7 Grand Steps

Mouschief games, of Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble! fame, is releasing a new game in a couple of months. It's called 7 Grand Steps and it lets you steer a family through history, tell stories through them, and race to keep one step ahead of the crocodiles.

The game plays out on a cross between a board-game and a slot machine where the game board is constantly moving you towards hungry crocodiles and you spend tokens to move forwards and pick up beads which act as xp. Tokens are generated by moving backwards on the track to the nearest character and interact with them. You will have a spouse who helps you out, and kids who you train by giving them tokens. More kids means there are fewer tokens to go around. The game mechanics are pretty simple but the interactions all seem meaningful and both serve to generate a story as well as provide for an interesting game.



There is a demo, which I urge everyone to try, that gives a pretty good idea of the game. And it's tiny and plays in a window and is dead simple to grasp.

I'd love to talk more about the game mechanics, there are definitely optimal moves and resource management to satisfy my board gamer instincts, as well as the challenge of moving up tracks, but I'll save that until I can try the full game.

Thanks to RPS for the heads up.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/08/the-generation-game-7-grand-steps-demo/

I thought this was a thread about a new Tale of Tales game where you take 7 steps and the game ends while you wish you'd thought about it more before purchasing.

So... what's up with the terrible half-woman half-robot voice-over during the trailer?

Tbh at this point any trailer that doesn't use the Deep Dramatic Male Voice gets a plus for me. And i have nothing against the robots.

It looks neat and the theme they pursue is relevant to my interests; gonna check out the demo.

I think you're confusing gaming and movies. The deep dramatic voice is a rarity in game trailers, generally they don't have a voice-over at all.

I don't watch movie trailers so no, i don't think i'm confusing them. The voice-over may be relatively rarer, i wouldn't know, but the Dramatic Male seems to be what they opt for whenever it is present.

No, most of them when using voice-over use an in-game character. Most don't have voice-over beyond the use of in-game dialogue. Many are music only. It's very, very rare for a game to have a trailer featuring a voice of someone who isn't from the game.

EDIT: I have 113 trailers on my PC, primarily for A through AAA games. Quickly running through them now I estimate no more than ten of them have non-game VO, and it's about a 40/60 male/female split.

Since the gruff white males are still dominant game characters, i'd say that can actually be part of my impression the male voice is the default. I didn't mean specifically a separately hired person doing the voice over, just what i'm the most used to hearing while the game trailer rolls.

I don't think that's true either. I'm going to reel off some AAAish game ads that I can recall:

Black Ops 2 - Ad features a variety of people playing real-life multiplayer. No VO.

X-COM - Various news reporters act as the VO, both male and female.

Dark Souls 2 - Gruff male VO.

Tomb Raider - Female VO.

The Last of Us - Father and child with the child being the VO.

StarCraft II Heart of the Swarm - Primarily Kerrigan, a variety of other characters. Jimmy brings the gruff.

Mass Effect 3 - Variety of characters, primarily Shepard, all taken from game VO. I wouldn't say he's gruff.

Dead Island Riptide - Music only

Dishonoured - One trailer features a man, though reasonably high-pitched for a man, the other features a small child singing

Bioshock Infinite - Has tended towards in-game dialogue, with about 50% of it coming from Elizabeth.

That's just off the top of my head, but I don't think there's any kind of trend in gaming towards gruff male VO in trailers. I don't even think all-testosterone games like Gears of War went that route. Blizzard have a bit of a hard-on for it though.

As these are all relatively recent examples could it be it's more of a case the norms are (slowly) changing? I guess i'd need to dig through few years worth of older samples to check that, but that feels bit too much like work.

Anyway, gave the topic game a spin. It's interesting (if simple) and quite looking forward to finished version now. Though there's few bit that seem either bugged atm or just not well explained, like children treatment -- treating them the same which i'm guessing means having them perform the same thing on the same turn is supposed to make them develop friendship, yet on some turns the result is actually opposite.

7GS is amazing. Totally unique in the gaming world. I've never played anything like it. Keith is awesome, and worked on small parts of the game during our old indie dev coworking days at the MADE. themade.org

Just FYI, you can take a turn to make tokens, if you keep running out. Some IGF judges missed that, and it kinda ruins the game.

