You can play “Surveillance Tycoon” here:
Here's also a short gameplay video if you don't want to try it yourself (for whatever reason) or think you have missed something. It also shortly discusses the design:
Design Process
For this excercise Alex Sinnl and I worked together. You can find his take on this design here. We exchanged a few initial ideas via email and then had one meeting / design session at a white-board (for a total of about 4h of work). Most of this challenges effort went into development (~12h) as the requirement was for it to be digital. Documentation took about 5 hours.
The topic was informatics and society. We explored and shortly iterated over a few ideas in regard to that. As you can see in the sketches below.
Solo-Sketching
In the game directly below the player would have to dodge the view- and circles-cones caused by cctv-cams and flyover drones in a bullet-hell like manner. The theme here is more coating than really integrated into the mechanics though.
On most of the next sketch I've played with a few story-driven approaches / sub-themes. The graphic in the center of the right side would be a rhythm game thematizing the factory-work.
Small scribbles about mechanics, sub-themes or meta-approaches:
In this page the rhythm-game concept started to expand a bit:
On the left side I started exploring a few concepts around the mechanics of trolling, flaming and flamewars. The right side uses trolls as a simple skinning for “the bad guys” in a plattformer, a plain propaganda game without deeper message or discussion of the issues around trolling:
Design-Session
This whiteboard-sketch contains some of the concepts already discussed above, drawn here to have an overview. New thoughts / concepts:
- We could implement the story-driven approaches as visual-novel. This would lessen development effort, however introduce the effort to create a truly compelling and critical narrative.
- Time-travel based games to highlight long-term cause-effect pairs/chains.
- We could do some sort of social-networking game where people try to maximize their reach (the graph on the top-right)
- A game where you use your activists to work on embodied social-problems (a bit like Pigmin or Overlord maybe?)
Below you can see the part of the overview that had been blanked out above. It starts playing with the role-reversal game of CCTV-Tycoon. It already contains the idea of using social-capital/resentment as build-resource (though also as a radar-chart) and to nudge the player towards a strategy of small increments to avoid a critical mass of resentment (as can be seen in real policy-making).
This little doodle elaborates the resentment-bar a bit:
Playing with generic names for the sample setting and small details:
This sketch shows a quick take at a possible game-UI. Note that it has multiple surveillance system types and a internet-map as second theater. Both of these features didn't make it into the first prototype.
Below you can find a listing of possible options for surveillance systems that the player could sell:
