Characters

Lately we have been designing the characters of the main philosophers. Currently the Objectivist is an otter; the Kantian is a bird and the Utilitarian is a lemur. Sketches and further explanations to follow soon.

Issues Thus Far

As with all projects, we are having some issues thinking through some things. I thought talking about them a bit might help us puzzle through them. 

1. How to teach the player in a subtle way? 
• We are aware that once people realize they are actively learning something during the game they will be significantly less interested in playing and keeping the game fun and interesting is the top priority. The educational aspects need to be subtle so that the player is overwhelmed with information, but we are not sure how to make the philosophy subtle in a way that the player still learns. 
2. The player might need to come to the game with some knowledge. 
•  One of the strategies we want to implement for the player to learn is that the player would gain and lose points depending on whether their actions were consistent with the philosophy. For that to work the player would need to have a slight idea what the philosopher would do in some situations. How can we teach the player a few things about each philosophy beforehand so that this strategy would work? Perhaps this idea just will not work out, but I would like to find a way to implement, maybe it is something for later levels?
3. Philosophy is a large field. 
• It seems unlikely that we could teach the player everything about all 4 philosophies that we have chosen. How do we decide what the most important aspects of each philosophy are? 

These are some of the things that we are trying to solve at the moment. 

mechanics and structure

Progress!

The team has had some ideas about how to handle multiple philosophers. Of course nothing is set in stone, but here is what we are thinking right now.

The game will have four main philosophers: The Utilitarian, The Objectivist, the The Confucian and The Kantian. Each will play a different role/have different abilities. 

When the game starts the player will choose one of the main philosophers and they will use that one philosopher to navigate the levels.

In addition to controlling one philosopher the player will also have the option of controlling several secondary characters.

I have created the following image to illustrate this mechanic.

In this instance the stick person is the philosopher that the player chooses at the beginning of the game. The stars represent the secondary characters. The yellow circles represent gold. The dark gray areas are platforms for the characters to walk on and the light gray areas are doorways to finish the level. 

Hopefully from this image it is clear that the player can always see the main philosopher and the secondary characters at the same time. The player will be able to control all 4 of the characters, however the player is only able to control one character at a time. The player can choose to take only the philosopher to the end of the level, or the philosopher as well as any number of the secondary characters. The player can split the gold between every character in his party or keep it all for the philosopher. These decisions should be made based on what philosopher they are playing as. 

As of right now this is the mechanic that we are working with. More updates on this idea soon.