Posse Comitatus

In our game, the primary point of connection between the casual gamers and the hardcore gamers is in a posse, where the hardcore player can hire a group of casual players to join him in battle. The avatar of the casual player plays a role in the hardcore game, where the hardcore captain can control the casuals around and make decisions for them. The casual gamer keeps playing his casual games but at the same time gets tons of rewards and new challenges from every battle won by the posse.

This sounds simple enough, but to get it working has been lots of work. Earlier this week, Charles and I sat down fully design this idea, and had tons of questions to answer: How loyal are the casual gamers to the posse? When can they leave? How can they join? How are they invited? How are they found? We took figurines from Dungeons and Dragons to represent the players in the posse, and played around with the figurines while writing down some of our ideas on notepad. We decided that casual gamer needs to be harassed as little as possible, but he or she should remain very interested in joining a posse.

The rest of the week has been implementing most of the basic functionality and getting it to the point that is good enough for the first iteration of our alpha. In the meantime, the design of the posse has called for some redesigns of the website in order to accommodate to what we decided, so the website went through an unexpected iteration.

Once we connect the hardcore game to the player-created posses, we should be good to start some serious playtesting to the outside world.