"TV 2 Game": Firefly

This project centers around taking a television show (past or present) and brainstorming ideas for one of three types of games:

 

Design a free game

for

the internet

that will draw people to the series;

 

Design a stand

alone game (for Nintendo) that spins

off from the series

 

Design a simple game for the

TV Show’s

Website that would be a fun way

for people to remember the show

 

I posted my brainstorming session and typed my thoughts on each of the four elements of game design (Story, Mechanics, Technology and Aesthetics) below. I chose one of my favorite TV series: Firefly. 

 

 

For a show like Firefly, the idea of going with a game by Nintendo may not be the best bet due to the complexity of the show. Nintendo involves using lots of interactivity with their games but the company uses games that are primarily geared for children, which would not be what Firefly would want to do. The best bet would be an immersive Internet based game and not a Nintendo or website based mini-game.

            The game would need to involve exploration of the system of planets that make up the Firefly universe. Since Firefly is also a Western spin on the science fiction genre, a game which reflects that would be a good bet.

          

  Story: The war between the Alliance and the Brown coated confederacy is over. The Alliance has brought down an iron fisted rule over the conquered systems and is forcing any former independents to retreat farther into the outer reaches of the system. You are a captain of an independent ship with the goal of settling on a new world, far from Alliance control. The Core ward worlds are where you begin as you hire a crew, sympathetic to your cause and fly your ship planet to planet. You hope to begin life anew far from Alliance control but to do so you need to travel and collect the resources you can in order to live on a hostile world. But the verse contains many dangers: the Alliance pushes ever outwards, while bandits, reavers and dangers of the cold empty darkness will press down upon you and your crew. Will you persevere? How will you be able to withstand a cold dark universe?

            Firefly has the immediately identifiable story of a western post-civil war story. The Alliance is identifiable as the Union army, seeking to combine the states back into the union, while the Confederates are the Browncoats, seeking state’s rights (though the space version of this would simply be autonomy). Outright copying the journey of Serenity and Malcolm from the show would make a game a bit too long, as there really isn’t any “end” to the journey. However, give the player an objective to settle a planet and suddenly there is an end to the game, as well as a reason for the Alliance to want to stop the player from illegally colonizing a planet. The big difference between the Union and the Alliance is that the Alliance is certifiably corrupt and iron willed about bringing outer colonies under their control. Alliance patrols should be extremely dangerous to the player. Reavers, also, are dangerous individuals. The story is that reavers travelled too far into wild space and turned into psychopaths who roamed inward to kill anyone they found. Since the reaver space is farther out than any other planet, the reavers would be a later game enemy that the player should only have to face once, a sort of risking it all tactic would be used to get past them.

           

 Mechanics: The game objective will be much like a strategy game. The character will be given choices to create a crew and ship of their own, based largely upon many of the ships and characters found in the TV show. For example there would be medics, engineers, pilots and other manner of characters that may be useful on the journey. The player would choose the set of characters that they feel is most useful and a ship that they like and start to blaze a trail towards the edge of the large solar system (which will serve as the game space). The goal is to find a suitable planet that is far from Alliance control in which to settle and have the means and materials to do so once you get there.

 There are many planets to chose from, however you must travel farther out in the system to be successful. Settle a planet too close to the core and you may not have explored enough to collect useful material; you will also increase the danger that Alliance poses to the colony you create. If you are too close to Alliance territory they will commandeer the planet for expansion and your colony will be forfeit. It is in your best interest to explore as much as you can before settling a planet in order to collect goods, rations, and possibly even crew to survive. But exploring too much also poses a danger; if a planet is explored or settled too far out of the system’s core, then you run the risk of the colony or ship being attacked by reavers. If you settle a planet and it is: attacked by reavers, militarized by the Alliance, or starves to death because you lacked enough material, its game over.

So the goal is to avoid both Alliance territory and reaver space, while collecting enough material and fuel to get to a suitable planet and survive. Your ability to get to the planet and avoid confrontation in one piece is the majority of the game play. The ability to settle the planet successfully and how the colony will prosper determine the endgame (which is a score tally of sorts). The final product is that you will see if your effort has paid off. Along the way there will be trials that test the limits of the ship and crew you create. The ship can be destroyed and members of your crew can be killed, both of which will hurt your chances of surviving the trip and creating the colony. The ship can run out of fuel, or a situation can result in the capture of the ship by the Alliance if too many risks are taken.

