Every Vote Counts

(and every Count Votes)

Welcome back to me ‘umble devlog. Come in, come in, ‘ang up your fancy coat afore it gets all mucky. Let me show you ‘ow the proverbial sausage is made.

(But first, we better start with my customary plea to wishlist our game. It only takes a second, but the warm glow of a good deed will last a lifetime. Probably.)

Last time, we discussed the two ways KING OF THE CASTLE is played - Party Game and Play on Twitch. But maybe we were getting ahead of ourselves. After all, what exactly is this game?

Internally, we refer to it as a “social storytelling game.” But that’s a bit of a mouthful, and it doesn’t quite get to the core of what the game’s really about.

Because don’t let the monarchist title fool you. KING OF THE CASTLE is, believe it or not, a game about democracy. 

Sure, there’s a veneer of Monarchy over the top. But the Monarch in KOTC isn’t an absolute ruler - at least, not unless they win. The Monarch of KOTC is held thoroughly in check by their Council of Nobles, who vote on every decision and collectively decide the course of the game.

The Nobles are where the “social” part of “social storytelling game” comes in. Each Noble is played by a real person who has joined the Monarch’s game - and they’re playing to win.

“Project Streamocracy”

The working title for KING OF THE CASTLE was Project Streamocracy, because when we first came up with the idea, it was that core kernel of democracy that had captured us.

Our Studio Lead (Sam Partridge) and Narrative Lead (Harry Tuffs) had just finished working on Over the Alps, a choose-your-own-adventure game for Apple Arcade. We’d been fascinated by the streams of that game, where some streamers encouraged their chat to vote on the way they wanted the story to go. What if we could turn that ad hoc democracy into a proper game, we wondered?

We also wanted to explore the flaws of democracy. A story-driven game where players could vote on the outcomes of the stories was all well and good, but what if we could ensure each player’s motives were muddied by competing incentives, factionalism, the prospect of personal enrichment, and inter-player rivalries? Then we’d have a real politics sim.

The theme of a Council under a Monarchy was important in order to encourage players to scheme and strategize selfishly. Given the success of shows like Game of Thrones, what better framework to prime that behaviour than to make the main characters a bunch of power-hungry aristocrats in a fantasy world?

(A fantasy world was also convenient because it allowed us to draw away from the stickier, ickier parts of real-world political strife, which we were not interested in. We wanted this game to allow players to be evil in delicious ways - for example, by allowing them to plot to overrun the Kingdom with rampaging ice giants - and not disgusting ways. You’ll notice that the world of Celest Ath has no concept of homophobia, sexism, or racism, for example.)

In short, we wanted the game to be fundamentally light-hearted, despite the various atrocities it allows you to commit. The “fantasy Kingdom” premise is sufficiently distanced from real life that we could hit the exact pitch of dark humour we were aiming for.

Vital Statistics

So we have a Monarch, and a Council of Nobles who vote on what they want to happen. That implies a Kingdom. How can we represent the impact of all these votes on the realm?

The answer is simple - the Kingdom has Stats which represent certain things like political stability, the authority and prestige of the Monarch, military and economic power, et cetera. Each stat ranges from 0 to 10, making them easy to keep track of.

The outcomes of votes can increase or decrease these stats, and stat levels then influence which new events are generated for Nobles to vote on. This way, every new vote has a cascade of consequences as the fabric of the Kingdom changes over a Monarch’s reign.

So far, so good. But a good story needs conflict. We didn’t want to make a purely collaborative game, where people worked together for the good of the Kingdom and make the numbers go up.

We wanted our game to have a satirical bent. To portray a world of intrigue and compromise, where players are super-invested in seeing their schemes coming to fruition. But how to achieve that? Well, a healthy dose of pointless tribalism would probably do the trick.

More on that next week.