Previously I mentioned how the r1 can capitalize on its unique design to build a location based game. Ideally, the location based side of gameplay is building users a well of resources to use in other, (mostly) non location based game aspects. To give a more concrete structure to this idea you are being subject to my wall of text on crafting/gather gameplay -.-
Why does Location matter?
Viewing the experience of playing a game, through the lenses of the venue, can offer us important insights into the pillars of design we should aim for. The difference between games played in a public and private venue can deeply influence how players are interacting with our game as a whole.
Gameplay is often aided by privacy. To take the risk of immersing yourself in a fantasy world, we like to be in a safe place, either alone or surrounded by people we know and trust. Naturally some of the most important play spaces are in the home.
~Jesse Schell on the private venue
Not all gameplay happens in the home, of course. The world is an exciting place, full [of] exciting people, places, and things to visit. The secret to location-based-entertainment (LBE) has been well known for thousands of years. Whether you are running a tavern, a theater, a restaurant, a brothel, a theme park, or a video arcade, the rule is the same: give them something they can’t get at home.
~Jesse Schell on the public venue
Other venues exist somewhere between the privacy of the home and the openness of a public venue, or they find a way to exist in both. The flexibility of these spaces that live on the boundary between public and private is what makes them interesting and important.
~Jesse Schell on half private/half public venues
Keep these concepts in mind as we move forward and attempt to design around the r1. This is especially important with the r1 because it is a “loud” device. The bright orange draws attention, to interact with the device you speak out loud, the nature of the device attracts attention. The home is a safe space to have deeper and longer interactions with the device and any gameplay we build on top of it. The public provides many sights a player cannot find at home, but the way a user interacts with the device in public should be “safe”. Playing a game should not make the player the center of attention in a room.\
I think that’s enough building up the general concepts around design, so I don’t lose your attention, lets get into the actual game concept.
The r1 ARG Companion
The What
Well before the r1 was announced, I had been theory crafting an infrastructure of different gameplay designs. In theory each small and simple gameplay loop would provide a resource for another gameplay loop. The player is naturally led between the “minigames”, falling into an overarching resource ecosystem. My long term hopes for this design was a companion app for an MMORPG. While players were away from their main interface of playing (PC probably), they could continue to make progress in the main game by interacting with a mobile spinoff. This allowed players to constantly make progress, at an extremely low commitment and time sink.
The hope was to create a type of funnel. As each player found their own niche and explored “life skills” in the MMO, they would develop their own needs for resources in the game. The mobile companion app was intended to ease the active grind of these systems, and allow players to idlily gain their desired resources. The companion app would stand alone as its own game, possibly even encouraging mobile only players to try out the MMO version.
Overall the systems I was designing were akin to incremental games and virtual pet games. They did not require active play, just the occasional check in or refresh. I knew the project would never be completed, but I enjoyed the designing process so I continued to design it. I’m just one man, there was zero chance I’d be making an MMO with enough complexity to make a project like this work.
Once the r1 was announced, a lot of my designing process shifted to how I could best leverage the features of the device, both AI side and hardware side. I dream big, and the potential projects something like teach mode could enable got me excited. Overall the project design stayed similar. I have a focus on high fantasy theming, MMO style life skills, and incremental style interaction. With confirmation on GPS features in the r1, I started considering how we can use location data to our advantage, as well as how this might effect each users individual experience/narrative. To keep myself from getting too much scope creep I dialed in the initial “skill” I wanted to focus on, settling on Alchemy as my primary mechanic.
Alchemy provides a beautiful base to narrow the features and optimize user interaction. It opens the door for two main gameplay loops, crafting and gathering. On the gathering side, we are mainly focusing organic material: flora, fauna, and minerals. Because the device has access to GPS data, theoretically we can cross reference the users location and use their local region, temperate zone, weather, time of day, etc., to influence what materials they gather. This type of context aware gathering also means if a user is searching for a specific material or type of material, they can reference their real world knowledge of the area to narrow down their search.
On the crafting side, each player develops their own localized set of materials that they can use for processing. The crafting side of things is heavily dependent on how flexible we can make gathering, so I have been intentionally putting it off until I have a good groundworks for gathering set in stone. For now I operate with the intention of adding basic potion making functions, where users can prepare ingredients, then add them into a cauldron. The player will have control over things like the heat, composition, and mixing of the potion; with each variable effecting the potions outcome in a different way.
The How
So we have a project outline, a set scope, and some strong design pillars to work around. How will this game function?
As I stated before, we aim to leverage the unique aspects of the r1. We also aim to create a game that does not require active play: stow and go. First and foremost, lets take a look at vision. Out the box, we can take a picture and generate a description of its contents. Magic camera has shown us we can “filter” an image. I’m not sure exactly how it works, but I figure vision is generating a description and sending it through a secondary “filter” prompt that reinterprets the image. If we are able to leverage this feature to our advantage, we should be able to filter an image to fit our needs.
In a perfect world, we can create “modes” for the r1. When the r1 enters a “mode”, it restricts what types of actions and interactions you can ask of it. For example, I would love to create a log mode, where vision entries get saved under a flora, fauna, or mineral category. In addition landscape shots save under a “cartography/location” category. This mode essentially applies a fixed filter prompt that encourages the summarization of vision entries to fit these categories. This might even be a function of a greater r1 ARG companion mode (I haven’t really decided on a name…). This mode based design is primarily to limit false queries. With a simple “shake to exit”, you return to the base r1 functionality.
If we are able to take an image, apply a filter, get a description, and categorize it; we have the perfect base to “itemize” objects from the real world and set them up with dynamic variables used in active gameplay. Simply accepting any image, any number of times without cooldown open the door to exploiting and we must find a way around this. Personally I believe cross referencing the players location with real world data is the best solution, as well as introducing a gather cooldown. Creating an area around the point of gather interaction, we can set a timer that applies when players try to gather within that area.
For “itemization”, generating variables based on the quality of object in the picture (again we are primarily focused on Alchemy right now, so healthy plants = quality items), hue, species, etc.; we can put the description through a “filter” prompt that gives it a high fantasy spin. The hardest part in all of this will be keeping a consistency that allows for the world to feel as if its one whole, connected experience.
If you have experimented around at all with roleplay on the r1, you will know that its narrative ability is pretty good. Having direct access to an LLM is a powerful tool in generating the narrative meat that needs to tie together gameplay mechanics, and I’m looking forward to trying my hand at making a cohesive world!
If you have made it this far, thank you for entertaining my insane ramblings. I look forward to trying to build this thing, but I am knowingly well out of my depth. If I am able to get the alchemy side of things working, I want to move on to fishing (location changes the types of fish you can catch, active reel gameplay with the scroll wheel…), cooking, pets, even magic casting and dungeon expeditions! The ARG concept is meant to give the player a secondary parallel reality they can seamlessly slip in and out of. ~Argo