Today, Elliot Borenstein discusses the "metagame system" of Drunken Robot Pornography, which gives players an always-weird, always-wonderful experience outside of arena combat.
Elliot says the plan is to have a big city represented by different locations that players can travel around. At each location, different events trigger based on what players interact with and what their attributes are (such as strength, looks, reputation, and perhaps gravitational pull, if you're fat).
For example, if you try to enter a fancy club before making a name for yourself, you won't get very far. Similarly, if you are super strong, a little old lady may ask you to carry her groceries and then give you a giant box of muffins in return.
Q: What do you do with the muffins?
A: You'll find out!
Scattered around the city will be entrances to various arenas, many of them less-than-official. These will take you into the core gameplay of fighting Titans.
The metagame system's goal is to build up the world and story around the frantic jetpacking of DRP, and to help make the game deeper and more interesting. Also important: we want to let you make obscene gestures with hotdogs. We've finished the latter, so we're now working on the former.
Right now, the metagame is all squares and programmer "not-art," but it'll eventually be even better-looking than Ichiro's horns. The code shot below shows a little bit of an encounter with a hotdog salesman, including a few of the choices the player can make. The game shot above shows the lobby of a stadium and a few choices the player has about what to do when s/he comes face-to-face with a concrete wall.
And there you have it. Adding more depth to the game for you and yours.
