Concept design: Würthel City

Given that compilation times on our final project for the masters are kind of high, I'm going to spend that idle time in-between doing something useful and write a new post.

(Yeah, I know I could use it as a legitimate excuse to slack off, as in XKCD's comic strip)

 

Well, going on-topic again:
At the end of yesterday's post I talked about a conceptual design we were asked to do by the U-Play Studios representative, which had come to give us a talk on starting up a video game developer studio. We were to think of ideas for a browser-based game.

To answer the question '...and what does a browser game look like?', there are lots of examples online, some of which you may have played already: Bitefight, Ogame, Ikariam, Striker Manager -done by the company that asked us to design the game, by the way-, and several more.

After a bit of brainstorming and casual chat with friends, I came up with 'Würthel City' (any similarity between the title/city name and certain massive corruption case in Spain being completely intentional). It allows players to put themselves in the shoes of a detective newly arrived to a metropolis where crime and corruption rates have skyrocketed.


Your goal as that detective is, of course, to become the best one out there. You'll be either competing or cooperating (via guilds detective agencies) with lots of other players to solve the highest number of cases.

To do that, you'll have to move around the areas of Würthel City, interact with NPCs and/or other human-controlled characters, and use your skills and equipment to make your way through the cases, which might range from robberies, drug trafficking, murders, corruption, kidnappings and such.






Click on this link for the English version of Würthel City's concept document.The PDF goes through these basic outlines in more detail. I apologise in advance for the crappy fake screenshots. I did some rough sketches at that moment to illustrate the concepts that I was trying to communicate, and didn't focus much in visual quality. I expect that they're descriptive enough, though.

PS: Würthel City, Spanish version