Design diary: Infinite City Jam

Hi everybody! I've been absent from the blog for many weeks, so it's a bit tough to find the time to post again, but whatever, I've had an important exam yesterday and want to start working on a new jam, so here we go:

Game Jam of the Infinite City

So, for the next 40 days I'll be working on a game for this jam, which suits me just perfectly, since I wanted to work on an urban game anyway. Without further ado, the pitch for the game:

We all know, have visited, or live in a failed city. A city that was promised the glory of a metropolis but fell short of it, or was tragically impeded from reaching that status. All failed cities coexist in a limbo in the edge of reality, a patchwork of neighborhoods, times and timelines, alternative realities, deterioration and decadence. One of the cities inside this limbo is Buenos Aires.

Some reach this haunted urban collage looking for something, some want to leave it, attracted by the promise of a distant metropolis. Some have always called the streets their home, and so it's natural that they've ended up here.

Whatever their reason to be here, the urban limbo (this name isn't definitive at all) offers the bold many opportunities, provided they're willing to leave the safety of the avenues and plunge into the deep city. In the deep city, you can get unusual and cheap offers, weird products that shouldn't exist, even recover someone lost forever, if you wander there long enough. But there are dangers too: the more you drift away from an avenue, the more reality and time distort: you might end up lost in a different neighborhood, sure, but also travel back or forward in time, reach a parallel timeline or an alternate world with slightly different rules, or cross a border and reach a different failed city, since they're all stitched together here. Wander long enough, and you might never be able to return to your native reality.

A few mechanical concepts for the game:

• This would be a guide for Buenos Aires for this urban limbo, a system for traversing it and dealing with distorsion, and finally a game, but the game and the guide should be fairly decoupled from each other, to allow Buenos Aires to be explored using other game, for example Electric Bastionland.
• The distortion sub system would allow to determine how the reality distorts as you travel from one block to the next one.
• The spacial unit will be the block, each one containing a knot, some sort of ongoing issue tied to the history or culture of the city, that keeps it in this limbo. Untying this knot has effects throughout the entire city. A knot may also be an urban legend or contain fantasy elements, specially inspired in writers like Jorge Luis Borges or Alejandro Dolina.
• The game would work like a labyrinth, similarly to my previous game "The Labyrinth of Verra", but neighbors may help you get oriented.

That's all for today! Damn, it's hard writing the same thing in Spanish and English, so don't get used to it. What the hell, go and learn some Spanish, it'd make my designer life much easier. See you all next time!