I am making this up on the spot, so forgive me if it seems somewhat unpolished.
When I began developing this game, I wanted it to be something of a deconstruction of the last two Council of Villains games. It would have a similar feel to the last two, but definitely be different enough to make it seem unique. I think I managed to make it unique at least with respect to my other games. I have pretty much shamelessly lifted ideas from TinCow, Sigurd, and Askthepizzaguy, and for that they have my simultaneous apologies and admiration.
I knew from the beginning that this game had to be set in the Metroid dimension- the original CoV was (nominally) set in the Sonic dimension (which I like to call “Chaotix”
) and The Koopa Troop was obviously in the Super Mario/Mushroom dimension. I had a small game in the Hyrule/Zelda dimension, and I’m planning another one for Pokemon. Not to mention ATPG got Lylat Wars in there too. So what’s the next biggest franchise? Metroid, of course.
The problem with Metroid is, there aren’t many villains with speaking roles. And there aren’t many heroes at all, besides Samus. I knew I would be using Samus under Bowser’s control, as per the ending of The Koopa Troop, and I would have to have Meta-Ridley if we were playing Metroid. But I needed an actual town for them to kill- while at the same time, it didn’t make sense for them to be out to kill the same people. At this point I looked to TinCow’s Rubicon and the divided town concept, and thought it would probably work perfectly.
So I came up with the setting right there. The IDFH is already established as of The Missing Link, but in the background and never really too important. Meta-Ridley is on the rise in the Metroid dimension, and since IDFH lost in The Koopa Troop they’re looking elsewhere. So in an alliance of convenience, all of a sudden the IDFH is working with Metroid’s Galactic Federation. I take a bunch of soldiers and bounty hunters for the GF, and a bunch of weaker heroes and sidekicks for the IDFH, to justify them all getting kicked around by Samus. And they’re all teaming up to beat Meta-Ridley and his Space Pirates. The IDFH knows something is up as soon as Samus gets on board unannounced, since they got the memo that Samus was supposedly killed by Bowser. But the GF love Samus and have no idea that she’s been turned to the dark side, so the dimmer ones among them will follow her to the ends of the earth.
Samus needs a counterpart. That’s Dark Samus, of course. She played a bit part in CoV, but was on the winning side in that game so technically she gets some new massive power. But how do I justify Dark Samus working with the IDFH? The GF has secret stores of Phazon on board that they purposefully neglect to tell IDFH about. The IDFH learns about it when Dark Samus busts down the door, and all of a sudden they see an opportunity- power to rival that of the villains. And to make Dark Samus seem even more friendly, she’s running around with a couple of heroes- corrupted, of course. So these short-sighted, weaker IDFH members will ally with a villain for the chance to take down other villains. Justification: Acceptable, IMO.
So, it’s Rubicon but in Metroid flavor. Instead of Caesar, Pompey, the Populares and whoever supported Pompey, you’ve got Samus, Dark Samus, GF, and IDFH. Meta-Ridley doesn’t fit into either category, so I make him a neutral serial killer and leave that for later.
And this is my deconstruction of Council of Villains. In the original game, the factions were for the most part very simple. There were the villains. There were the heroes. There were the antiheroes. And then there were a couple of classic villains-who-betray-other-villains. In The Koopa Troop, I deliberately made it more complicated and confusing. There were the villains as the town. There were still heroes as mafia. But then there were also *takes breath* villains who were taking control of heroes and other villains for the purposes of killing both the heroes and the villains (Dimentio and Fawful).
So with the new game, I intended to completely shatter any notions of heroes or villains. They became questions instead of definitions- what makes a hero? What makes a villain? The town would be composed of heroes this time- but they were not true heroes. From the start they would be fighting against heroes-turned-villains (Samus, Peach, Pikachu, Cloud). They could be corrupted forcibly into joining the villains. And in the end most of them were only out for their own survival, so they could win with the villains willingly as well. I even placed in a villain who could turn hero (Dedede) in one possible ending. It’s gray and grey morality, and it’s hard to tell who’s got the good cause any more.
