IAT 312 | Team 1-3

Game Design document

Game Design Document

(1) Basic Info

Players: Four to six players, for best player experience, play with six.

Length: Approximately 1 hour.

Age: Recommended age of players is 8+ years.

(2) Razor

Keep on truckin’ as you sell as much food as possible in order to sustain your food truck and discover the fundamentals of how situational outcomes quickly lead to privilege in this fast-food game.

(3) Slogan

Seven days, stacked food truck bills, greasy competitors. Work hard, but not too hard, privilege favors the fortunate.

(4) Vision Statement & Top Level Summary

Trucks’n’Troubles is a board game of situational outcomes and competitive sales battles between food trucks where players must compete for the right to pick the best spots first in order to pay off their trucks by the end of a seven-day festival. With harsh critics giving you ratings each day, and events beyond your control shaking things up, players must work hard to survive in the ruthless market of fast food. Despite it being a colorful and playful game, if you look below the surface, you will quickly realize that easy success is often attributed to unearned privileges.

(8) Why Is Our Project Innovative?

(a) Innovation:

Rather than spearheading the topic of situational privilege head-on, our game aims to abstract the theme and repackage it in a more cheery and friendlier manner. This approach is meant to target younger demographics where children are able to explore this sensitive issue in a safe environment - it is a segue for greater discussion. What is interesting about our game is that we create the grounds to facilitate that lesson by including a sheet of talking points for educators and family members to utilize. Upon finishing gameplay, rather than packing it up and putting it away, there is an opportunity for its players to further understand the underlying issues of situational privilege, given the chance that they are analyzing their encounters within the magic circle.

(b) Relevance:

Despite the playful theme of food trucks, our game is inherently unfair when mechanics create long-term positive feedback loops for players in the lead. The goal in essence is to have players witness or experience disparity in access and success despite having little to no input in the outcomes. Regardless of where the issue is presented, for instance, corporate scenarios, alien planets, and so forth, relevance remains when the experience itself is apparent. For those further behind in the game, it is about feeling wronged due to unreasonable outcomes, yet those in the lead will hardly be concerned as to why they are successful and would carry on reaping the benefits. It is intended that player experience in-game can be reflected in real-life scenarios when they understand that some advantages given to them were unearned while others may have to struggle more purely because of factors not in their control. It is to understand the perspective in a “diluted” way to gain a glimpse into how society essentially operates.

(c) Selling Points:

Trucks'n'Troubles is a fun and bright competitive game that encourages cooperation or sabotage amongst its players. Not only does it touch upon issues in society through abstraction, but engaging people-fun aspects are what tie in the eye-opening experiences. As a game aimed at younger children, Trucks'n'Troubles is the perfect platform to start a discussion about the underlying challenges of situational privilege today when players soon realize a quick turn of events beyond their control can entirely change outcomes of success.

(9) Introduction

Trucks’n’Troubles tells the story of a group of food trucks trying to earn the most money by the end of a seven-day festival. Players each take the role of a food truck owner and must make decisions about managing their truck based on events, popularity, and their individual wealth. The core game loop consists of a global event (drawn from a deck of cards), the selection of location for the day, individual events which occur to each player, and the collection of the day’s earnings.

(10) Narrative/Story

Our game is set over the course of a seven-day festival being held in an unnamed city. The players each take the role of food truck proprietor who needs to earn enough money to pay off their truck during the festival (note: the “pay off one’s food truck” element is purely narrative in the current state, and it will likely remain that way). The industry is hyper-competitive, and only one truck can lay claim to an area each day, not only that, but the festival wants the most popular trucks to have first dibs at locations, giving them access to the most profits too.

A feature that we have developed, but have not implemented due to the limited amount of time available for testing, adds an additional narrative in the form of Character Trucks. These are truck and player card combinations that would replace the current generic sets with a diverse cast of memorable characters. The expanded system would give each player a backstory that would provide both advantages and disadvantages in-game, along with a new set of event cards that would play into which truck players are playing as.

(11) Game Mechanics

• The game occurs over the course of seven in-world days, each of which follows this structure:

○ Global Event

○ Trucks Choose Locations

○ Trucks’ Individual Turns

⁍ Individual Event

⁍ Optional: Truck Upgrade

○ Trucks Collect Their Earnings

Global Events:

Global Events are drawn from the corresponding deck at the start of each day, they directly impact the game world and adjust the strength of each location based on its attributes or narrative context. For example, a Global Event may cause all nighttime locations to receive more customers (high traffic) at the cost of all daytime locations receiving less (low traffic).

Choosing Locations:

Having received the context of the Global Event, players choose their locations for the day in descending order of popularity (with ties being broken by how much money each player has). This is designed to emphasize our core message, as it directly showcases “the rich getting richer”.

Individual Turns:

Players have two things to do on their own turns. Firstly, they must draw an individual event card, which can lead to a broad spectrum of results. Players may receive a favorable card that increases their popularity, or they may experience a technical issue and lose money for the day. Or, most interestingly, players may receive a choice of actions that has distinctive pros and cons, such as being approached by another truck looking for supplies. If you give the supplies, you lose a significant amount of money, and the other player is totally fine, if you refuse, you lose popularity and the other player loses much of their daily income.

The second activity for players on their turns is the option to purchase upgrades for their trucks. Purchasing an upgrade has the effect of immediately providing a +1 bonus to popularity, however, this bonus does not prevent the player from later losing that popularity, and each purchase of an upgrade significantly increases in price to do the next one.

Collecting Earnings:

At the end of the day, players use the global event and their individual events to determine how much money they have made that day. Money comes from a location’s traffic (either decided by an event or simply normal), any bonuses or penalties received from events, and one’s truck’s popularity level.

At the end of the game, the player who has saved the most money is declared the winner.

(12) Play Matrix

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