Vault 68 - Game Design Document, 1st Draft (Patreon)

Once again, this is posted way later than I wanted to. This time around, it's because I ended up spending nearly 4 hours making the release poster. Model- and texture-work was involved, as well as the logistics involved in getting 30 character models in a scene. It is currently 5:05AM at the time of me hitting "Publish Now." I am dead fucking tired.

WITH THAT BEING SAID THOUGH,

I present to you all the first draft of the game design document for Vault 68. Named and themed after the vault of the same number in the Fallout Bible, where the experiment was 999 men to a single woman.

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In this game, that one woman is Elizabeth - and she finds herself, as the sole member of the population able to propagate family lines, in a position of unique power. And you, good player, get to make her decisions as she works to unify this fragmented community under her unanimous rule.

How does she go about doing that? Well, as she already observed, she is the only one able to start families. And between having a body like hers, and her precious baby-maker's availability being at a premium... I think you can figure out the rest.

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This is a hugely ambitious game project idea. I have plans to build it in Unity. The hope is to make it fully 3D, rather than 2D FMV (Full-Motion Video) game, like my Flash games of the past. There are still some technical hurdles to be overcame before I can commit to that, though.

I plan to take a month after Blue Star Episode 3 is finally released to focus solely on Vault 68. I don't expect to have the game fully finished in that month, but I am hoping to, at the least, have a vertical slice available: all of the systems implemented, but with only a shoestring of content tying them together.

Which is to say that, the goal is to have a playable demo of the game done by the end of that month. From there, I will judge public interest, and see what I can do about making more time to finish the game.

But enough talk of my future plans, if you're here, then you likely want to read the game design document itself! Below are two links. The first is a link to a 2-page synopsis and overview, which is a high-level pitch of the idea. It doesn't get into the grit of things, but hopefully expresses enough to pique interest.

The second link is to a 16-page detailed design document. It includes the synopsis and overview, and then 13 pages of detailed design (and a table-of-contents that takes up a full page). This design document is not for the light-hearted - It is basically the English, human-readable form of the code that would ultimately compose of this game. It is filled with exhaustive descriptions, algorithms, and numbers. If one isn't mindful of the grander picture, then they could easily find themselves drowning in the minutiae of this document, and think the game overcomplicated or boring.

Both links below house 5 files: a docx, a doc, a pdf, an rtf, and a txt. The order listed is the order they should be opened in, if you can't open the one previous. They have a lot of formatting that should be kept if at all possible.

Click here for the 2-page overview 

Click here for the 16-page design document 

I can't comment on the boring, because the game hasn't been made yet, but I want to say that while all the systems may seem overcomplicated, the goal of this game is a huge focus on emergent gameplay - the phenomenon of a bunch of simple systems interacting in unexpected ways, creating unique scenarios for the player to solve. The systems and information exposed to the player are designed to be extremely intuitive.

Indeed, the design objective for the game is to make it extremely easy to pick up and quick to learn, but deceptively difficult to master and challenging to beat. If you just want a quick porn-game session of Elizabeth being slutty, then Vault 68 will be the perfect game for you - and if you want an involved strategy game with a lewd twist to it, then Vault 68 should provide the challenge you're looking for.