Students: Dylan Baker
Faculty Advisor or Community Project Lead: Kenrick Mock
Summary:
Mogul is a behind-the-scenes news show simulation game. The player is tasked with managing staff, stories, and advertiser relations in order to maintain three goal variables: finances, viewer count, and public trust. The prototype will have only a free-form system in which the player is able to keep the game going indefinitely as long as their network remains solvent.
The player has direct control over their staff and is able to hire or fire any number of them at any time, but has limited finances, which caps their salary payouts and therefore their total number of staff. Staff can be “leveled up” over time as they gain experience in their jobs, which improves their skills and allows them to specialize in certain areas but also makes them more expensive to retain.
Advertisers are the player’s primary source of funding. The player must manage their relationships with their advertisers, primarily by not running stories that step on their toes too often, and by having their legal department smooth out any bumps in their relationships. If a
player runs stories too critical of their advertisers, or behaves erratically over an extended period of time (such as running many stories in close proximity with opposite effects), their advertisers may decide not to renew their contracts.
The core game loop consists of the player flitting about, processing the stories their reporters generate, deciding whether or not to run each one, and handing them off as appropriate. Early in the game, the complexity of this will be low, as the player will not have a large reporting staff and so the optimal play style will be both obvious and simple: to have each reporter work on whatever stories match their beat — usually the same ones they generate in the first place. As staff grows, the player will have to decide between several qualified reporters for each stage of story processing, and will have more incoming stories to manage.
The core game design, coupled with the fact that this project will be written in Java, leads me to conclude that this project is best served with a Model-View-Controller design.
Document(s):
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