I have a concept for the miniLD. I’m not sure how much of it I will manage, but I am aiming for my end result to be a working prototype.
There’s a bit of background to this one that I’m not sure how I’ll introduce in-game. Here goes:
We know of the Greeks and Romans and their pantheon of gods. And of the Egyptians with theirs. We know of many ancient civilizations and we know of the gods they worshiped. But there is one civilization we know nothing about. And it is their pantheon’s fault. The king of their gods had but one name: The Warmonger. And it was due to him that his people were wiped out.
So that’s the background info. By the way, if anyone has suggestions for how to put story (like that ^) into a game, please comment.
Read on for the actual game play.
The screen is a possibly side-scrolling side view onto the world. There might be terrain or it might just be flat ground all the way. On the ground are little stick-figures. The color of a stick figure represents its faction. The stick figures have weapons and they run around and make war. They have hp bars and other stats that either float above them or are accessible through roll-over or clicking. You play The Warmonger. As a god, you derive your power from being worshiped. As a god of war, people pray to you for military success. Since people only pray for military success during war, war is good. Your goal is for the war to go on for as long as possible. If everyone dies out or only one faction is left, you lose. So stalemates or near-stalemates are what you want.
At the side of your screen, you will have a power meter for each faction. Power goes up when individual people worship you. Whether they do so, and how much depends on several factors. Faction wide factors such as how hostile the faction is towards other factions, how much they need help, whether you’ve generally worked to help or hinder them, and how responsive you’ve been to previous prayers affect all people in a faction. In fact, I might even make some power come directly from the faction (i.e. from people off screen who I don’t actually code). Individual factors are exactly the same but with the individual. How hostile the person is, how low their or their opponent’s health is, and other such things can boost or decrease the power you get from an individual.
The purpose of power is to fuel actions. You can only do an action if you have enough of the correct type of power. For instance, you can’t smite a blue stick figure with a lightning bolt if the only power you have is blue power. In order to shoot a lightning bolt at a person, you need to have power from an opposing faction or individual (a specific red person might have disliked that specific blue person even though red and blue were not on hostile terms).
The actions are split into 4 categories: you can Bless, Curse, Cast, or Meddle.
Blessing: any blessing is a temporary buff. You could bless a whole faction or an individual (or a group of individuals). For example, you could bless the blue faction’s weapons and they do more damage for a limited time, or you could bless a specific blue person with invulnerability to arrows, or you could bless a specific area with critical hits and every person in the area at the time of the blessing will do critical damage as long as you could pay for that person. The power comes from the faction that got the benefits. Afterwords, that faction/individual pray more.
Cursing: any cursing is a temporary debuff of a faction, person, or group. The cost is distributed over the enemies of the specific individuals affected and the enemies of their faction. Afterwords, those who were cursed pray less.
Casting: any casting falls into one of two categories: smiting and area effects. The difference is that for smiting you target a person and for area effects you target a location. This is the category for all the standard explosions, fires, lightning bolts, poison fog, etc… Those effected pray less afterword and their enemies pray more. The power cost for a smiting is distributed over the enemies of the person you smite and the enemies of his faction and the power cost for an area affect comes from a faction you chose. however, that faction gets invulnerability to that specific action.
Meddling: meddling refers to meddling with the factions. You could introduce dissent into a faction so that later you could split a faction into two with a rebellion. Introducing dissent and rebellion are two meddling actions. By meddling, you can improve or worsen relationships between factions as well as affect the stability of a faction. Factions with bad relations make war. Factions with really good ones can ally and join into one faction. Factions can surrender and become parts of another faction. Stable factions are less likely to surrender or split into two by rebellion. Unstable ones do. All these things occur in game without meddling, but Meddling lets you affect them. The power for meddle actions comes from a separate source that simply accumulates over time. There is also another very specific type of meddling. Teaching costs no power, but its impossible to take back. You can teach a faction certain things like a new unit or a better weapon or better resistance, but once they have it, they don’t get it back. The reason you might want to take back a teaching is because the things you teach also make your castings and curses less effective against that faction. For instance, if there is a flaming catapult on the red faction and you teach the blue faction fire-resistant armor, the fire resistance will also work against your fireball casting. Factions slowly learn things by themselves, with increased speed when they fight or ally with a faction which has something they don’t (they learn from each-other). Basically, if you over-teach, you won’t be able to affect the battle much afterward and whatever faction had the slight upper hand will quickly defeat the others (making you lose).
I might start the game with this scenario: there is a cease fire between two factions because one is going to surrender. Because of the lack of fighting, you have no power. The factions start at opposite sides of the field, and if they meet, one will surrender. So your only choice is to teach them something (or you lose). If I have too much time or if I keep working on this after the 48 hrs, I might make a small cutscene thing where you lament that you had to give them something that makes them less vulnerable to your (fill in the blank) action.
Looking up, this seems like way too much for 48 hours. So expect something a lot more basic. As long as I have the power meters, at least some rudimentary individual and factional relationship system (relationships to other factions, other individuals, and to The Warmonger), some actions, and the people running around and fighting, it will be complete enough. I hope I can manage it 
Comments, suggestions, ideas: please post 😛
—
Mikhail Rudoy
