Exemplar Windows, Mac game

In Exemplar, the player plays the role of the head of an agency, tasked with recruiting people with extraordinary powers that are beginning to show up around the world and utilise their talents to address dangerous events.

Sometimes these events may be completely natural. An earthquake or volcanic eruption for example. Other times they'll be part of a Super Villain's evil plan. No matter what they are, they are represented as a comic book. Each comic book is essentially a mini deck of event cards. These cards are graded into tiers of difficulty, and form part of the overall comic issue's plot. Random events are dealt out at the lowest tier to begin with, each with a turn timer indicating the window of opportunity to prevent or deal with them. The player must assign Heroes or Agents from their own decks to these events before the timer reaches 0 to attempt to nullify them.

If the timer reaches 0 before the event is successfully completed, the World State as a whole deteriorates. When that state reaches 0, the game is over.

Each event is presented as a double page spread in the comic. The left page is a series of procedurally generated panels depicting the assigned hero or heroes approaching and possibly beginning to address the situation. On the right are the player options. These panels are generated from the powers and gadgets the assigned hero or heroes have. The player selects the one they think has the best chance of success and under the hood some RPG-like "rolls" figure out if that is the case or not.

Each issue has an end game. A villain, or overall event that is the final page. Each event successfully completed before that makes it easier to defeat the final confrontation. But each event also presents the risk of losing your hero, possibly for good, before you even get there.

In multiplayer, this becomes particularly interesting. You may need to assist your fellow agencies to make sure the world state doesn't hit 0 before you're ready to make your move on the villain. You also have to factor in that anyone can make a move on the final page at any time. Move to soon, and you'll most likely end up too far behind the others to start training up a new bunch of heroes, but leave it too late and someone else will steal the win.

For now, we've begun work on the tech for the visuals behind the comic. This is a very early pass, using a few placeholders and a basic plane for the book's pages, but we think it gets the concept across pretty nicely.