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The Devil's World
A dialog heavy game about gambling.
While the game is themed to gambling, the true nature of the game is more like that of a puzzle game. The various gambling mini-games either have some sort of flaw that the player can figure out and exploit, or the player has some sort of tool or trick that he can use to bend the game in his favor.
The game uses a top down grid based tile world, akin to Pokemon or the old Final Fantasy games. The player walks around on the grid and can interact with things such as NPCs and objects.
The game also features several subsystems to help flesh out the experience, and to get the player immersed with the game, seeing it more as an adventure rather than a series of mini-games with a thin wrapper.
A custom 9 chamber revolver is used. The enemy player puts in a bullet into one chamber, and then the player puts one bullet into another chamber, and the revolver is spun. The spinning animation takes a long time. The players take every other turn firing the gun towards themselves. A player may fire several times in a row if he wishes, and if he does, the enemy player must likewise fire as many times on his upcoming turn.
When the revolver chamber is spun, it will always settle so that the two chambers with the bullets are down towards the ground due to their extra weight. The player can actually see this during the long spinning animation, where the spin clearly has a bias when it slows down or keeps going easily.
By putting the player's bullet right to the left or right of the enemy player's bullet, the player ensures that the two bullets are at the bottom together, and there will be 5 empty chambers before the 6th one which contains a bullet. The player can then fire the gun against himself 4-5 times, ensuring that when it's the enemy player's turn he will definitely be firing the live bullet.
The player might win this out of pure luck, so the situation should probably be set up so that he has to defeat several opponents in a row, maybe in a very horrifying elimination qualifier round against a whole group of rivals.
##Money Box
There is a box. All players begin the game by paying the fee to participate in the game. The collective fees are all put in the box. The players then take turns withdrawing money from the box. Money can only be withdrawn in certain sized bulks, for instance the sizes might be: $100, $300, $500.
The game ends when the last money is withdrawn from the box. Then after the game is over, the player with the most money, and the player who withdrew the last money in the box, are both penalized. They lose the money they have withdrawn from the box this game. The money is distributed to the other players who were not penalized. In case of ties for most money, all tied players are penalized.
The most basic move is to grab $500 from the box every turn, since that maximizes your winnings. This means we can easily calculate how the game will end up unless somebody takes a lesser amount. For instance, if there are five players that each paid $2000 for a total of $10000 in the box, then $500 can be withdrawn 20 times, which means that the turn will rotate among the players 4 times before ending with the player right before the starting player.
Once this happens, this player will be penalized if he opts for $500, so he takes $300 instead, pushing defeat over to the two next players, who will pick $100 each and be penalized for having the most money and for taking the last money.
Thus, to win the game, those players who will be penalized by this outcome must pick a smaller amount than $500 on prior rounds to change the outcome. They key to victory is knowing exactly what you need to pick to maximize your profits while still keeping yourself safe.
Furthermore, since the penalized players's money are distributed among the remaining players, playing passively to ensure your survival can still be very profitable.
Several rare artifacts are up for action. These artifacts are worth some random value each such as $40,000, $30,000 and $15,000, etc. The players all start with a wallet filled with their entrance fee money, a static sum identical to all players, such as $50,000.
When the action starts, the artifacts are sold one after another. During the bidding round, each player makes a secret bid, to the maximum of the content of their wallet. When the bids are revealed, the highest bid wins the artifact, which is given to the player. The artifact's value may not be used as "wallet money" to make a new bid for the next artifact. All other bids are still subtracted from the bidder's wallet, making bidding rather dangerous. There is a minimum bid of $1, so no player may choose to not bid at all. The amount of money remaining in the player's wallet, and what artifacts he holds, is visible at all times to all players.
When all artifacts have been sold, the net worth (wallet + artifacts) of each player is tallied up. The players who have not bought a single artifact are penalized, their wallet money is taken and given to the player(s) who hold the most amount of artifacts.
The first thing to note is that bidding higher than the actual value of the artifact can be a good move. Bidding $40,001 for the first artifact will only net you a loss of $1 in your total net worth, and yet drain a lot of money from enemy players who put in bids to win the artifact to rise in net worth.
One thing to keep in mind is that it's possible for a player to bid $1 on each artifact, which means that even if he doesn't win a single bid, his net value will be barely below his starting value, possibly allowing him to dominate later bids.
Since the net worth of all players is always visible, during the last artifact's bidding round, the player can deduce how the situation might play out if everybody plays rationally.
One important thing to keep in mind is that the player's wallets gets smaller as the artifacts are sold. That means the number of potential high enemy bids to watch out for lessens, especially for the last few artifacts. Several players might not even have enough money to cover the cost of the last artifact, and might be unwilling to bid at all, or they might be easy to defeat by simply bidding their wallet maximum plus one.
Several players are on a pirate ship, and are about to divide their looted gold among themselves. Each player is assigned a random rank, in sequence from top rank to bottom rank. The highest ranking pirate then proposes a split of the looted gold among the pirates in whatever amount he wishes. For instance, he might split it among himself as his three subordinates as 40% / 30% / 20% / 10%, giving himself the most, and the lowest subordinate the lowest amount.
The pirates then all vote on this proposition, with the highest ranking pirate having a tie-breaker vote. If the proposition is accepted, the game ends and money is paid out. If the proposition is rejected, the pirate who put forth the proposal is forced to walk the plank, and is out of the game. If this happens, the next highest ranking pirate must put out his own proposal instead, which is then put up for vote.
The highest ranking pirate also has the option to drop his rank lower instead of making a proposition. If he does, he goes down two ranks, and the newly highest ranked pirate is faced with the choice instead.
