Teen-Islanders High School Politics and Coconut Radios

[SuperSooga]

I was toying with the idea of creating a game that could be playable solo, taking inspiration from the randomly generated content of Roguelikes. I ended up with the idea of a desert-island survival game where you or your group collaboratively control a generated group of highschoolers that have to balance gathering food and materials to survive with complex social networks and backstabing. Of course I painted the whole thing with a thick coat of highschool stereotypes and had my basic idea down.

So in the very early stages here's what I'm for now calling Teen-Islanders.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddmbxmt_13cg9mbdv5

So far I've only really done significant testing on the group generation system, which I like a lot. For example, a friend rolled some dice for me earlier today and ended up with this group. Completely generated by the dice, she just filled in the names.

The Rebels
Lucia and Franklyn (Spunk, Couple)

The Cheerleaders
Michelle (Social, Fussy, The Bitch)
Tara (Social, Fussy)
Amber, Tiffany and Samantha (Social)

The Rest
Heather (Sports)
Christian (The Class Clown, Smarts, Spunk)
Eugene (Glutton)
Aaron (Jerk)
Amie (Sports, Crush on Franklyn)

The brackets contain any Strengths or Weaknesses the character has as well as how any other notable information such as relationships with other Castaways or whether they fit a special role such as Prom King or Class Clown. As you can see Cliques form rapidly on this island.

As I said I've literally rushed these ideas together over a couple of hours so I'm not after any feedback on the details such as layout or phrasing. I'd like to hear what people think of this general idea and whether they think they'd be interested in playtesting when it comes to it.

[whiteknife]

The idea is interesting. A situation that's popular in TV and movies, but not something you can really do in any other RPG. It seems like by yourself it'd really be all about luck, whereas in a group it'd be all about the interactions of the people, which is cool. The charts are pretty solid, and seem like they'd make for an interesting game. It's very heavily luck based, which sort of puts me off a bit as I like there to be some more strategy to things, although it does fit with both theme of being at the mercy of the island as well as being somewhat necessary for solo play. I think I might end up trying this out when I get time, it looks good. I'll be interested in anything seeing what else you end up doing with the idea.

[SuperSooga]

You're right about it being very luck-based. As I mentioned I took a lot of inspiration from Roguelike games for this (ADoM and Dwarf Fortress particularly) and my own experiences with them. If you're unfamiliar with the games they're computer RPGs that feature a lot of randomly generated content and are somewhat infamous for their difficulty.

Playing ADoM with a friend we'd often share control of the character and agree on what to do in each situation and even if we ended up suffering a horrible death at the hands of some seemingly inescapable foe we'd almost always end the game smiling with a good story to show for it. This is the sort of atmosphere I'm aiming for with this game, more "let's play and see what happens" rather than "let's see if we can win". I also agree with you that it would be infinitely more fun with a small group than solo, but one of my design aims was to have that option there.

Be sure to let me know if you try an island out and thanks for the feedback.