Hero's Journey

[SuperBiasedMan]

Howdy folks!

As some of you already know and have tested, at the start of this year I started work on a digital pen and paper roleplaying style game. I basically wanted the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons or other tabletop roleplaying games but without having to need other people and cumbersome dice rolls and stat tracking. So, I started work on this game. It basically randomises prompts and suggestions for a player, who has to then build the story out of what the game provides to them. I'm trying to keep it simple and extendible so that it could be easily modded or rewritten at a user's whim.

 

Here's a quick demo of how one part of the game works. This shows a randomly generated prompt for the Setting of the game. The prompt just has some key jumping off points, and then I as the user have to define what it actually is in the story by incorporating the details that the game has provided.

 

The goal is for it to be a player driven narrative, so that it offers a lot more breadth of options but that the limitations of the structure still encourage creative ideas. And the fact that so much of it has to come from the player is supposed to make you more invested in the story as it's playing out. 

It's been surprisingly successful so far! I have a solid working build, and it reads everything from a JSON file so it's easy to rearrange the structure and rewrite the prompts. My intent is that down the line people could easily write a new JSON file with a totally different flavour. You could make a noir game, road trip or reality show simulator without having to actually edit any of the code.

 

I wanted to start this thread now as motivation and to start talking/thinking more deeply about some aspects of the game so far. It's a fairly strong foundation (I hope) so I just need to continue fleshing out parts. Right now my main focus is making it communicate a lot of things clearer to the player.

 

Thanks for reading this post! If anyone's interested in trying the game out for yourself, get in contact. I've been getting great feedback from testers so far and it's helped shape the upcoming road map.