Project 16: Covert Action in Space

Sid Meyer has a rule, the Covert Action Rule. The Covert Action Rule basically says don’t make Covert Action.

So the next big thing I want to make is basically a recreation of Covert Action. Covert Action in Space.

In covert action you play a super spy (or super agent … or super counter-agent … or something). Each month you’re given a mission and some basic clues. Then you have to stop the bad guys from doing whatever they’re doing. If you succeed you get a clue about the current mastermind plotting the crimes. Once you’ve figured out who and where the mastermind is you can grab them and wrap up that crime spree. Then some other mastermind starts up again the next month.

Now, I’m trying to finish a PhD, so it’s a really stupid time to take up making a game, but that’s where the Covert Action Rule comes in. Basically the point behind the Covert Action Rule is that it’s hard for the player to remember what they’re doing when they have to keep switching between generally unrelated minigames, so make sure that your player always knows what they’re supposed to be doing (XCOM also falls into this territory).

My thought is that given limited time and attention, making a collection of interesting minigames, seems like a good idea. I can work on one minigame when I have time and I don’t have to worry too much about making the whole thing hang together. It should be good practice getting a game made without worrying too much about making the game good.

As for the “in Space” part. I have a sci-fi world sitting around in my head, with a few stories I’d been meaning to write (and a few I’ve managed to put up here). It seemed like a good way to modernize a game that had fallen into abandonware and give it an interesting spin. Rather than having to fight 1990s terrorist across Europe, you could fight space terrorist across the Terran Empire.

The original game had four main minigames; one where you infiltrate people’s offices, stealing their information and possibly arresting them, one where you drive through the city either trying to capture someone or avoiding your own capture, one where you have to swap chips out to trace a car or bug a landline, and one where you have to decrypt messages doing a simple substitution cypher.

I think there are a lot of fun things that could be done after to stretch the game and make it a little more playable than the original. Before that however I want build the original four minigames and get a skeleton basically. Of the four, I’d like to start with the infiltration minigame, and especially with a little bit of fun procedurally generating offices (possibly to do different things) and building up a guard AI.

Due to a mishearing, I accidentally created the mascot for this project. The Flurpin.

I’ve started a bit over the last few months and I have a rough system together that takes requirements for buildings and is able to generate a procedural room graph, that connects all the rooms, but doesn’t actually build a floor plan yet. My next short term goal is to finish creating the floorplans from the graphs. Given that I still have a PhD to finish and this is mostly a “watching TV with the laptop out” activity, I’m hoping to wrap up this the floor plan generation by October 15, 2017.