Just wanted to open a new discussion thread about game design. Since we announced our contest.
we’re also releasing our design doc.
Any revelations/thoughts?
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Is this document the same as the outline you released earlier?
No. This is our full game design doc.
Ok. Thank you I’ll be going over it today then.
I’m excited to see this! I dunno if I’ll be entering the contest, but I’m going to be writing a Hosted Game in between working on my non-COG WIP and this will be super useful.
Do authors have to follow all of these? If so, that’s kind of disappointing. Makes more sense to me now why Hosted Games publishes the best games, feels like with all these rules you’re almost handicapping your own games.
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Some CoG authors color outside the lines a bit. The hard rule is gender and sexual orientation inclusivity - if there are romances, there are romances of multiple sexual orientations available, and if the player has a gender, they have the option to select their gender. (The Fleet has neither, but it has no romances and gender is completely irrelevant - the PC is kind of a Non-Entity General.)
For example, Choice of Robots feeds the guidelines regarding stat use into a wood chipper, but then Kevin Gold is a good enough writer and game designer to get away with this.
If you’re writing for the contest, you’ll be judged on how well you fit the guidelines, of course.
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