My stress-induced insomnia is your gain. Best game pitch involving Opilio crabs in an office situation gets a RB Country Track Pack code.The idea behind this game is it The Office meets The Deadliest Catch. You play the manager of an Snow Crab Tech Support Center, and it is your job to make sure that the employees at the company do not wander aimlessly into crab traps and to make sure that they are doing the best job they can. The game plays kind of like an isometric fusion of Lemmings, World of Goo, and The Sims.
Each level is a different floor of the Snow Crab Tech Support Center, and the layouts get more complicated as the game goes on. The goal of each level is to get the crabs to their cubicles safely by giving crabs tasks in the office. For example, there are two kinds of security guards: turning and deflective. Turning guards make crabs turn 90 degrees and keep moving. Deflective guards make crabs turn 180 degrees and go back the way they came. Then there are also Trap Destroyers. These crabs go kamikaze on the crab traps so the other crabs can get past them. Finally, when the crabs get to their desks, they can be set to Work, Eat, or Sleep, each of which adds to one game-metric and subtracts from two. Work increases your money, while decreases your Comfort and Alertness. Eat increases your comfort, while slowing down your money intake and decreasing your Alertness. Sleep increases your Alertness while slowing down your money intake and and Comfort.
Each level has different goals to be completed on different playthroughs, ala Mario 64/Sunshine/Galaxy. For example, a level's goals may be "Make $15,000" or "Maintain 100% Comfort for 3 Minutes" or "Avoid All Fishermen," which would be traps and hooks that are thrown down to the game-space during the level which the player must avoid. The player receives a different colored Crab Medal for the number of completed goals: Bronze Crab for 1, Silver Crab for 2, and Golden Crab for 3.
Between levels, players spend their earned money on hiring employee types between levels. Unlike Lemmings which have a set number of umbrellas, bombers, miners etc. per level, here it is up to the player to determine what they need and which playstyle fits them best. General workers do not need to be purchased, but Security, Bombers, and any other special job types do. These basically equate to your inventory.
The main multiplayer mode I can think of would involve one player dropping traps, nets, fishing lines, and all sorts of other crab-catching paraphenalia on another player who is trying to avoid them and get the crabs out of the maze. Whichever player has the most crabs at the end wins.
So while players are mainly concerned with completing the level's objectives, they must also watch out for traps sent by the enemy AI/other players. If the overall alertness of the crabs is low, they react slower to your clicks to make them move. If they are hungry, they move slower. If they are hungry and tired, they're just overall sluggish. But keep them happy, healthy crabs and they're lightning fast.
Great catch and showing initiative by posting this here. :)
ReplyDeleteYour formatting of the pitch is a bit weird... you only finally explained the connection between what the metrics of the money/comfort/alertness do until the very end, but immediately after you introduced the concepts I was like 'but what do they DO?!" for the whole rest of the article until it was finally explained.
Once you finally did explain, though... it seems a bit weird. The spending your money to pay for new crab jobs works (and could work really well to give individual levels a progression... i.e. at the start you have $0 until a crab gets to a cubicle and starts working... other crabs are getting stuck in traps until that 1 working crab makes enough to suddenly hire a crab to deflect the rest away from the traps, which leads another crab to a cubicle to make more money to hire yet another guard, etc...)
BUT, that said... the comfort one is a bit weird. Do you mean they move slower ONLY ONCE THEY'RE WORKING AT A CUBICLE?
Or is that when they're still wandering about the office floor, getting stuck in traps?
Because at THAT earlier stage (getting stuck in traps and such) it seems like you'd WANT the crabs to move slower-- the faster they move, the less time you have to hire crabs as guards to deflect crabs away from traps and the more crabs will get trapped or killed.
Sure, it might be more annoying to watch slow-moving crabs but far less would die and crab death/capture is most likely at a higher tier of frustration than slow-moving crabs.
But if it's just when they're working... I suppose that makes sense. But in that case, you should clarify that they don't MOVE more sluggishly-- they produce money when working at a much more sluggish rate (do they also increase the other metrics like Alertness or their own comfort at a slow rate too?)