Dear Mayor, is a game where the player is the mayor of "Frogville". The mayor's office receives letters every day regarding the state of the city. Some letters are from concerned citizens, some from government entities and some are from superheroes or celestial beings!
You can buy the game through here: https://mickehh.itch.io/dear-mayor
This blog post is going to be me breaking down the game and the reasons behind decisions I've taken in the game's design and development. I have set out to make a procedural narrative game that had multiple story threads running at the same time that don't have to do anything with each other but at the same time affect the environment and the flow of the game without disturbing each other's stories.
The player is meant to explore these stories by taking the role of the mayor in approving/disapproving letters or just out right ignoring them.
The office contains the desk, a door and a window looking out at the city's skyline. The player always sees the same view everyday to be familiar with how the office usually looks. So it would be noticeable if it changes slightly.
However, the player's interaction with the letters can affect the environment around them in many ways. Minor ways can be an important public figure taking over the city, so their "brand"/"Logo" can be seen on all of the buildings in the skyline. Or the department responsible for making the city look good ask to build bridges or plant trees.
Major ways the environment can change includes heavy spoilers for the game, so this is a warning that going forward involves some ways the game ends. The vanilla content that came out with the game involves one main storyline which is the "Superhero arc" and there is what I call a Hard Ending which is an ending to the storyline that causes all the other stories to end. The supervillain that is revealed through the letters would attack the player's office to.. 💀 make them sleep, forever. That ending for example changes the environment in a substantial way. (as seen in the screenshot below)
There is another type of ending called a Soft Ending, and in the vanilla state of the game it also ends the run, but once more storylines are added to the game the soft endings will do their real job.
Soft Endings are endings to the main storylines that narratively conclude but are not destructive to the story. For example, there is an ending where the supervillain from the screenshot above is caught by the authorities. That ends the story of the superhero arc, but it doesn't result in the office being destroyed or the mayor being affected in any way. Soft endings give collectables and right now they are presents sent by the letters senders and the number of presents collected and total presents in the game is shown in a separate menu in the title screen. As shown below.
With this system, even when more content is added, there is a chance that the player will make choices that will result in no hard endings. That would result in the game never ending which can be a bad thing since the content is limited and not randomly or procedurally generated.
The current solution in the vanilla version, makes the game end even when the player reaches a soft ending. The next content update will make only hard endings end the game but there will be smaller arcs that have no soft endings so that I would make sure the player ends the game.
The future solution that I plan on working on is finding ways to procedurally generating letters or story arcs. I have always wanted to experiment with procedural narrative and this can be the first try at it. But I like creating things quickly and learning from them so I can improve future projects. So I might just take the procedurally generated narrative step in the next project instead.
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Thank you!