Identity: Introduction

Here's a first draft design doc of something that came to me on the commute home tonight. I think I'll probably prototype this over a few lunches next week and see what develops.

Premise
We all have several different faces that we wear when interacting with people. Family, friends, spouses, co-workers, etc. This idea involves mechanics that allow the player to shift identities in the presence of different people through the metaphor of color. Analogous colors will work well together while complementary colors will clash. Each session will take only a few minutes, and at the end the player can see how many friends were made and how much integrity he retained.

Interface
My first thoughts are using 2d and a dual stick controller since I'll probably be mocking this up in XNA. Left stick moves while the right stick will change color. I think that mechanic is going to need instant fine tuned access, so an analogue stick would work well for this. The stick will access a radial menu around the character, perhaps requiring a button press for confirmation. I want to involve the triggers as well to set some sort of intensity or radius for the color being exhibited. It'll take some prototyping to work out.

Colors
As mentioned above, the player can change colors to represent a different personality facet he's exposing. I might include the triggers to slide the value up and down to sort of represent the introvert/extrovert continuum or chroma/purity of the facet being displayed. Closer to grey in this case means sort of wishy washy. You can play it safe and stay near grey, and everyone will sort of tolerate you, but you'll never make any true friends.

Staying close to someone with a similar color will raise their opinion of you. A high enough opinion might result in them following you around more, making it tricky to befriend people of opposite colors. If you're dragging along a deeply green friend and try to chat up the red guy, you'll either piss off the green friend by shifting to red, or go middle of the road and sort of bore them both. I'm not certain if I want to deal with interactions between the NPCs themselves.

Letters
The entire cast of characters should fit within an alphabet of letters. This allows them to be iconic and abstract, but still memorable. The player will easily be able to remember "I really pissed A off this time, while G became my best friend." Full names aren't abstract enough and edge in on a simulation threshold I don't want to cross. Unmarked shapes, however, won't allow the player to track progress as easily or project personalities and relationships into the 'NPCs'.

Each character will be a colored circle with a letter in the center. The color will represent the personality type you have to match. There will be some indicator as to the character's attitude towards the player. It might be represented in the letter on a monochrome white to black scale.

Gifts
Some letters will bear gifts like love and wealth. If the player wins them over through repeat interaction with a similar enough color, he will gain the gift from that character. Wealth accumulates in one large pile. Love could either be tallied by the number of characters that have given the gift, or it could be tracked on a per character basis as something that can be gained and lost. There may or may not be different ways these are obtained from a character.

Timeline
The timeline will direct the pace of the game. It simulates a lifetime of interacting with people. Events on the line will pass by (probably at the top of the screen, as different shapes on a line or something) and change the mix of NPCs on the screen. Big events (birthdays, funerals?) will have a larger variety of people, while everyday occurrences like school and work will offer the player repeat opportunities with the same smaller group of characters. Funerals and the ebbing of life might be a cool thing to look into as well, having letters fade away after a time, as long as it doesn't detract from the core message of the game.

Goal/Endgame
I don't think this is going to be a win/lose sort of experience. There will be trackable metrics that accumulate at the end. The player can amass love and wealth. The player will also have a color at the end that will vary in hue, chroma and value. Each of these axes will tell part of the story of how that player approached things. Once the player has checked it out a couple of times, he can set his own goals and see if he can achieve them, maybe learning a thing or two along the way about the mechanics, and by proxy his own approach to interfacing with human beings. That's a pretty lofty goal, however.

So that's the first pass. Some of the moment to moment stuff is a bit vague, but I think there are ingredients in there for an interesting experience. Posts to follow as prototyping commences.