Idea Info Name: Evangelist Index: Primary Category: Simulation Submitted: 11/26/2003 6:20:24 PM Written By: alan2110 Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition Book Highly Recommended !

Creating a religion

The first part of Evangelist is to create your very own religion from scratch. The create your own religion, you first select the deity(s) that your followers will worship. You can choose from well known ones from other religions or you can create your own. This will be done by a simple set of menus describing basic characteristics. Does your God live in the heavens or in the winds? Is He a compassionate god or is He quick to anger? Note that the God you create will not actually show up in the game, it will only dictate how your followers will feel about worshipping Him.

The second part to creating your religion will be to lay down a small set of rules or commandments that are the basic laws your religion will be built upon and that your followers must obey in their daily lives.  You could do the classic “thou shalt not …” type of laws, or you could do other styles. This will have to be limited to things the computer controlled people living in the city can actually do. So the laws you pick will have a big impact on whether people will want to follow your religion and if they do follow it, how it will affect their lives.

The next part is to come up with punishment for breaking the laws and living a life of sin. Where the definition of sin is to go against the laws you have set up. What will happen? Will they burn in fire in the afterlife? Or will they fear something bad will happen in their normal life? Nothing will actually happen in the game, the things you choose will only effect how scared your followers are of committing sin.

So nobody is perfect and people will end up sinning. You now setup a way for your followers to atone for their sins. This may involve praying for forgiveness, confessing to a priest, or even wearing sack cloth and covering yourself with ash. Whatever you want. If you pick simple things then people may not worry too much about sinning or may not feel like they have paid their dues after doing it. On the other hand if your tasks are too difficult you may lose followers or end up with more fanatical people.

And finally, your religion can have an ultimate reward for the faithful followers that stick with it and follow it in their lives. Will they go to a paradise in the afterlife? Or will they be reborn as a higher entity? Or maybe your religion does not have one and only promises a peaceful existence on earth. Having a good reward will be a good way to attract followers.

Note that if you pick an already known God in the first step then you will be unable to make your own laws, punishments, atonements, or ultimate rewards. All these things will be preset with settings for that particular deity. This will be a way for new players to get right into the game without having to go through the difficulty of setting up every aspect of their religion.

Gameplay

Now you are ready to play the game. You will start from scratch in a large city with a small amount of money. Your first task will be to spread the word of your religion to people and to try to get people interesting in hearing about it. You can do this by talking to people on the street or by going door to door. You can also use your money to print up fliers or pamphlets that you can hand out.

There will need to be a simple dialog system where you can talk to people and they can ask you questions about your religion and you can answer them. They will tell you troubles in their lives and you can tell them how your religion will be the answer for them. The people that you meet will all have a different make up for their job, home, money, wants, and desires. They will have preset ways of thinking for how they feel about different aspects of different religions. They may tell you that your religion is crazy, or your religion may appeal to them right off the bat depending on how you have set up your religion and what needs and beliefs that person has.

They city will have different communities to it with different people of different backgrounds and makeup’s. There will be an upscale part of town with rich well to-do people and their will be a poor section of town. Depending on how you set your religion up, it may appeal more to rich people or it may appeal more to poor people, or possibly both or even neither. Say your religion mandates that you have to give large tithes every week. Then this will not appeal to people that are struggling to pay their rent. But it may appeal to the upper class because it will make them feel important. Or your religion may say that salvation is completely free, you just have to accept it. This would appeal to everybody.

As you discover parts of the city and what the people are like that live there, you may want to make some changes to your religion. This is ok in the beginning if you do not have any followers. But if it is later in the game and you have a lot of followers, then if you make any drastic changes, your followers are going to get very angry and they may leave your religion. But making changes may invite new people to join if the change was to something that had prevented them from liking your religion.

Another factor for people will be that they may already be part of a religion. If they are happy with their religion and have been with it for a while then it will be very difficult for you to convert them over. But if they are unhappy or if they do not have any religion then you will have a better chance.

