So I didn’t get an entry in for Game Chef this year.  I ended up too busy with other things at the end of the week to complete a game.  So that’s the fail.  The ‘well’ part is that two game ideas spawned out of it this time.  I have been working on one most of the week.  I’ll talk about it in a minute.  The other one hit me Thursday afternoon and kind of took over the thought process.  And may have prevented the first from getting completed.  I talk about the second game in another post.

So the first game is called The Survivor(s).  It is set on a deserted planet that once was home to a civilization.  In the game your ship has crashed here.  You (this can be a plural ‘you’) survived.  Luckily for you the Galactic Patrol set up an emergency beacon on the planet.  Unfortunately it is very far away.  So you must journey there, activate it and survive until you are rescued.  Along the way you will face dangers from outside as well as inside.

So it was originally designed as a solo game.  The idea came from watching Survivorman and was inspired by the movie Robinson Crusoe On Mars.  This is a good movie from 1964 starring Paul Mantee and a monkey.  Check it out if you are able.  Anyway, the idea is survive until you are rescued.  I began writing it as a solo game.  You play against a card based mechanic in sort of a ‘choose your own adventure’ mode.  Inspiration here comes from ‘The Plant’ by Jason Morningstar.  The game was developing ok.  I was getting ideas on how to handle different things like weather and creatures.  The card mechanics were fair but promising, needing work.  As I was going along with it, the idea occurred that it could be a two player game with one person as the survivor and one as the planet.  This is good.  And it doesn’t really change anything.  Then I thought well it could be multiplayer in the same way with a GM.  This too was good.  So it ended up being a game multiplayer GM or GM-less game that will support solo play too.  Cool.

The mechanics.  I know you want to know about mechanics.  Those will have to wait until tomorrow.

So come back on Tuesday.