AMIR

Behind the scene

I was interested in implementing a dynamic and realistic economic system in the gameplay so that the trading process is more efficient. Our gameplay is thus centered around a trader who travels between towns to trade in and trade out. We attempted to condense on the life of an ordinary trader in the middle ages, and shape the gameplay around that person’s experience. This game is essentially a prototype of a game at a much larger scale.

SHOWCASE

Town Scenes

The towns are designed to be safe havens where the player is kept away from harm and can trade and interact with NPCs as they please. The visuals at each town hint at their products -- in fact, their names and locations are all based on historical cities that existed.

Narrative Box

Although the implementation of narratives is rare in our version, as it only appears briefly before trading takes place, we envisioned a game with many more twists and plots. After all, communication is vital in a merchant's life. We want to show how the merchants are exposed to all sorts of information and different choices.

Trading System

The price generally follows net diffusion. I assume that each town has its unique produce that increases with time, but the overall quantity remains constant. The commodities exchange is behind the scenes and follows a realistic trend. The prices are calculated based on the supply/demand model. We hope the methods we employed for the economic system could give the game a creative touch and prevent the game from generating unrealistic numbers.

Combat System

Trading is a risky adventure. This point was emphasized to us a lot during research. Merchants, before the age of the Industrial Revolution, had to travel long distances, which was a challenging task: they were threatened by bandits and might suffer huge losses. We incorporated this idea into the game and accordingly created the combat system that offers additional gameplay between trading posts.

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Game play

The story unfolds with the game tutorial, and thereafter comes with the gameplay ( through no block of text). There are seven different endings depending on the objects discovered by the players. The discoverable objects range from wedding photos to newspapers; my intention is to make all the combinations make logical sense.

Narrative

Amir does not have any intuitive narrative as it’s a prototype of a dynamic trading system.

Challenges and improvements

We’ve already had in mind quite a lot of improvements and extra features that could be added to this game. It is a pity for us that we had no time adding NPCs in every town to exchange information on certain commodity prices change— we want them to influence the demand curve in specific ways so that our trading system could be more unpredictable. Our narrative system is implemented but we didn’t have the opportunity to add in actual narratives. To present the players an immersive experience of a trader whose life is so different then the ones they are having, we’d love to add in a background story and give the player a purpose in trading. In addition, Along with reducing the health of the player, we believe dropping commodities when defeated by the bandits makes more sense with our level design. We’d love to expand this game in the future.