Kontextmaschine

15th November 2022

Post reblogged from a continuous cutting motion with 176 notes

here’s a video game idea which would probably be pretty hard to make fun but which I like as a concept:
Gameplay consists of short (~1 hour or less) runs, and a bunch of the rules governing how the game works are randomly generated and vary from one run to the next. As an example of the kind of variation you could have, there’s the common mechanic in roguelikes where e.g. a “blue potion” has different effects from one run to the next, and you have to figure out what it does this run, sometimes by doing something dangerous like drinking it, sometimes by other means. Here, though, more things are uncertain than in a traditional roguelike, and getting that information is riskier; it’s balanced such that you can’t expect to get, within a single run, all the information you would need to win. And you can’t carry information over to future runs because next time you’ll get a completely different set of rules.
But it’s played online, and although any ruleset is seen by each player only once, after one player loses a run another player is given the same ruleset. After losing a run a player can write a short message (maybe limited at 500 characters?) describing what they learned, and players can see the messages from everyone who has previously attempted the game with the same ruleset that they’ve been given. Once someone finally wins for that ruleset, everyone in the chain gets an email or a message to their account, which gives the full list of the messages written by players in the chain together with a video or transcript of the actual winning run.

Tagged: vidya