HI, I'm new to this forums, and I was wondering whether you could give some feedback on my game idea. I've couple of question and I hope you might help.

First of all, the idea:

The idea is about manipulating citizens, represented as pawns in a (abstracted) city. Your ultimate goal is to rein with total control over your city and be able to tell every citizens what to do, by turning them into "grey" citizens.

At the start the citizens are behaving in different ways according to which "mood" they represent. Moods are represented by color, each citizen has a certain color. If your control over that citizen increases his color fades and becomes grey, meaning you have now total control over him.
You generate money by taxing your citizens work, the more they work, the more income you generate.

Some examples of how you can influence your citizens:

- Color advertising (a screen with a certain color, which promotes that "mood")
- Speaker instruction (instructing citizens to react by changing there mood when encountering certain colors of situations)
- Secret Police (punishing citizens with a forbidden mood in a certain zone)
- Social networking (spreading a mood trough interaction)
- Prison (indoctrinating them)
- and more..

Every mood represents a way of acting, and will generate certain behavior on occasion.

For example:

Red: Easily manipulated for a short while, impulsive, aggressive.
Blue: Works hard, not easily manipulated, has influence over red.
Yellow: Opportunist, seeks maximum gain, easily scared.
Purple: Idealist, negotiator, has influence.
Etc..

Each mode will also represent a challenge to "the system". Red could vandalize state property, blue could bomb buildings, yellow could steal money, purple could incite other citizens to demonstrate etc.

Key to getting the citizens under control will be to manipulate them in the right proportions and at the right time.

For example, you place a blue advertising screen on a crossroad where many citizens go trough on there way to work, this way you'll promote your income, if the mood of more and more citizens change to blue, but it will represent difficulties later on, cause blue is not easily manipulated.

Or you could change the mood, or direct "red citizens", to a certain area with lots of secret police to, and incite them to commit vandalism, so that you can arrest them and indoctrinate them in prison.

These kind of situations I'm thinking off.

However, cause it will be very hard to create a good AI for this, I was thinking how I could turn this idea into a multiplayer idea. Or perhaps MMO.
And how I could make sure to create the right level of depth for each citizen and new control measures or game-play elements. Without making the game to complex or unbalanced.

I hope you kinda get the idea, and you didn't get too bored o_O. Would appreciate some feedback, thanks!

Give citizens and effectors vector of moods, not just one state.

Axis1: -passivity / +activity
Axis2: -follower / +leader
Axis3: -agressive / +peacefull
Axis4: -opportunist / +lawfull
Axis5: +randomness
...

(all so mood axis for each game faction)

Axis10: (faction 1) enemy / friend
Axis11: (faction 2) enemy / friend
Axis12: (faction 3) enemy / friend
...

example:
MoodVector PoliceMood = new MoodVector(+10.0f, +2.0f, +1.0f, +20.0f, +0.01f ...)
police generaly are active (+10.0), try littlebit lead others (+2.0),
cops try to first speak and then shot (peacefull +1.0)
cops are fanatic in following factions laws (+20.0)
cops like "governament" faction (+20.0) and hate "crime" faction.

Then create one function that calculates next mood for citizen after influence.
(remember influences have similar MoodChangeVector)

// example function header
MoodVector EffectCitizen(MoodVector citizenMood, MoodVector influencesEffect) {}

This function gets bit hard to code, but atleast all states are solved in
constant style! (no special exception case codes floating all around!)


I hope that this gives you some ideas to go foreward.

/Tyrian

Great idea. Thanks!

I like the idea behind this, very Orwellian (as in the book 1984). The idea of controling colourful people and making them all grey is very intrigueing.

Quote:

Some examples of how you can influence your citizens:

One idea her is to force citizens to behave contrary to what they want. So if you have citizens wanting to to be impulsive, then you can take actions that suppress this impulsivness.

What I think would be an interesting gamplay mechnaic is that these colours generate the player's resources, so the more colourful people that exist in the city, the more potential resources there are for the player to gather (but they still need controled greys to gather it). This way the player is forced to find a balance between controling citizens and the amount of resources they get until they are in a position to take over completely.

If you also have it that colour is infectious (grey isn't infectious), then the greys gathering the resources are exposed to citizens with colour and will thus need to be "disinfected" (brought back under the player's control). It will also mean that if one colour gathers in one area, it will promote more citizens to convert to that colour.

As an idea for the name of the game, you could call it 1983 (as in the precursor to 1984).