The Throne!

Gametype: Multiplayer Action Stealth Game

Perspective: Over Head Isometric View

Players: 8-16

Overview:

The King has sadly passed away and the 12 days of mourning has begun. That means you only have 12 days to secure your place as the new King! Normally this would mean making allies with the Counsel through good will, good ideas, personality and policies. Then, at the end of the 12 Days, you would be voted in as the new King…

But screw that… That’s hard…

Instead its time to discredit your competition! Everyone has secrets, time to expose a few and lower their standings with the Counsel.  As you find and expose these secrets their hold over the top positions weakens and yours grows stronger. But be careful, you have secrets too…

Gameplay:

Gameplay focuses on Multiplayer Stealth, Trust And Betrayal.

The entire game takes place in a open world full of NPCs going about their business. Players begin with a few supplies, lock picks, and a letter containing evidence of their secret. During the course of the game, each player is attempting to find out one another’s secrets, get the evidence and figure out how to best use it.

Players can trade it, hold on to it for ransom, or expose it to the Counsel.

Exposing the letter drops a players standings down, but depending on who it is given to and when determines how badly it drops. Talking to NPC’s and figuring out the best time and place to expose the letter allows players to destroy another’s reputation rather than just hurting it slightly.

The Counsel’s Standings:

In order to become the new King, players need the votes from the Counsel, without it, there is no way to claim the throne as your own. Keeping your standings up with them through out the game is key to success, but everyone is out to discredit one another so be careful. As players do favors for NPCs in the world they gain better standings and when they are discredited they lose some.

Cabinet Documents:

Although the main goal is to win the Kingship, players also have a Cabinet Document with positions that the King gives out to his friends. These positions are like cabinet positions for the presidency and are highly sought after. Each player creates a document for the other players, ranking who they want higher than others.

After the game is over, the elected King’s Document is set as the ranking system for the rest of the players, 2nd place on the document is now 2nd place no matter how well they did during the game.

The higher positions in the end game give out different special abilities for the next game players play in, giving out advantages to those who help out the new King.

Art Style:

Although the game seems like it’s pretty dark in it’s backstabbing ways, I envision this as a more humorous version of Game of Thrones. The over head view of the game allows us to pull the player out of their character a bit more and if we add in a more cartoon-y looking setting and style we can keep a dark tone while staying more fun. I don’t want people to really latch onto the backstabbing ways but instead play a role that allows it.

That way we can try and keep people from taking the game too seriously and getting too upset when they get tricked or used by others.

Tech Requirements:

There would be a lot to go into this game programming wise. A few problems that I can think of off the top of my head:

• Multiplayer open world needs to work well, this could be taken care of depending on what engine is used but being a larger open world should be taken into consideration.
• Networking is always an issue, I haven’t dealt with it too much and tend to get tripped up on here and there when I need to. Extra attention will probably need to be placed into making sure everything runs smoothly across server and client side.
• There will be a lot of AI and NPC interactions that need to be tracked really well, not only from one players perspective but from a lot. A really good system of keeping track of all the player’s secrets, stats, standings, missions, and much more will need to be in place and allow the designers to really setup cool interactions with the NPC’s and other players.