Design Pillars

The design pillars are the fundamental components of Beestation’s design. It is important that the design pillars are followed so that we develop a game with a consistent vision. Design pillars may be used to argue for/against certain features, and help to guide your design decision. All other parts of the design stem from these core pillars.

Contribute to the round’s story

• Players should matter, and their existence should be important.
• Mechanics should encourage players to contribute towards the round.
• Mechanics should not overshadow the existence of a department or role.

Play your character

• Emphasis on character skill over player skill.
• Encourage players to act in the way that their character should.

No stale rounds

• All mechanics should encourage players to act in an interesting way, avoid allowing players to make their rounds boring.
• There should never be an entirely peaceful round.
• Mechanics should encourage players to travel between departments and interact with other players.
• Mechanics should encourage unique and eventful rounds, a core mechanic should not be able to be 100% perfected.
• Prefer mechanics which involve other players to drive their game state.
• Emphasis on well-communicated random chance.
• Keep gameplay interesting and fun throughout the round.

Success & failure

• Both failure and successes make for an interesting round.
• Don’t limit a player’s ability to do something by completely blocking them, instead give them the chance for serious and substantial consequences should they be unskilled.
• Instead of defining deterministic success/fail failure states, use probabilistic failure modes where higher rewards incur greater chance of risk.

Drive the economy

• Transaction is the medium of interactions and drama.
• Every department has expenses and profits, they need to have transactions with the other departments to function.
• Every player needs money to perform their job duties.
• The lack of a currency drives conflict between players and departments.
• Nothing is completely free, machines requires a resource to be maintained.