Day 0

I'll jot down some pre-jam ideas, goals and ambitions which can be compared to the product at the end of the week as a testament to the hubris of man.

The main idea I want to explore comes from a personal experience (and stereotype) of how parents, typically from immigrant families, tend to hold strong opinions on what their children should be pursuing for their education and career - i.e. engineering, medicine and finance over music, art and literature - oftentimes resulting in a clash of wills. Over the years I've seen a lot of friends from the latter, more vocational fields do just as well as the 'safer' bets of the former, but have also appreciated how fierce the competition was for employment and livelihood in countries such as China (where my parents are from) and how their advice came from a good place.

It got me thinking about how much our environment has to do with how practical it is to follow mantras such as 'do what you love' and 'follow your dreams'; pursuing a passion for Puppetry might be a sensible, calculated career choice if you're in a setting with strong financial support, social welfare or universal basic income, but less so in a poor, overpopulated country with an unstable economy and harsh climate. Also, universities of said country may not offer Puppetry as an undergraduate course in their prospectus.

All this seems to be stating the obvious, but it would be cool to explore how the optimal life strategy depends on the society and initial relationships (i.e. parents), analogous to how different playstyles become viable depending on what items are offered and chosen in rogue{like,light}s. In this game, the player has to make the choices similar to what we confront on a daily basis such as:

* Should I go for happiness now or happiness later?

* Should I develop this less enjoyable skill instead of this more enjoyable one to maximise my late-game survivability?

* Do I have enough resources to explore this promising avenue/relationship?

* How does future uncertainty affect my risk tolerance?

These questions open up a lot of design challenges:

* How to create tension between the choice of current happiness and future happiness?

* What even is happiness?

* How attainable/desirable should survivability to the end be?

* How many 'external' parameters do I need (e.g. discrimination, job market, climate, competition, society stability)?

* How many 'internal' parameters do I need (e.g. activity preferences, happiness, intelligence, physical health, mental health, satiety)? And what about sexuality/bearing offspring?

* How many types of interactions/nouns do I need (e.g. possessions, relationships, dependents, consumables)?

* How should the choices be presented to the player (e.g. develop X, discard X, explore Y), how much should be revealed beforehand about the expected payoff of their choice, and should that quantity change (e.g. a wisdom parameter)?

* Should there be a hedonic treadmill mechanic?

* What is the meaning of life?

There are also some technical goals:

* Friendly GUI with good UX

* In-game onboarding

* Original, pixel-based art

* Original, multi-layered soundtrack

* Deterministic RNG in order to implement time-travelling/AI-simulations for the same society seed

Tune in in the early hours of next Monday AM (and everyday for daily devlogs) to see how much of this can be achieved inside a week!

Addendum: the name is inspired by the multi-armed bandit problem, each with different payoffs and you have to figure out how to allocate your time between playing the machine with the best payoff and trying to find new machines with even better payoffs (see these intuitive strategies). It seems like the crux of the game will involve coming to terms with the exploration-versus-exploitation tradeoff for a given set of environment and internal parameters.