The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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10:50am on Friday, 27th July, 2007:
Anecdote
Every game designer has a stack of unused, often half-completed game designs kicking around. Today, I was looking through the ones on my hard drive (while waiting for my wife to be ready to go to the shops — half an hour later she decided she wasn't coming along anyway) and I found these:
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Page 10
These aren't the designs for a game, they're designs for the promotional material I was going to send out to try get funding for a game. The basic premise was that the players were rich shopaholics going to an island retreat for rehab. There, they would only have a limited amount of money each day, but the better behaved they were the more money they would have access to, until eventually they were cured and could leave. "Better behaved" meant "having a good reputation", and there were a number of ways to get this XP-equivalent, of which having wild sex with the locals was but one.
OK, so the game idea wasn't all that great and neither were the mechanics (although they helped inform a later design on the same topic). What I did find interesting, though, was writing the mock brochure. I only did 5 of the 16 pages planned, but they give a flavour of what the whole would have been like. They were quite entertaining to put together, and I got ideas for a bunch more set in various other imaginary countries.
I couldn't ever sell one to a publisher because they'd have to look like travel brochures to work, but I wonder if I could interest a magazine or newspaper to include them as a promotion?
I guess there's only one way to find out...
Referenced by Beyond Parody.
Referenced by Where I Work #7.
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Copyright © 2007 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).
