I have a few ideas for a COG and am wondering if someone can give me a bit of input for which game idea I should go for in the future…
Idea 1: You play a CEO of a corrupt multi-million dollar company. You must decide how to run the business, how to avoid legal prosecution and what the companies income sources are.
Idea 2: You play as a colonist on a newly founded Mars colony. You must interact with other colonist and solve their issues and run the colony well to make sure everyone does not die.
Idea 3: You play as a settler in the New World at around 1800. Protect and improve your property and find ways to sustain yourself and your family.
Idea #1 sounds the best to me. It’s hard to define corruption in the business world unless you look at WorldCom or other companies that outright committed fraud. I would be interested to see how you would define corruption. I despise how TV shows and movies create the evil bad corporate guy that buries toxic waste underneath schools and neighborhoods.
How about You play the CEO of a Multi-Million Company intent on colonising Mars! Do you care for the ecological resources or or do you exploit the soil in order to get everything you can? Being so far away from Earth do you stick to basic human rights laws, or do you begin to flout them, knowing no regulator will ever be by to check up? Will you actually care for your colonists or will you work like them slaves to make as much money as possible. Protect and improve your colony, finding new ways to sustain yourself and your people! And what happens when the martians attack? Will you be able to defend yourself against them? And how do you run the colony itself? How do you make things run smoothly and ensure no one dies?
And the above is why I’m never going to actually create a game myself. Rather than sticking with one idea I go SQUISH THEM ALL TOGETHER AND MAKE A GAME OF IMPOSSIBLE SCOPE!
@FairyGodfeather To be fair I think pretty much everyone has the tendency to that.
Plotting the outlines, assigning names for your cast and locations, it’s all the fun part. The real challenge is getting the whole thing done. As we’ve all seen around here most authors don’t really have any serious problems when it comes to ideas - although yes, things could always be worse, namely that when you actually run out of them, halfway through. Lol.
As for the original question, #1 would be the most out-of-the-box to me, although it’s rather unclear where you want to take it from the brief. Is it that the player has the choice to drive the once-corrupt enterprise away from its evil culture, or does the player get to stay in said path if not only to become a worse douchebaggery (since you mention avoiding lawsuits)? In the case you’re thinking of the latter - which is still something I’d love to play, I wouldn’t be so surprised that the game might later encounter difficulties to get into appstores since someone could always pick on your work as “promoting illegal mindset” or something along that line, if you know what I mean. Would be a different story though if you don’t intend it to be commercial…
My 2c anyway
I prefer the first the others are ok but if I have to be good I usually lost all interest I want freedom in alignment. and about be obligated to care a whiny family is not my style maybe I could abandon them