That’s my bit on heroes and villains and crap. Back into game mechanics. I knew I wanted to have Metroid-esque power-ups. Sigurd and ATPG’s Star Wars powers seemed the right way to go, but that system was way too complicated for me to make from scratch. I settled on a simplified version that I think worked reasonably well. Fire, Lightning, Ice, Light, and Dark elemental attacks for the mafia. Defenses for each one, and then a Fire-Lightning-Ice combined defense and a Light-Dark combined defense if anyone ever got that far. 4 types of visor for investigation, similar to but different from the Force investigations, as well as a specific defense against investigations for maximum chaos potential. No Force Breath, because that really annoyed me, but night-kill defense instead, in the form of Energy Tanks. Then, three different townie abilities: the fire-based Plasma Cannon vigilante kill, the Ice Beam for roleblocking, and the electric Wave Grapple, which stole powers from other players. There were no light or dark based townie actions. Add in a Super Missile, a couple of unique character abilities, and the ability of Samus and Dark Samus to steal powers after killing- like a power-up gained from killing a boss.
As for how the powers were divided up: a select few started out with one power. They would then be given out randomly at the beginning of every night phase, for use by the next phase. The number of powers given out was proportional to how many players were alive: I divided by 5 and rounded up. Then I numbered a list and got that many numbers from random.org, and I used another random number for each to decide what the power was. Each mafioso and Chuck Norris had double the chance to get a power. Meta-Ridley had triple chances to compensate for his being alone with bad odds.
Later I had to tweak this when the mafia were getting wrecked. By this new system, the mafia were removed from the list and were guaranteed a power every night. I also had it set up so that if Meta-Ridley either died or completed his victory conditions and left the ship, there would be another serial killer to take his place. On the night after Meta-Ridley’s death, I randomly assigned the Omega Weapon ability to someone- and johnhughthom, the lucky winner, was transformed into a new serial killer, Gorea.
Of course, with this set-up, the split town would need a reason to tolerate being in the same room with each other and not deliberately be out to kill each other from the start. Ideally, that would be the mentality of many players, but there would be some who saw an advantage in killing ALL mafia. So there were a small number of incorruptible heroes. Through this, the concept of a leader for each faction who was a lynch director came to mind. Admiral Dane was obviously the GF leader. His IDFH counterpart I decided would be Captain Falcon, and then- I had a crazy thought. Both of these characters had been the subject of internet memes- namely, their names were placed in front of Chuck Norris jokes instead of the bearded wonder himself. So I decided, wouldn’t it be funny if Falcon and Dane were the same person the whole time – none other than Chuck Norris! If Chuck Norris was defeated and left the Olympus, the subordinates to Dane and Falcon- Link and Adam Malkovich- would take over. Both of these were also incorruptible heroes, but they were not unified. If they were killed, then there would be survivalists in charge of each faction, and things would have devolved very quickly from there.
I did figure out that it was kind of ridiculous to expect every basic townie to survive in order to win. So I found a way around that, my deliberate lie number one: survivalists were told they had to survive to win up until the point that they died. This would simulate them actually acting in the interests of their own safety, without condemning the majority of the players to lose the game. After every survivalist died, their victory conditions changed to the normal townie ones. When I had to make replacements, it got into a sketchy area, but I asked them not to reveal what they had learned.
For all intents and purposes, the mafia were very overpowered. At any given point in this game the only people with more than a 20% chance to resist a mafia attack were Chuck Norris and Link with his unique Mirror Shield. But their strength in this game relied on making good long-run decisions. They were told they had to kill the other family, yes, but they fell into the trap of trying to do it immediately at the outset of the game. The Phazon team was crippled by the Bowser team by a lucky N1 scan, and as a result there were less kills at night and pressure was taken off of the town. The town was able to sit back with lynches to spare, and a string of anti-town roles was exposed and killed so quickly that they had no incentive to factionalize. Had the game continued with 5 kills per night and both families continuing to recruit, this game would have had a VERY different outcome. The town would because of the death rate and would have been much more likely to align themselves with their respective mafia families instead of themselves. Then it would have ended in a late-game showdown between the two families and possibly even Meta-Ridley. This could have very easily been the true “divided town” that TinCow craved so much, but random chance and a couple of easy-to-make mistakes ensured that the town had the edge for the majority.
I have droned on for a very long time, but I think there are just two enigmatic roles left for me to go into, and then I’m done. Don’t quote me on that.
