GoKawiilSortis - A paper empire game
I settled on the name Sortis from the latin because you don't play every turn in the game instead you skip ahead and calculate what happened at the point you want to make a genuine change to what's going on. Its a way of having the mechanics of the computer adding 1 wheat each turn without you having to manually add 1 wheat each turn. The literal translation is "of the lot/ of fate/ of oracle". Its etymology stretches back to a series, chain or row; which is equally relevant to this game. I'd love for the word to come to mean computationally reducible, a generalisation of closed form.
I have been working on a game recently that is played on paper but has the emergence of a procedural game like Minecraft, without forcing the player to do all the computation that would normally require.
What I wanted from this game was the feeling of progression, automation and discovery without needing anything other than pen and paper. I also wanted it to be something I could engage with that wouldn't rot my brain, but that I could actively do while very tired.
I feel I have achieved what I set out to.
If you are trained in computer science you will already know enough of the primitives to find the rules simple and memorable. If you haven't, then concepts like XOR and hexadecimal may need a little research. If you feel up to the effort, none of the concepts in this game are challenging to grasp.
The game is based on a grid world where each square is naturally water, forest or mountain. Forests can be cleared to build on, and there are a number of buildings. The aim of the game is to get the workshop to the highest level possible, and you do this using ever higher grades of ore. Ore is mined at a mine built on a mountain square. The build progression was inspired by OGame (a browser strategy game whose costs all climb on powers of two), so the formulas are all some form of \(2^n\). As the only player (the game is played alone in a notebook) you coordinate every agent in the game, of which you start with one.
The map
The page with the map from one play through - coloured in.
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