As you find believers and followers in your religion, then the word will spread. People will tell others of your religion. Also, if you convert somebody over to your religion, and this person is a well known and respected part of their community, then that person will be a great role model for others and people will ask them about their religion and it will win over new converts. This can also have the opposite effect. If your religion has rules and beliefs that are shunned from the community, then you will attract people that are outcasts and if they do things that are disliked by others, then they will also think badly of your religion. Of course, if the city has a large number of outcasts then this could be a way to get a large following.

Now that you are getting followers, you need a place to meet. You will first need to rent a place and hold weekly or nightly meetings. You will need to pass the word around where to meet and at what time. Depending on how well you did on the street, there may be people that show up and want to hear what you have to say. There could also be a large crowd or the place might be empty.

You will need to organize what will happen at your meetings. What is read, what you will preach to the people, what things the people will say, and what rituals they will do. There will be a menu system that you will use to setup how your meetings will be run. This will greatly effect how people feel about your religion and whether they want to keep coming back or maybe they will want to bring a friend next time.

You can also talk to individuals at your meetings to see how they feel about your religion and the meetings. From this feedback you will want to make small changes to your meetings or you may just keep things the way they are hoping more people will show up that like it better and will want to stay and spread the word.

As your meetings grow you will need larger and larger places. As you collect tithe from your followers you can use this to pay rent. If you can make a large amount of money you can eventually start building your own churches.

Eventually you can appoint some of your followers that you really like to start their own meetings. You may want to drop in on them now and then to see how they are doing. They may try to change parts of your religion and they may start their own following. So you will want to keep talking with them. If they really go against you, you may want to kick them out before things get out of control.

Another thing you can add to your religion would be a book that contains a lot of meaningful writings about your religion. It would be your Bible or Torah. This could be a powerful part of your religion and if you could afford to print a lot of copies and have them spread around, it could really strengthen your religion.

People will always be watching your own life to see how you live and will be judging you and also what you say on a daily basis. If you go against your own rules then it will anger people and they may not want to join or may quit.

There will be a city government that you will need to deal with. I’m not sure if I want this to be a major part of the game. I really want this game to be interacting with people. But if you choose rules in your religion that go against government laws, then you will need to meet in secret locations otherwise your followers will be imprisoned. For instance, if your religion requires animal sacrifices then you will have animal rights activists beating down your door to have you arrested. Unless you were living in a time period where it was not an issue. This part of the game may hinder gameplay and could possibly be dropped completely.

There will be different difficulties of play. The easiest would be to go to a small town of people that had no religion and were eager for something. It will then be easy to get people interested and if your religion is managed and presented well, you will quickly have a large following. A more difficult game would be to go to a city that has a large number of people that already have a religion they believe in. It will then be very difficult to get converts and it may take a lot of time before you are able to have meetings.

I would like this game to be flexible so that you could explore any kind of crazy religion that you could think up. The game would also allow you to play your religion the way you want to and see what happens. If you really worked at it and played well, it is possible you could make a crazy religion work in any sort of city. I think that kind of exploration would be very entertaining and insightful to play.

Rendering

This game will need to show a full city with buildings that you can walk in and out of. It will also need to show people walking around that you can interact with. I think it could be something like SimCity or even better would be a full 3d environment like Grand Theft Auto.

Controls

The game will need an easy intuitive and also deep way to communicate with people. It could be just selecting from a list of sentences and having the people responding to them. It would be nice to setup a way to ask questions of people and to answer questions. The interface will need to be easy to learn so that you can communicate quickly but also deep so that you can get meaningful conversations.

This game would not let you do anything you want like hurt people or steal cars like a GTA game. It would be focused on creating and maintaining a religion and interacting with people.

The City

The city will need to have a complex set of computer controlled people living in it. They will have daily schedules of things that they are doing. They will also have preset histories of where they live, what job they have, if they have a family, and other things. They will also have a set of characteristics and beliefs that make up their personality.