I began this project to explore a mechanic I really want to employ in a variety of games going foward, a graph of points the player builds like they would build a deck in a deckbuilding game and then traverses to trigger its effects. the card equivalent in this analogy are the actual points, each one with their little power.
to begin exploring this mechanic and how to implement it, I started a simple tiny project to test this graph almost in isolation. thought of ideas until I arrived at this one, a virtual pet game, where your pet's "function" works through the traversal of this graph.
I'm gonna explain concretely the basic structure. you're raising-building a homunculus, constantly aggregating new parts and substances to it, which leads you to add more "functions" to its constelation. a function is a point in this constelation and represents some form of bodily or psychological function the homunculus performs. each "moment" or turn in the game, the homunculus itself will choose a new function adjacent to the current one (there is always an active function) and will activate its effect. this would then be a representation of the homunculus functioning as an organism.
a function will usually change the value of the four substances (phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile) or hunger. taking care of the homnuculus means balancing these values, that shouldn't get either too high or low, having strong consequences to the little thing. the homunculus gets more hunger every turn and satiating it is a primary motivation to aggregate new parts to it. less frequently, these new parts will add or remove functions from the constelation, or form/ break conections.
the homunculus not only activates the node it just visited, but all last four, forming a little combo. when functions of the same type (but not necessarily the exact same function) get activated together in a combo, their effect is stronger. the reason for it is leading the player to plan the position of the points, to create the possibility for benefitial combos.
throughout the game you keep building this constelation of points, adding and removing them, forming connections, creating a possibility space, but your little pet, as an independent being, traverses this graph on its own, realising only one of its possible paths.
this game and this mechanic come from my appreciation of deckbuilding games, but as I mentioned in this blog before, I don't like game mechanics that give the player multiple options of things to do, of powers to activate, all simultaneously. like a bunch of toys in a bucket, for the player to grab and use when they want. so I wanted to try something sort of deckbuilding where cards have a specific structured relation to each other.
I think this mechanic of a constelation of points can be explored two ways, with two poetic and aesthetic results. when some entity in the game traverses this graph on its own, it becomes a question of building this possibility space to then observe the way, amongst many options, it got actualised. a back and forth between you and this entity with a life of its own. sort of god game. when you yourself traverses the graph you created, it becomes about building an instrument to then have to perform it.
this game is gonna have this sort of gothic medieval theme. I have some specific ideas for the aesthetic to call back to game I made with colorful lines against a dark background. that is also why the four substances you balance reference the four humours theory.
is probable that the game is gonna be very open, without explicit objectives, more of a digital toy than a challenge. I think this frees me to explore this mechanic for the first time and play around with it without having to worry about balance and things like that.
I recorded a demo of the structure of this game, there is nothing final yet, just the systems:
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