ideas, and how fun they really are.

I will explain the ideas I have come up with so far in other posts.

Strategy

I also dedicated a whole chapter on strategy in the design document. Currently this is a pretty empty section, but I hope I can discover / create some usefull tools to fully understand what strategy is; how it works, how it can be translated into games etc.

Note

This was a little bit more indo about General’s Map. I hope I did a good job explaining how it works, but if you have any questions, please ask.

Off course I’m not only explaining this because I like writing. I hope it can help some one, in some way. I also want to open up a bit the conversation between (browser based!) game designers. If you have remarks etc I would be happy if you share them with me!

And then to be clear: I don’t publish any of my game designs so others can copy them. I hope to inspire other, so they can use it in their own design.