Monday Morning Game Design: Chiron Beta Prime

Title: Chiron Beta Prime
Genre: Farmville-Like
Players: 1 (social)

Premise: The Robot Council has decided to relocate you to the beautiful planet of Chiron Beta Prime in an effort to provide you with more comfortable living away from the cold metallic, robot dominated life of your homeworld. You will be provided with a homestead and a means to provide for yourself. The Robot Council wishes you good luck in your future endeavors!

Upon arriving at Chiron Beta Prime you discover that the planet has suffered a devastating catastrophe, and while the surviving half of the planet is indeed beautiful, the side you were assigned to has been blasted into thousands of city sized asteroids which are now slowly beginning to orbit the planet. Cheerfully ignoring your protest your robot pilot (piloting a robot spacecraft) drops you off at your assigned chunk of land assuring you that it its perfectly safe and healthy for a human to live on a rock in space. He explains that in return for this generous grant of land you will be expected to fill a storage container with various trivial things such as ore which will be picked up once a week. Admitting that this plot of land is in somewhat of a worse condition than when it was assigned to you by the Robot Commission on H.A.I.R. (Human Affairs and Interstellar Relocation), and wishing to make your new home as comfortable as possible he leaves you with an extra month of air and departs with a whistle.

Gameplay: The player works and develops various mine shafts throughout his assigned asteroid drilling out various exotic substances such as ‘Photon Salt’ and ‘EM Broccoli’ (so named for its crystalline structure resembling terrestrial broccoli). Each substance takes different amounts of time to harvest. The collected material is then placed in the storage unit for weekly pickup.

The Robot overlords protectors set a production quota every month and if this quota is met the player is awarded with additional life support such as air for the air tank, or batteries for the radiation shielding. If the quotas are exceeded the player is rewarded with a selection of items from robot-themed holiday decorations to fun improvements to his/her asteroid (such as a new soylent green processor) and even more efficient mining equipment. The items available would never be anything a human would be happy to receive under normal circumstances but will be presented as if the player should be ecstatic to have the opportunity to have them.

The player must check on his mine shafts to insure that there are no jams or other delays. Unlike farmville, a shaft (finding its equivalent in the farm plot) constantly produces ore at a fixed rate. This rate drops over time or can temporarily halt altogether until input from the player restores it back to 100%. There are other things that can be done to get people hooked on clicking, but since this isn’t a formal game proposal and I’m late for my drawing class I’m not going to hash them all out here. Maybe I’ll edit this post later with more.

Edit: Holy crap I forgot to mention that this was inspired by the insanely awesome Jonathan Coulton song of the same name.