This little piece of work is dedicated solely to explaining how does my mind envision the game loop and what kind of resources we can have in the game. It might look a bit easy but don’t be fooled by few cards and few lines.
Let’s start with the resources.
The most important one, and the most universa one is the SCARPS. Those are all kind of scraps that one can find in the postapocalyptic scenerio. Pieces of materials, metals and so on, that can be reshaped, remodeled or reused as something useful. It will serve as both a building material and a currency that can be used in the narrative events to pay people off or trade.
Another important resource are the humans themselves. The goal of the game is to survive, but you cannot survive if noone is alive, it is in the name, so you need to take care of your survivors. They have needs such as food and shelter but nothing too complex. They also are the reason you can do things in the game. They will serve as a workforce that gathers, defends and builds the camp of survivors. When starting the game you will have only a handful of survivors – your family.
Every human in the game has list of things they do good and things they do poorly. It is a numbered list from 1 to 4 and includes elements such as: scavenger, technitian, security and herbalist. Those elements determine what they are good at and what they are bad at. It is best to have all kinds of people and lean on their strength while avoiding their drawbacks. As you can see, those elements match the type of resources we have in the game. Resources that I had not metioned before are: plants, tech and arms.
Arms determine how safe the camp be and what type of dangers it can defend istelf from.
Plants/bio tell us how many specimen of new and old flora the camp has. It is used both in making progress in Adapt goal and it makes food. The more people you have assigned to work with plants the more food you are going to get.
Tech elements are thing with high tech value. They are very important in upgrading buildings and in building a rocket for one of the end goals.
Arms and tech can be made with commiting a lot of scraps towards it but all three: arms, tech and bio/plants can be gained from narrative events and daily scavenge events.
Knowing all that let us break down the core loop of the game.
The game is divided into weeks. For every week the player makes decisions concerning the production of the Tech and Arms from Scraps, sending a scavenger party, making new buildings, training people in using weapons, etc. Once they decide what will the camp dedicate their time to, they choose which people from the camp (also the family members) will be assigned to do what. Every person will have a different impact on the task, some can gather Scarps faster and some can e more useful in the training security forces.
Then, the player will be faced with consequences of the ongoing events (from previous weeks) or from the events that happen randomly, concerning the wellbeing of the survivors or other dilemmas. One of those events will be a Narrative scripted event that will push the story forward. The events will sometimes have meangful choices to steer the player in one of the three endgames scenarios and sometimes they will require some sort of pregathered materials. The choices can be postponed but only couple of times.
In the bigger scope, the game is all about delegating tasks and choosing responses to the events in order to gather resources and choosing the path in the narrative that we desire the most. There is no “good” path, they are different with different prerequisits. Throughout the game, the camp will suffer some universal problems, there will be enemy raids and housing crisis or food crisis to deal with, all trying to test our managerial skills.