Development Log: Horror Game Part 6

Let's skip the design notes today; they're slowing down anyway and it's time to test some of these ideas rather than philosophize about them.

So today I'm sketching out making safe rooms static and elaborate so players can meet in more than tiny one-room campfires, which was my first thought when the idea of this game hit me.

The player never sees this.  It's all in their MINDS!

We'll start off with the setup of a first year safe zone, being an elementary school.  I made it small, compared to some, perhaps, but I think it's fairly accurate to how my elementary school was set up, as far as I can remember.  Growing up, however, I lived in the middle of nowhere, and my one small elementary school took kids from seven towns, and we were proud when we reached a population of 200 students, faculty, and staff.  So it seems small at first, but I think it'll be large enough to house new players and get them used to interacting with others and learning about safe zones.

Supposing there were a 365 room cap per year, and there were multiple safe zones in each year, the safe zone rooms wouldn't count as part of that room cap.  Otherwise, 43 of the rooms would be used right here.

On top of this map, I've also begun throwing together a static room description list for this area, so it can easily be c&p'd when I program it.  Right now the descriptions get redundant, especially for large rooms and corridors, but I'll work on them to make them more descriptive and subtle, while trying to eliminate that "Text Adventure Vocab" that creeps in as I write room descriptions.

Anyway, this school would be a basic setup, probably for year one, and possibly with slight alterations for year two or three safe zones, before letting the school become dangerous in later years (and it would lose cohesion completely so it would become randomized).

Players would be able to congregate in various rooms to chat, and I'd probably offer other things to do as well, if I can come up with them (library books, for instance).  You can be sure that some players would enter a classroom and then type in the chat "plays Tic-Tac-Toe on the chalkboard" and stuff to pass the time.  That would be the kind of emergent social gameplay I would encourage but not enforce.  To do this, it would need to be in the room descriptions, like "The chalkboard is filled with games of Hangman." Etc.  Ooh, that's a good idea.  Time to work.