Cedars of the Cosmos

Overview

Cedars of the Cosmos is a three-player game of galactic growth. Pilot spacecrafts that will take you across interstellar space in search of Ancient Seeds. Each seed contains a fragment of a lost story. Piece together two of these fragments in the right order and win the game.

Obtaining Ancient Seeds gives you access to new found technology in the form of more cargo space for your ship. You'll use this space to hold resources, be it Seeds, Fuel, or Trap Tokens.

Players can obtain Fuel through harnessing the suns' energies at the center of each solar system. Use the fuel to shift your momentum and traverse to higher orbital rings, eventually traversing stellar systems.

Roles

Game created in a group of four with Wayne Hurras, Alex Lorraine, Devin Murray and myself. I was largely responsible for the design doc, the digital art assets, and the procedural poetry. The design itself was a collaborative effort.

Thoughts going in

I was really interested in movement systems at the time, and was thinking about what it might mean to move on a spiral or concentric-circle based board. My thinking led me to believe that the key to creating a meaningful movement system  (that brought more to the table than an aesthetic change), was that there would have to be a fundamental difference between concentric and eccentric movement. That is, moving radially along circles would have to be a systemically different thing to moving  towards or away from the center of the circle. 

I also thought there was opportunity to add interesting decisions by tinkering with the  the storage system considering the resource oriented gameplay. I latched onto the idea of a residence evil style storage storage system where items take up physical slots and storage becomes a mini-puzzle. It seemed to lean into the affordances of a physical game. While I also hoped it would  introduce heuristic based decisions where different resources might take up the same amount of storage but be different shapes and would more easily fit in differently shaped storage containers.

Post Mortem

Cedars is fundamentally a resource collection and management game, and ultimately there wasn't enough synergy between the games systems to allow for emergent complexity and enough interesting heuristic based choices. In any multiplayer  resource collection game there should be an economy brought into existence by the inter-dependence of players' resources'. Unfortunately there weren't enough mechanics linking players' resources to allow for meaningful economy to emerge. In the end, the gameplay which dominated were the mini-puzzles of taking the right amount of Fuel to successfully travel about the board. Because the strategic side of the game didn't quite come together, the systems goal of winning  through the collection of Goal Cards became secondary to the softer goal  of putting the cards together to procedurally generate poetry and exquisite corpse alien trees.