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11:31am on Tuesday, 1st March, 2022:

Downtown

Anecdote

Yesterday, I was looking for the original, handwritten text of my first published game, The Solo Dungeon. This entailed digging through piles of material from the days when I didn't used to do everything on a computer. I came across a design for a game I called Downtown. Here's the map:



It does come with an overlay that breaks the area up into districts, but I found that after I scanned it.

As you can perhaps tell, it's a prohibition-era gangsters setting. I have supporting documents that tell me what's in all the squares (many, many different kinds of buildings) plus the assorted legal and illegal organisations involved.

It was going to be a (tile-based) role-playing game, driven by interactions between thousands of NPCs all following their own agendas. Situations would emerge that the player could participate in (the NPCs wouldn't know the player wasn't also an NPC) and change the course of the city's future. Basically, anything an NPC could do, the player could do — and vice-versa. The player, being smarter than the NPCs, would be able to rise in whatever hierarchy they chose: gangster, police, judiciary, shopkeeper, ... Some long-term careers wouldn't work (university professorships would effectively be fixed) but others would if they were open to NPCs.

Although I designed the game, I didn't ever make it. There was no point in making a game I couldn't sell (I have zero artistic ability), and the fun part — the designing — was already done. I set it aside, to find again two or three decades later. I could have more fun designing a new game instead.

If any of my students doing the Hero's Journey assignment are reading this: here's where I failed the Woman as Temptress step.




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