Game Concept Final Form: The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep:

This is a turn based strategy game, with a hint of fighting, set in a futuristic city that has spiraled into chaos where the government no longer has control, but rather, the gangs have taken over. The players control two rival gangs and play against one another and the objective is to either find the rival gangs safe (equivalent to a flag) or to eliminate all enemy players so they cannot make a move. I named it The Big Sleep, since it is centered around gangs, because that is slang word they use for "Death". I focused on the three different elements of Characters, Environment and maps you can play on, as well as the game mechanics and game play itself.

 I focused on the characters of the game because I thought it was really important to get a sense of how the models will look and give you a sort of idea of what type of society these people live in. As you can see in the image there is prominent use of prosthetic limbs and skin and the technology level is a lot higher than that of society today. These specific pictures I wanted to model for Spy character of the game and the general (man with four arms), and the other is just a rough sketch of a grunt action sequence. I want to also make it available, possibly at a later time, to give the options of choosing different gang factions for different player skins of each piece to ones liking.

I wanted to focus on the environment of the game because to this type of strategy the structures around play a huge part and where you can strategically move you character pieces to give yourself the advantage. At this stage I wanted to have two maps of different parts of this city. Parts where gangs would most likely have turf wars over. I also wanted contrast the elements of day and night so I thought that docks map during the day would allow for a different atmosphere of play, while the players can also battle in the city streets at night for that more inner city turf war. Each map will have different hazards that players have to maneuver around and different elements of strategy they will have to think about to outsmart the enemy player.

I lastly focused on the game mechanics and game play because I really thought it was important to explain the combat system which uses ranked pieces as well as the specific abilities some pieces have. It was also important to get out there the fighting game mechanic I thought to add whenever a tie would happen. So to start, I want to describe the combat system which uses ranks, this is how game works smoothly. In game you cannot see your enemy players numbers on his piece for they are secret only to him, so you are going in blind to fights. If you attack the enemy both ranks are revealed and who ever has the lower rank, i.e. Rank 3 beats a Rank 5, wins the fight and the other players piece is removed from the bored. This goes with a few exceptions to bombs and spy pieces. A spy is the only character piece that has a chance to take out the kingpin piece. The player with the spy, however, has to initiate the attack. Mechanics are the only pieces who are able to disarm bombs if they come across one, other than that bombs always win against everyone and are not removed. Grunt pieces have the special ability to move in a straight line as many spaces as they want until they hit a wall or an enemy. For ties, the game changes to a 1v1 fighting game, where skill comes into play rather than strategy, and slows game play a little bit to make the fights a little more intense and worth winning.

The game poster I created to advertise some elements