Geo Siege (working title)

11 Nov 2023

There is a game that I have wanted to play for years, so its time to build it.

Context

Galcon is a game that I fell in love with many years ago. It’s a very simple game where 2 players battle it out to control the galaxy. The graphics and the rules are simple but I found the gameplay highly engaging.

Wikipedia describes Galcon as the following

Players start with 1-3 large “home planets” and send off ships to conquer other planets around them. The numbers on each planet indicate how many ships it will take to conquer them. The numbers on a player’s own planet indicate the number of ships that their planet holds. Each planet a player owns produces ships for that player with more ships at a faster rate produced depending on the planet’s size. Players can select what percentage of the ships to send from a planet and players can redirect ships in mid-flight. The aim of the game is to defeat the other player(s) by eliminating all of the enemy planets.

I was even more excited when I learned that there is a multi-player version of the game where I got the battle it out with real people! I love the creeping satisfaction when I know that I’m out-manovering the opponent and that I’ll take the game eventually. It reminds of the Tug-of-war style custom games in Starcraft 2.

But a few years ago I became interested in emergent behaviour, and how it can be added to games. Looking at more recent games like Zelda (BoTW and TotK), you start with a small set of basic mechanics but the game encourages you to play with them and combine them in creative ways. I wanted to find a way to do something like this for a genre of game like Galcon.

On top of this inspiration, when I first had this idea it was in the middle of the hype for Pokemon Go and Ingress Prime. These encouraged people to play the game in the real world. I wasn’t a huge fan of Pokemon Go (the gameplay seemed dull), but I really liked the idea for this genre. I apprechiated that you could play to some degree from your couch, but if you went outside and used your legs you could get a step up.

Introducing Geo Siege (working title)

What if we made the following set of changes to Galcon

• Instead of the game being set in a pretend galaxy, set the game in the real world. The backdrop of the game would be a map.
• Worlds would be based on POIs in the real world (churches, pubs, significant buildings)
• A players home world would be based on their live location
• Attacks/fleet movements from one world to another would move slowly (say around walking pace)
• Fleet movements over long distances cost more
• Players get a notification if an attack is incoming to one of their controlled worlds

My intention is that these basic rules would encourage the following types of player behaviours

• Each player will naturally try to capture and defend the area around where they live
• Their friends probably live reasonably close by so friends will probably start battling each other
• Eventually some friends might organise themselves outside of the game to take down another player
• World location is tied to current GPS position, and if you can move faster than the normal attacking pace (say in a car or on a bike), then you can make a surprise attack.
• By making attacks cost more over longer distances, players are encouraged to make bridges of planets to make their attacks more efficient
• Players might make population breeding hubs in far away safer locations, and ferry them over to their home using faster in-person travel.

This is a game that I would absolutely love to play. I love the simple rules and the emergent behaviour that I hope would fall out of it.

I’ve called this project Geo Siege for now until I think of a better name