The first is Meta-Ridley. I wanted him to be a serial killer, but realized it would be way too difficult for him to compete with two recruiting cults and only one action per night. I didn’t want to give anyone more than one action per night, for simplicity’s sake. So I gave him options. He could be your classic serial killer, or he had the other option of killing two specific people and then jumping ship. The catch was that these specific people were the heads of the mafia families, Samus and Dark Samus. Not an easy task to be sure, but he started off with an action investigation ability when only the mafia and a select few townies had actions. Meta-Ridley had the advantage of essentially being able to lay low and unnoticed for the entire game (in the write-ups at least) until he decided he knew who he had to kill. Despite my warning in the opening write-up, nobody caught on that he existed in the game until his scaly mug appeared in a night-kill. If Meta-Ridley managed against all odds to kill both Samuses, he would get a major victory and get to leave the game right there. Or, he could go double or nothing and try to survive till the end for Total Victory. So yeah, you could say there are some similarities with Bane Anded right there.
And how fitting that ATPG should be randomly cast as the dragon! I was ecstatic, because not only would it ensure I had an interesting player to try my interesting dynamic, but it would probably be a challenge for ATPG, too. Because the best way to play Meta-Ridley, at least from my perspective, was not to play the supertownie, but to be sneaky and deceptive. Though Meta-Ridley started with an Energy Tank, it would be important to remember he was only a single lynch away from death. When ATPG appeared in both mafia quicktopics, I knew that he was definitely going high-risk, high-reward. If ATPG had realized they were the mafia before they realized he was Meta-Ridley, he would have had all of the reward. But again, they found him out and (this time rightly so) did not hesitate to reveal him to the town for the lynch.
The other role was King Dedede. If I had to compare him to something, I’d say he’s roughly analogous to the Cleopatra role in Rubicon (which I played… seeing a pattern here?
). Basically he was the “true” survivalist. Dedede could win with anyone, provided he survived- the united town, Team Bowser, Team Phazon, or even Meta-Ridley if he went super-serial killer. The only player he couldn’t win with was Gorea, who was literally out to kill EVERYTHING.
And now I need to break that promise to talk about unique abilities. Samus, Dark Samus, Meta-Ridley, and Chuck Norris all had a unique 100% kill ability that they could randomly acquire- basically all the same but with different names. I later expanded this to Pikachu to give pevergreen a chance once he became the last man standing. Chuck Norris also had two more unique abilities. He started with Omniguard, which he could use to protect either himself or another player from anything except for said aforementioned 100% kills (this was the only protection ability in the game). The other was Chuck’s personal countermeasure against Corruption- Beard Control. Chuck used his own corruption to make people incorruptible townie heroes. In-game, landlubber got this ability very late, and only used it once: on Csargo. There were two more unique townie abilities: Link’s Mirror Shield, which defended against Fire, Ice, and Light, and Gandrayda’s Metamorph, which let her copy abilities without stealing them.
On the mafia side, there were the Varia and Phazon Suits that started on Samus and Dark Samus and were passed to subsequent leaders if necessary- this was the kill-ability-steal-ability. Each of them also had Corruption, which did NOT transfer to minions upon death. They could each only have up to two minions at a time, to keep them from creating an army on converts. Finally, one minion in each family had a unique ability. Cloud on Dark Samus’s side had Overdrive, which let him kill either a player who voted to lynch him or whoever killed him. This was much less subtle than Doopliss’s ability, but I’d argue just as useful, for the following reasons. On the chance Cloud gets lynched, tough luck. But if Cloud gets killed at night, then one way or another he is killing someone immediately dangerous to the family- a Samus minion, or Meta-Ridley, or Chuck Norris, or Gorea, or a vigilante. I will give the caveat that Doopliss’s Doppelganger ability is probably a lot cooler and more fun to use, if not more useful. Basically it let him manipulate his own role PM to suit his purposes; Diamondeye didn’t take nearly as much advantage of this as I thought he would. But at the same time, good for him, because he was victim to deliberate lie number two. Doopliss was told he had defense against ANY investigation, but in reality an X-Ray Visor would see straight through his cover role just like any other Mafioso. So theoretically Doopliss could think he was protected and invite a scan on him- only to find himself caught by his own trap. No townie ever got the X-Ray Visor, though, so it never happened.
And that is really all that I can think of right now. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to ask. I know this commentary was rather large, but I know I missed something. I will post the role PMs tomorrow, as soon as I can figure out how to format it somewhat elegantly.
[Council of Villains] A State of Corruption: Information Thread
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