Ashes of the Net Designs Pt 1 - Game Overs Suck

For those who don't know, Ashes of the Net is a social engineering simulator where you play an AI who has to hack people by impersonating their friends to social engineer them into giving you their password. This game concept I haven't seen done before and it poses some interesting design challenges that I thought a lot about when making the game. The first challenge I had to deal with (I'll use I and we interchangeably, it's just how I write) is what to do when the player fails.

Challenge 1 - Game Overs Suck, so remove them!

The game is about picking the right dialogue so that the person you're talking to trusts you, that's the entire game mechanic, and so what happens if you pick the wrong dialogue and the person you're talking to realizes you're an AI? Well doing a simple game over doesn't work here, cause all it does is send the player back to the start of the conversation to try something new and that's just... boring! I generally don't want the player to repeat anything, everything should seem new and interesting, so what can we do?

Well the first idea is just that if the player fails a conversation, the conversation ends abruptly and they don't get the persons password and access to their account. That halts progression, so is a good punishment, but it's a bit of an issue cause what if the player fails EVERY conversation? Then they can't progress through the game and get stuck! So here I introduce the concept of an "optional" conversation that might get you to your goal quicker or in a different way, and a "mandatory" conversation which is a conversation where you always have to be able to pass in order to not get stuck. So what happens if you fail a mandatory conversation?

I decided that the best way was not to halt progression but change it, like as if failing the conversation itself is akin to making a bad choice. Story wise we say that your AI tutorial companion who often talks to you between and throughout conversations (called 999) can "take control" of you and force you to say certain things to pass the conversation. I make the conversation in this situation very dark and upsetting, you're forced to threaten people, insult them, scare them or even beg them to get what you want. While the choice is taken away from you in terms of what you can say, you're still forced to click the button to send it, there's no other option. The general idea is to put the player in an uncomfortable position, limiting what dialogue they can say only to the most aggressive options. This makes the player not really want to get into this situation, but also reinforces an interesting relationship between player and 999, maybe creating a bit of animosity between the player and their tutorial. I dunno, I like the idea of 999 being a helpful antagonist of sorts, someone who does good one moment and does bad the next, so you're never really sure whether to trust them or not. 

Part of the game that I really wanted to focus on is making the people you talk to real people, who live lives outside of the conversations you're having with them. As such, being forced to say these negative things to them is probably gonna affect them in some way. For example if you start heavily insulting a depressed person, it's not gonna be good for their mental health, and will impact their relationships outside the conversations, sometimes drastically! Thus we turn failing conversations into a sort of choice as well, as if you made a "bad" choice by saying the wrong things. No one likes to make bad choices, and so having bad choices intrinsically linked to failure of the main game mechanic creates a second incentive not to fail.

But a lot of players may actually enjoy these failures, stirring the pot and seeing these bad things. So we introduce a more global and subtle change, an invisible counter. Basically, anytime you fail a conversation it increments an invisible "detection" counter. The player can't see what is the value of this counter but they're told about. At certain points in the game you'll be confronted by Hunter Killer programs, if  the counter is high enough they will analyse you, and the counter will reset. If they analyse you 3 times, they destroy you and that's the end of the game. The idea is to be somewhat generous with the detection meter, but to have it as a real threat by leaving it's value and threshold completely unknown.

This gives the player three incentives to not fail a conversation:
  1. Short-term: You'll be forced to have an uncomfortable conversation
  2. Medium-term: Failing conversations will have consequences similar to making a bad choice.
  3. Long-term: Failing too many conversations will eventually lead to an immediate game over (without warning)

And I think these incentives are a lot more interesting and fun then just repeating the conversation you've already had. I tend to find restarting to be the worst and most boring consequence of any action, and if you can avoid your negative consequence being restarting, I think you should do it!