King's Sandwich
About the game
King's Sandwich is a game created for Ludum Dare 53 with a theme "Delivery". The player acts as the king's messenger, deciding when to deliver good news, and how to deliver bad ones.
The title references the "feedback sandwich" technique, a corporate communication method where negative news is placed between two positive messages to soften its impact
Systems
I co-designed the game's core message delivery system, and the King's "patience" scoring mechanism. The scoring system, doesn't simply awards points, but takes into accounts multiple factors; the king's mood, message streaks, delivery sequence, and message context, making delivery a strategic challenge.
Even tough created for a game jam, the system was designed for easy expansion, allowing quick addition of news items, stories, king’s responses and moods, while supporting broader narrative arcs across chapters. Even during the game jam, this systemic, scalable approach proved to be incredibly helpful, when we decided to increase number of messages on the last day of the event.
Balance
The core motif of the game was King's mood swings was a challenging design problem. We had to ensure that game isn't unfair, while stay true to the motif. We resolved this through mechanical changes; by allowing players to leave certain news for later or adding news that ensure King's next day mood. We improved UI with "main story news" icons, as well as fine-tuning numbers in both scores and variety of news types.
Narrative & Writing
While the messenger in our game risk the beheading for delivering bad news, the game is kept in a light-hearted, humourous tone, in a pop-culture version of medieval court. I wrote majority of custom, humourous, events and king's responses to most important and memorable news.