Ok so where are we at with this? Having read the above I think these are the points of agreement. Does anyone disagree with these? It would be great to get going with agents a bit.
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Each agent will have a code.
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Each organelle will have a code.
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The amount the codes overlap will determine the intensity of the effect on the organelle (basically breaking it / slowing it down temporarily).
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The player must work out what the agent does by using it.
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The player is offered some mechanism to change the code of the agent.
The points yet to be fixed are.
A. How are the codes assigned, do all mitochondria have the same code? Do all mitochondria of the same species have the same code?
B. How does the player get given information on how to upgrade their agent?
One option is something along the lines of “I want this agent to work 100% against this organelle of this species” So you can pick one time when the agent works perfectly and then all the other times you might get lucky with code overlap.
Another option would actually be to show the player the code of their agent and the overlap with other species organelles. So you can see that your code is 110101 and that had 3/6 overlap with the mitochondria of species A and then you could choose to change your agent code and over time hope to get closer (kind of like the game mastermind, don’t know if you’ve played it).
Do you think this enough to build something to play with? We can always change how the codes are assigned to organelles later (if we find there is a killjuice trap). Maybe it is more difficult to change how the player chooses to change their agent.