 The real inspiration is here is that the mechanics are similar to the older game The Oregon Trail, though updated and rehashed to fit the style of Firefly. The random nature of the game would play into this as well. Every play through would feature different events that could be solved in different ways, with different consequences. For example, much like an episode in the series, an event could occur in which a derelict ship is found with a lone survivor. If a medic is present in the crew, he can heal the survivor. But many different outcomes of this could happen; the survivor could die, he could join the crew, he could go crazy from a traumatic experience and kill a crew member, or report the ship to an Alliance patrol and get some of the crew’s supplies taken away, or he could even give supplies in exchange for fuel to get the derelict ship home

 Technology: The technical aspect of the game would be turn based. The player would have a limited choice of crew and ship enhancements to be chosen from in the core worlds. The user would then start to engage the jump drive and travel between systems. The system would probably have something like 30 planets to chose from. Of those 30 planets around 15 would be habitable enough to form a colony, but all would have different events that would help or hinder the user when they arrive. The planets can all be explored, but of the 15 habitable planets, there is are roughly five that would lie within Alliance territory and another three that would be in wild space and within reaver influence. That would leave a total of seven planets that would be suitable for colonization, which seems to be the lucky number that is enough that the player would not have trouble finding the planet and not so much that it would be too easy to find one after finding the necessary material to get there.

The player would be able to arrive in a system and the information regarding the planet would come up. The information would give some backstory to the planet but more importantly it would tell the player if the planet was habitable. The player would then have the choice of whether to colonize the planet or to move on. 

Before he can do so, however, the player must go through a randomized event that occurs in the system. The event would involve choice where the player chooses an outcome based upon the nature of the event, the crew and ship he has available, and what materials they need to continue. The result can be achieved in one of two ways. If the player has a specialized crewmember or ship enhancement, then often times the event will turn out favorably. For example, using an engineer to repair a damaged ship will result in material or perhaps a ship enhancement being salvaged from the ship, whereas trying to repair the ship without a specialized crewmember may result in the ship exploding and killing the crew as the nature becomes much more random. Choices that are made like the Mass Effect games keep linearity to the storyline, but can posit many different outcomes to a situation.

 The random nature of choices makes specialized crewmembers and enhancements more desirable as they lower the chances of losing crewmembers and material due to events that turn out badly. The key to the game is simplicity; the events which occur are only relying on a computer dice roll which determines whether an action is successful, as well as a simple point and click interface in order to make choices. The technology should be able to function on any computer, since it’s an Internet based game, it shouldn’t be as large as a full sized game. That’s why the working needs to be simple.

 The game Oregon Trail could fit on 1 floppy disk, containing at most 200 Megabytes, which would easily fit into an Internet based medium on today’s computers. The technology tried and true and with a reemergence of the importance of choice-style interactivity in games, the game could become popular with the target audience of the show of Firefly: those being people who are at an age where they were able to experience games like the Oregon Trail as a kid and then are in their twenties when the show was premiering. The game serves as a nostalgia trip as well as an interesting tie in to the firefly universe, all of it more attainable (as well as accessible and entertaining for today's demographic) than a copy of the Oregon Trail.

 Aesthetics: The Firefly universe contains a delicate mix of western themes and science fiction ones. The combination of holsters, horses and breeches, and exposed engine parts, nebulae and lasers makes it a winning one. It’s the same type of feel that made Star Wars so popular. The feel should be one that reflects that of the show. The clothing is full of utilitarian straps, belts, holsters and suspenders in rustic colors. The ships are much the same, with engines, enhancements, and parts being put on mostly based on function. There are no incredibly sleek ships to be found here. The Alliance ships have retained the right to use the best technology and would have ships that would reflect that with much more aesthetically pleasing birds.

The kind of look that would accompany Firefly would also carry over in the form of its music. The music of Firefly is one that really would fit in a post civil-war America and the music of the game would have to feature the same sort of lazy, western feel. A violin would be a fiddle and slide guitars would be prevalent. The show’s music could actually be reused in the game format, but it might be better to recompose music or transfer the music to an 8-bit format. The reason for this is because the game would require enough music to go in the background while the player interacts with a system. Looping tracks and making them simpler would be very necessary in order to achieve the length needed to last the entirety of the game.

Along with the music, the graphics need to match the quality. Since the game is on the Internet, realistic graphics are limited to pictures of planets appearing on a scanner. The rest would have to be stylized and pixelated art, coupled with minor movements to keep the different screens from getting stale. The idea is to couple the fact that the graphics may be lacking with exciting story events to draw the mind away from the fact that the game is from the Internet. That doesn’t mean that the graphics would be bad, mind you. Plenty of pixelated games can be very pretty; the idea of minimalism is what drives this. Games like Minecraft and Faster Than Light achieve this excellently.