Heartbeat Football

After wrestling with ideas for a long time, I finally resorted to paper and wrote out a "design doc" for the strategy layer. I'm quoting "design doc" because in real life a design doc probably wouldn't be written freehand on a single sheet of printer paper. It's pictured here for your amusement.

Since the doc is basically illegible (or, as I like to think of it, "encrypted") I want to talk through it a little bit. Given the ultimate goal of having a relationship system, I'm taking inspiration from the structure of Tokimeki Memorial. I've never played it, but I did watch this 6-hour review once https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb-DtICmPTY. 

The premise is that you have some number of weeks before The Big Game, and you can choose how to spend each day, picking one option per day. You can practice football, play a game, go on a date, meet new people, sleep in, or fight evil. Speaking of fighting evil, there's an existentially threatening Bad Guy who's planning to attack the very same day as The Big Game! What do you do?

The time-management aspect of this design immediately sets up potential for interesting trade-offs--the primary decision being whether to get better at football or save the world. It seems like a promising idea and not too difficult to implement.

To make the strategy layer less monotonous, I propose a few variations on the soccer formula that aren't quite the same thing. The one that's both most interesting and least safe is the "boss" variation. I envision a soccer goal that moves from side to side and shoots bullets while a road scrolls beneath the players' feat. I think it could be super fun, and also kids love it when you make everything into a shmup.

I'll be working on the boss variation first because I want to see if it works as a POC. There's no release today since I'm just doing plumbing work, but I'll upload it as soon as there's something to see.

Exciting!