Faction and Event Design
Amberspire Design Diary #16
Today we're going into the design goals for the factions and events. See the other design diaries, wishlist the game, or subscribe to our newsletter.
From a design perspective, the factions and events form the third major element of the game, alongside the dice and the environment. The goal is to create a narrative quality to the game and city that is missing from the other two parts.
The dice and environment provide a large and detailed systemic representation of the city. There's many little stories that come out of them, but they represent the city and environment as a series of processes with relatively fixed inputs and outputs.
The factions and events represent the people, communities, and ideologies in the world, and they are weird! The events are meant to depict what the systems can't - strange occurrences, people being goofy or aggressive or helpful. The events also describe much of what happens beyond the city, in other settlements in the solar system and in systems beyond. This layer is something that narratively you are aware of as you control the city, but do not have direct control of.
Events
Designing the event system was tricky, and a lot of ideas came and went. I wanted to keep events and factions simple so that the focus remained on the city building, and so that it did not feel like the factions were playing a game without the player. A typical 4X or strategy game has the player and AI on (roughly) equal footing mechanically to simulate the idea that everyone is at the same table playing the game, which was not the goal here.
Skipping over the dozen discarded ideas, the factions came down to being represented by two values: strength and disposition. If a faction is strong enough and has a disposition towards you, a mechanical effect is applied to the entire city at once. These can be positive or negative, but greatly alter the various rules of the game like weather, terrain, dice, and more. Events are now closely tied with factions and change strength or disposition of that faction, or others.
The ultimate benefit of the simplicity of this system is communicating it to the player. To take a discarded idea of factions owning buildings and the you interacting with them: how is the state of the building's owner communicated to the player? Floating icons, art tinting, custom art, all have pros and cons that for the moment ruled out these ideas.
Influence & Dice
So factions have strength and disposition, events tell little stories to adjust those values and affect the game elsewhere. A few different ideas on how to incorporate dice came and went, with the resulting idea feeling very obvious in retrospect. If you can afford to you can choose to pay influence to select an event option, otherwise a die is rolled.
A few other options here were interesting, like a special faction die to choose a type of event, or the player paying to change the faces of die to better guarantee the outcome they wanted. Ultimately simplicity won out, similar for reasons above.