Rulesheet Post (Group 11)

For our group, we chose my other teammate’s idea. The idea of our game was easy as a concept, but honestly kind of difficult to really get into. Basically, it was to have the player walk through some kind of “story” in a choose your own adventure type manner, and your opponent has the flowchart to your story. They will either choose to help you get the good ending or trick into a bad one so they get the good one for themselves.

It sounds pretty good on paper, but then again, when you put in a little thought into it, a bunch of unanswered questions pop up.

For example:

  • What’s the point of making them trick each other in the first place?

  • What’ll make them want to do that?

  • What kind of ending will make a satisfying reward?


Our first rulesheet was more like our barf up of ideas, since we were kind of pressed on time and my teammate hadn’t actually thought about a premise for the story. It was (and still is) quite unclean. We used the premise from my idea, which was a simple story of two people traipsing through a dungeon to compete for the throne. Unfortunately, we weren’t really imaginative enough, so we’re kind of hoping playtesters will help give us some ideas for the actual content. We made flowcharts for Players 1 and 2, but they’re still pretty messy. Right now we only have really simple things like meeting an angel that gives blessings or a monster that could potentially kill you. To answer the “What will make the players want to trick each other?” question: I thought that maybe we should implement a prisoner’s dilemma situation, but we couldn’t really think up a good idea as to what would happen if the players either both allied or both betrayed each other. Please help us.

As for playtesting, we had two options. I thought of using Renpy, since this is a choose-your-own-adventure game (or a visual novel). Renpy was pretty much made for games like this, and we can add in graphics if we want. We have decided to go with that as our main playtesting mode, but since you actually have to code all the stuff, it’s a little more complicated. Luckily you don’t actually need to know how to code, since the engine was made with beginners in mind. The tutorial is pretty easy to understand and I’m not doing anything crazy with it anyway. But unfortunately, I am nowhere near close to finishing the code (which doesn’t even include any graphics by the way).

(A bit of the code. VERY UNFINISHED!!)    

    Instead, we have another option, which is this site called Inklewriter. It’s basically an online text adventure maker. My teammate made the games on that site fairly quickly. The dialogue isn’t much, but of course, it’s just the first version after all. There’s some pros and cons to both sides. While Renpy has actual graphics, it’s not something you can play online, you have to download the program (that I will eventually finish). Inklewriter doesn’t have any graphics, but you can play it online.

I feel like our iteration process is really going to take off once we get to actually playtest. I think that our brains are getting fried from thinking too hard about it, but other people would be able to think up something easy peasy. We need some fresh new ideas on this project. Right now, we’re in the difficult part of planning things, but after the playtest, it’s just a matter of switching a few things around to make it better!


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