The First Proposal

It was time to assemble my thoughts; I set to work writing a proposal. It led off with a tiny story about being marooned with a little creature called a Siboot ("Bootsie" with the syllables reversed). The player, a business traveler, was on board a spacecraft that lost an engine on takeoff and crashed several hundred miles from the spaceport, leaving only the player and a Siboot surviving. (Oddly enough, the day after my publisher received the proposal, the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed by an engine failure on takeoff.) The core concept of this first proposal was the Interspecies Iconic Language card, which was a table of icons that could be used for simple communications by simply pointing at icons in sequence. This would be simple enough to implement on a personal computer. At the time, however, I had no idea of what those icons would actually represent.

The second major concept of the proposal was a journey from the crash site back to civilization. The many difficulties encountered during this journey would force the player to cooperate with the Siboot, and, I expected, induce him to develop a rapport with the Siboot.

The third major concept was the use of episodes in the journey. I expected to create a large set of incidents or episodes that would randomly arise during the journey to safety. I anticipated creating about a hundred such episodes and exposing the player to about twenty during each playing of the game. This, I estimated, would provide plenty of material for multiple replayings.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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