The demo makes token-generation pretty darn impossible to miss. I guess the IGF judges didn't get to play that. :)

One thing i noticed is that while there is a lot more synergy in token creation if you and your spouse occupy the same space the tradeoff is that it likely as not means you get another child. Even with the three generations the demo allows I was already seriously committed to family planning. Two kids, max, seems to give a decent ratio of spending tokens for kids vs using them to advance. Unfortunately it's hard to not end up with four or five if you and your spouse makes tokens together.

The game looks great, but Dangerous High School Girls was awful, so colour me cynical.

Well what are the AAAish trailers you're basing your position on? I don't think there's been a particular shift, though pre-2006 game trailers were generally so pants I'm not sure I'd want to inflict them on myself.

Is there any advantage to investing the tokens in more than one child, btw? I suppose they can be used for minting some extra tokens once their skill is high enough, but as they are limited to just one token per turn and the production isn't guaranteed, not sure if it works out.

That's the thing, i don't remember any specific examples off the bat; it's just overall impression formed as result of watching various trailers over the years. It is possible i've simply not seen enough of them and it was unfortunately skewed sample, but it'd took effort to verify that. I don't think i'm quite ready for it yet, so for now i'll just accept the possibility i'm off, here.

its hard to talk token strategy without access to the finished game. I assume that having your siblings hate you because you got all the tokens is going to end in tragedy at one point or another. There are also the allies you get on the track, I'm not sure if good sibling relations (from investing equally in all kids) might net you allies there but it probably should.

Yeah, at the moment i can't tell if there's any effect of sibling relations on the game, as right now they simply seem to disappear on the generation change. Getting allies/rivals based on the relations could make sense, but i haven't seen any enemies appear even in the game that had the entire family hate my firstborn, so idk. (and the allies/enemies based on that could be also problematic with aforementioned trouble with shaping these relations, but that's another story)

The game is out for sale in a beta release. $10 now for the unfinished and probably-buggy version they have right now versus $15 when the final release is out, and the plan is to increase the price by $1 per month until release.

I've bought it and I'll report back when I have put some time in.

Played through seven or eight generations and made it to the top of the track in the first age. Then I hit a crash bug when I tried for a heroic feat.

I just bought this and played WAY too much. It's really interesting. I have a feeling that it'll never end, though. Which is fine, as the gameplay is so interesting.

The beta was just updated a few days ago and while I still saw a few bugs they were mostly of the missing text variety and not of the game-crashing variety.

So I have zero reservations about recommending people to buy this now. I almost made it as supreme ruler of Rome. Twice. But almost doesn't count.

Continuing on the discussion from the demo, sibling rivalry is a rather big deal. If a sibling loves you they will give you tokens when you play as an adult. A small boon, but significant nonetheless.

If, on the other hand, a sibling dislikes you or even worse hates you then you are prone to randomly losing tokens or getting bad events. This can range from a nuisance to character-ending. (but not game ending, as you can always go back and play your sibling to continue the tale).

This has consequences when it comes to giving your kids tokens to educate them. Frontloading the eldest and neglecting his siblings is not a risk I'm willing to take, but not educating your kids just so they won't resent eachother is also not a good idea as it hoses the next generation.

My approach is to have one kid asap and give him plenty of tokens and then roughly 1/3-1/2 through your current characters life have a second child. And from that point I tend to alternate turns between giving both kids tokens and giving none of them tokens and saving up. Two kids because kids can die and you need an heir, and better to have a second child with decent education than a last-minute emergency kid who will only get a token or two before your life ends.

You also have to consider inheritance. If you only have one token when you start your adult life then it is very easy to fail and get eaten by the crocodiles. Whoever you want to play as should have two tokens minimum if you want them to have a fair chance at making it on their own. More is better, especially if you can get more diverse tokens in there, because it increases their chances of getting on the same space as a prospective spouse before they're all married off.

Juggling all these demands on tokens is the core of the game, and I really enjoy it. It's good for small spurts of gaming, and turnbased and windowed so I can just pick it up, leave it, and come back.