Anubis

Team Nascent: NEXTGEN 2023 GameJam

Programming and Concept: Luci Cowlishaw

Art: George Muscroft, AJ Haw

Content Design: Luci Cowlishaw, AJ Haw

You select questions to ask the dead souls and must choose to save them or feed them to Ammit based on how they respond. Although this is purely a proof of concept, these are the systems that we planned for if we were to take the game further: 

1:

We would need a way to add a variety of content to the game to provide a refresher between constantly judging souls in order to prevent the player burning out and improve replay-ability.

-The games loop would be split into free-time and shifts.

-Shifts would have you judging a handful of souls before you return to the afterlife for free time.

-During Free-time you can explore a section of the afterlife that acts as a Hub for newly interred souls

-This hub would be similar to the Hub space in Hades where you can talk to characters that you have saved

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2:

If we are wanting to make the game replayable, we need a way to create a large enough quantity of souls to keep the game loop going while the player talks to different characters.

-Create an internal difference between characters with dialogue in the Hub space and filler characters you only get to process

-Filler characters have procedurally generated response lists to questions so they dont have much unique depth to them or require much individual work but arent exact repeats of prior characters.

-Every shift you get 1 guaranteed dialogue character and 4 filler characters that are ordered randomly in the shift.

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3:

With the ability to Save characters and talk to them again, there is little reason to Damn any characters. So we have planned a way we would implement to create a threat to the player and put more weight and emphasis on the decision to save a character.

-For every shift, Ammit has a quota of souls it wants to eat. Bad souls will fill Ammit up more and good souls less.

-If Ammit's quota is not met, it will eat a character that you have previously saved and is in the afterlife at random.

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4:

The game would still lack a reason to keep playing, however we already decided when planning that the game would be character centric and they would be the reason to keep playing which we could double down on.

-You can spend your free time in the hub doing mini-games and activities with characters you have saved to get to know them better and learn their specific stories.

-This system would be pretty similar to the social link system found in persona 5 and follows more traditional visual novel ideas, appealing more to that specific audience.

Enjoy!