Update: Plan change!



Since I've about made up my mind that v2.0 will need to be rebuilt from the ground up, I may as well start planning it out like that as well. This gives me an excuse to shake up the formula, which I might as well make the most of:

1. New setting: Inner city. Complete with urban activity, populace, economy, and police.
   
2. On its passive layer, gameplay is basically like a hands-on interpretation of Monopoly: You seek control of the city by buying out businesses, employing dirty tricks against your competitors, and exploiting appropriate opportunities as best you can.
   
3. On its active layer, it's fairly close to standard mafia: Amongst the players are a few that have allied together and have specially infiltrated into the workings of the city. Failing to put a stop to these individuals will quickly render your petty city control quest pretty darn moot.
   
4. Adding a dark twist to it all, each player shares the same color with each other and with the city's own NPC population. You are only uniquely identified by your single main unit, which must stay alive.
   
5. You'll get to recruit city NPCs of various types for your purposes. I'll work out the exact dynamics of this later. Just note that this mechanic will be my interpretation of the concept of 'special roles'.
   
6. Mafia players have only two distinct properties: Quiet alliance with one another (including shared monetary resources) and access to special NPC units for killing, booby trapping, or otherwise sabotaging non-mafia players' operations.

The main, backbone ingredient to this whole thing will be a fully-functional simulated city environment. Cars will drive by. Citizens will traverse destinations. Police will patrol about attempting to keep order. Gangsters will lurk around occasionally upsetting the order. The occasional city official or urban elite can be seen moving from place to place conducting special important business.

Through it all, the players (themselves city elites) can recruit, bribe, or coerce these NPC citizens individually to be able to issue commands to them. They won't become units that you own, but rather they'll be specially 'marked' to be responsive to individual orders. Moreover, certain NPCs can only be accessed by purchasing city properties, so economy and conquest will play a role.

I don't yet know how lynch voting and stuff like that is going to play out, though.




Now, because this is looking like kind of a big project, it may very well end up taking a chunk out of Sin if I let it. I still haven't decided if it's worth it or not. It represents a drastic departure from my previous mafia formula, and potentially much more complex a gameplay formula... which always worries me. Still, it seems like the idea may be worth trying out...

Again, this is just preemptive planning on my part. Most likely I'll just leave this out here as a half-cooked idea in case I get sufficiently bored or else someone else wants to take it up themselves. Just letting you know.

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Jan 22 2010, 7:57 am by Tuxedo-Templar.

I just wanna say, the first map was amazing, and I hadn't even heard of it until like a week ago, also, I think a city would definitely add to it, as it currently was, as much as it was mafiaish, it also lacked a cool sort of theme, and was almost like a Sim map.

A Sim map? I wasn't aware Sims murdered each other in their sleep.


You know, it's occurred to me that this could actually be two maps: One for the city dynamics and Monopoly stuff (I could just call it Urban Monopoly or something like that), and another with the added mafia element.

Or heck I could just add the mafia shit as simply a game setting within Urban Monopoly itself, along with other possible game modes. Yeah. I'll probably just do that, and cease to plan for making this expressly into a mafia map for now.

This looks really unique, and more importantly really great. I think you should go for it.

Well you know, considering the highly procedural nature of Sin, this would make an excellent warmup in its own regard. I might just consider it.

I just fear I'll get too drawn into it and won't get the chance to even get to Sin properly. I'm about 50/50 torn at the moment on this.

Sin really does need to be done but...

As you said this would be a pretty good warm-up for it, but it could take up a lot of time and energy...

So the answer is simple, half-ass this map and THEN make Sin.
Ez123.

There's no point to doing it if it'd be half assed.


I actually think I'm going to skip it. I've done more than enough tinkering and prototyping already. If I'm going to make something procedural, I might as well go with the more epic choice.

Dude you can't ALWAYS make maps with such determination and gruff as Tank'd, you have to roll out some So-so maps sometimes...