1. How do you plan to deal with the issue of new players arriving in the middle of a long game? Get rid of the victory condition, or find a way to make sure that players are matched with those of similar ability?

With our MMOG version of the game, each cycle of amnesia would last only for a couple of hours, and the players would be locked into a character for those hours. Since players would get amnesia in waves dependent on what time they logged on, there would have to be games full of bots ready who can easily get replaced by players as they log on, and the players would interact with AI until that NPC got amnesia and was replaced by a live player in that character. There would be six players per world, and those worlds would last until there were no more players signing on and it was filled with bots again, and the world would be reset. This way the worlds would be in various states of change based on what players have done in them. Each time a player started the game they could start as a different character, and it would put them into a world that was either brand new and full of bots, or if their timing was right they could take over a character previously controlled by another player. This would make sense because the characters all have amnesia, so the changes in the world would not need to stay the same for each player because their character wouldn't remember anyway. Players would be grouped into a world based on how far they have progressed in the game, and what information they have uncovered, thus making sure that players who have just started are not placed in a game with a player near the end of the story.


2. What will happen to the gameplay when a player vanishes? How will it affect the other players’ experience of the game (what they see and hear)? Does it disrupt the balance of the game? Will it make the challenges easier or harder? Is the game even meaningful anymore?


When a player vanishes from the game they will immediately be replaced by AI, or as immediately as possible, that will continue that iteration of the character until they are assigned to get amnesia, where it will then be filled by another player. Hopefully it will not create a huge gap where a character can't be interacted with. The AI will be designed well enough where playing a game with only AI will only differ from players by their level of creativity and inspiration. It will make searching for information slightly harder because the AI will randomly explore, whereas a player will intelligently explore the world. But they will both be finding pertinent areas and interesting information to be shared.


3. What happens to the game’s score when a player vanishes? Is the game still fair?

There is no score; their game is saved from the last autosave before the drop out and they will start a new game with the same information, starting with people who have found similar information. For the players who remained in the game, nothing would change except they would be interacting with AI instead.


4. Does your game offer a player an advantage of some kind for intentionally disconnecting himself (whether by preventing himself from losing or by sealing his own victory)? Is there any way to minimize this without penalizing players who are disconnected accidentally?

There is no losing or winning, there is only finding enough information to fulfill the backstory and everything else is exploration.

5. In a turn-based game, what mechanism will you use to prevent a player from stalling play for the other players? Set a time limit? Allow simultaneous turns? Implement a reasonable default if the player does nothing?

The only turn-based aspect of our game are the dialog choices between characters, so there will be an option to exit the conversation if a player finds someone they are in a conversation suddenly unresponsive. If a player has no input on any controls for five minutes, they will automatically be logged out.

6. If you offer a chat mechanism, what features will you implement to keep it civil? Filters? A complaint system? An ignore system? Or will your game require moderated chat spaces?

There will not be a chat mechanism, the only interactions between characters will be through dialog choices that are based on the personality set for their characters at the start of the session.

7. Is your game designed to prevent (or alleviate) collusion? Because you can’t prevent players from talking to each other on the phone as they play, how will you address this? Or can you design your game in such a way that collusion is part of the gameplay, as in Diplomacy?


 If two players in the same game are talking to each other outside of the game, it will not matter because they are playing with characters that have already discovered around the same amount of information.