Eliminating pirates means there are less rivals to share the loot with. This is especially beneficial for lower ranking pirates who'd normally be given a very small portion of the loot.
However, the fewer pirates there are, the more powerful the tie-breaker vote becomes.
When there are only two pirates left, the highest ranking pirate can give himself 100% of the gold, and win the vote against the lower ranking pirate with his tie-breaker vote.
Because of the two-pirate situation, the highest ranked pirate can count on the lowest ranking pirate's vote as long as he gives him more than nothing of the loot, such as a 80% / 0% / 20% split.
Since there are four votes, and the highest ranked pirate has the tie-breaker, he only needs 1 other pirate to vote with him to end the game. Splitting 75% / 0% / 0% / 25% for instance might do it. But the lowest ranked pirate might vote against the split hoping that in the "three pirate" situation he will be offered more than 25%.
It starts to become a bit fuzzy here. The highest ranking pirate needs 3 votes to win, and can't rely on his tie-breaker. He might try to tempt two pirates with a 50% / 0% / 25% / 25% split, but it's possible for them to up their winnings at their next chance by rejecting the split.
Any normal person would get angry and spiteful at an 1% offer even if it's in their best interest to accept. We might not even want the players to behave like robots, but the game obviously becomes a lot harder and more random if emotions are the source of decisions. One possibility of helping the player make solid informed decisions might be to allow the pirates to walk around and talk to each other for a pause right before the voting, where a pirate might declare that he will vote yes or no depending on some criteria (or lie about it to manipulate your choices).
The player's position among the pirates should not be completely random. Being the first or last pirate is very boring, as it means you are either eliminated right away or get very little power over the ultimate outcome.
Also, having a whole lot of pirates and having the first few outcomes be static might be a good idea to give the player the right idea about the game. For instance, the crazy and greedy captain Blackbeard, the highest ranking pirate, might opt to give himself 100% and 0% to the others, only to have himself voted down. The first mate might give a very fair 10% / 10% / 10% / 10% / 10% / 10% / 10% / 10% / 10% / 10% to save his skin, and still be voted down, to show the player that getting rid of pirates even if they give a fair share can be beneficial.
Ideally, the player should be around 7th to 5th from the last place, where there are few enough pirates left that some tactics can be used.
It's the Devil's world yo. His world, his rules. And his rules is that gambling decides everything. Physical violence is impossible, you rob people by gambling them blind.
The player is an interloper to the Devil's world. For mysterious reasons, the exact nature of the player's avatar is never fully clarified, although several deeply secret dialogs might give a few suggestive hints.
The Devil talks as if he knows the truth of the matter, and finds it mostly amusing and somewhat interesting. He is mostly interested in testing the player, and possibly exchanging philosophical devilish arguments about the nature of gambling, chance, destiny and luck.
The last boss of the game. Needs an obviously amazing and epic showdown of gambling. I'm thinking maybe that the player can challenge him to any prior gambling game he has encountered, but the Devil uses perfect AI and perfect luck to always have a uncanny 100% win rate on everything. It doesn't matter if you are flipping a coin, he gets heads a thousand times in a row if he needs it.
Early on the player should gain a companion that follows him around. This companion is somewhat naive about gambling, and the player's avatar often has to explain various obvious tactics and angles to some of the gambling games (as an added bonus we also tell the human player to get him started on cracking the game). This allows us to have ad-hoc arbitrary dialog pretty much whenever we need it, without it feeling unnatural (as an hostile gambling enemy might not be a natural target for conversation).
As a twist, this companion might be somebody really important. Maybe somebody planted by the Devil to keep an eye on the player, or maybe some party responsible for the player's interloper entry into The Devil's World. It should probably be part of the final boss confrontation. Or maybe, after following the player around for the entire game, the companion is mysterious absent for the first time during the last confrontation.
Throughout the game, the player interacts with many NPCs. All NPCs in the game has an affection value towards the player. This value is modified by the player's actions. The NPC's tone and familiarity with the player changes by a higher affection value, and new dialog might become available. The ending of the game might change drastically depending on what NPCs he has on friendly terms.
The game features dialog choices with NPCs, which affects NPC affection, and possibly other game related things. Lots of optional story is also hidden behind certain dialog choices, along with gameplay hints and gambling strategy.
Whenever an NPC talks, certain words stand out in a different color. These words can be "remembered" by the player by clicking on them. To avoid simply hoarding them, the player might have a max of 3 or 5 words he can remember at one time. These trigger words can then later be "used" on NPCs to bring it up as a subject, potentially triggering something important, uncovering secrets, or even getting new trigger words.
The idea behind these trigger words is not to make the player run back and forth between every NPC to sequentially remember each trigger word and then test them on each NPC one by one. Rather, they are mostly handed out during story dialog that cannot be revised, so the player has to carefully pick and remember the words of topics he genuinely wants to learn more about from NPCs.
While secrets may be unlocked, hints and tactics be uncovered, and NPC affection raised, the trigger words will always be strictly optional to the game. You can neglect them the entire way and still get to the end of the game.
Scattered across the game's tile world there are 52 collectable items, themed to a deck of cards. They are hidden in places like garbage cans, tables, phone boots, etc. If the player stands still, they shimmer a bit so you can see them and not have to "check" every single tile.
Certain high profile gamblers give out badges when you defeat them. Gotta catch them all!
Achievements are crazy, they are all about pulling off crazy true gambler stunts that no sane person would attempt, such as bluffing an enemy successfully five times in a row flawlessly, or going ALL IN over and over until you win.