#Subterfuge Game Brief
##What is your project?
Subterfuge is a multiplayer scenario for Arma 3 based on Dark Business and Subrosa. Two Gangster teams are given semi-random objectives that place them in cooperation or opposition. Examples of objectives are "trade your macguffin for the other team's macguffin", "kill the other team", "steal the other team's macguffin and escape with both macguffins" or "team up with the other team to ambush the police team". Each Gangster team is unaware of the other team's objective. An optional third team, the Police team, attempts to prevent the Gangster teams from completing objectives and escaping. The Police team is outnumbered by the Gangster teams but has better equipment. Each round should take between ten and thirty minutes. Players do not respawn until a round is over, but can spectate the game and converse with other dead players while waiting.
##What does your game aim to do?
The purpose of Subterfuge is to be an unpredictable and memorable multiplayer experience that showcases information asymmetry, player ingenuity, realistic ballistics and tactics, semi-random variance, and inter-player interaction. More often than not, players should end each round with at least one moment they want to excitedly talk about with the other players. Rounds should be relatively short so that several of these moments occur every hour of play. Themes of Subterfuge should be mistrust, paranoia, communication and "ten minutes of tension, ninety seconds of panic".
##What format are you shooting for (use specifics: PC, iOS, Android, screen sizes, required graphics detail, etc.)
Subterfuge is a scenario for Arma 3, a military sandbox simulator for Windows PCs. It will share requirements with Arma 3. It will be compatible with the vanilla game, but designed for use with the AGM and TFAR mods.
##What are you designing with? Who? (Try to be specific)
Arma 3 scenarios are written in the SQF scripting language. The scenario will be developed using Sublime Text and hosted on GitHub. Code from my most recent Arma project, Tango Hunt, will be re-used. While I plan to be the main developer of this scenario, I will bounce code ideas off my friend and fellow Arma scenario author Judah Harvey and gameplay ideas off of my friends Edwin, Brian, Joey, Gabe, Austin and David. I will run technical tests using a local server and player testing and feedback using a DigitalOcean cloud server.
##What is your Target Audience?
My target audience are small to medium groups of friends who play Arma 3 or it's mods. Cheating in this game format is trivially easy using an out-of-game communication system, so players should have established levels of trust. Players should have microphones and be familiar with Arma 3's core infantry mechanics.
##What does your game appeal to / how will it affect people?
During gameplay, players should feel paranoid and mistrust the other team(s), even when they appear to be cooperating. The game should at various times encourage antagonism, cooperation and deceit so that players are unable to accurately predict each round of gameplay. However, after each round players should immediately be friendly and excited to discuss the round with each other. Ideally, players should be randomly assigned to teams each round to encourage rotation and prevent mini-cliques from forming. However, automated random assignment is not technically feasible in the ArmA 3 engine.
##What are some inspirations? (Try to be specific.)
The major inspirations for Subterfuge are:
- Dark Business, an Arma 2 scenario where a group of guerilla players attempt to deal with (or are betrayed by) a group of Russian players, while a team of NATO players try to rescue the guerilla's hostages. The best run I've ever seen is shown in the following YouTube videos:
NATO POV (Spoiler: NATO steals the Russian MacGuffin, shoots down a guerilla plane, gets shot down, captures the guerilla commander and has an intense interrogation scene)
Guerilla POV (This one's hilarious. Spoiler: Guerilla commander puts their hostages in airborne biplanes to try and force the Russians to hand over their MacGuffin, things go very bad, chaos ensures.)
- Subrosa, an indie game inspired directly by Dark Business where three teams of players attempt to accomplish randomly assigned objectives.
Minor inspirations are:
- Kane and Lynch 2's multiplayer, where players conducted a bank heist together but could also betray each other at any moment
- EVE online and it's culture of human interaction and legal betrayal/backstabbing
##What are some competitors to your game? (Other games that do the same or similar things)
Subrosa. I mean, this whole thing was started because I played Subrosa and thought "I can do better than this!"
##What will your game do different from them?
- Arma's simulation and fidelity (Subrosa looks and sounds awful) - No bullshit persistent resource system (players can snowball in Subrosa) - Open source and moddable
##What is your budget?
$0! It's a scenario, not a commercial product. Technically I'll spend a few bucks on the cloud servers for gameplay testing, I guess.