Game Design: Cybertek – Game Creation

Hi folks. So I’m a big believer in game creation mechanics. From the Dresden Files City creation, which is stripped down to game creation in Fate Core by Evil Hat, to Spark by Genesis of Legend Publishing, to Microscope by Lame Mage Productions with it’s things included and excluded from the game. I put territory creation as a cooperative experience in Part-Time Gods of Fate so of course I dropped it in our initial design of Cybertek. I’ll tell you where you can pick up Sprint one for free, which includes way more than game creation, but I’ll give you the quick and dirty version of game creation here.

Step one has the group answering three directed questions which create their Cyber Crap Sack Dystopia world. Step two sets the scope of the game at the beginning of the game. It could always change through play but it’s a starting point for the player’s expectations. Step three has each player create organizations and faces for those organizations. I went with organizations here because I felt cyberpunk as a genre is more about organizations moving against each other with the player characters being caught between them. Locations, while important for scene setting, were less important than those two parts to playing the game. There is some stuff for creating locations but they’re associated with the organizations. Step four creates the games issues which are also creatively constrained to keep the game within the genre. One is a mystery the GM creates based on everything created thus far, one is an issue concerning the technology of the setting, and the last one is an issue concerning the dystopian nature of society.

If you’re interested you can read the first sprint by joining the Misdirected Mark Productions G+ community and clicking on the link to the first Cybertek sprint there.