Design Brief

The player character is banned from being a JRPG protagonist after they help who they think is a just king ascend to the throne. Using their absolute rule our protag is banished to the backwaters with all options cut off from them to saving the world.

Until they decide to use the Lv2-5 NPCs in the area to act as their arms and sword…but these guys are terrible.

The game plays as a management sim where your perspective of ultimate strength and power makes trying to understand people who’ve never dedicated themselves to martial prowess mostly impossible.

Themes and Tone

The game has themes of using the wrong tool to get a mostly correct answer and victory through determination.

The tone is pretty lighthearted, seemingly set in disc two of a JRPG that got sidetracked.

Design Inspirations

Taking Inspiration from the time management of Princess Maker and Long Live the Queen and the remote missions in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the downtime management in Darkest Dungeon and the XdN stats checks of Billy Vs Snakeman.

Core Mechanics

The game is handled like a management game, the player assigned jobs for each of their units in their guild during the day and receives updates on the progress of each ongoing job at the end of the day.

Because the units you hire aren’t hardened adventurers they will often report unrelated details to their jobs like if they spent the day following cats around or contemplating poetry.

The game also has a level of abstraction once you get through the tutorial and start managing units in multiple towns as you make your way towards the capital. You’ll need to manage the units automatically taking jobs and trying to balance a budget sheet to keep each chapter profitable and working as a boon for their town.

The scope of the game is to overthrow the king and put someone on the throne who’ll let you continue with your original quest to take down the demon lord.

Scope Hope

Also want to put in a lemmings/pikmin style dungeon crush mode where random dungeons appear near towns due to the influence of the demon lord and you need to organize a sully route to the dungeon and then muster a force to attack the dungeon and destroy the dungeon core and a boss monster if one is present.

Visual Design

So far most of the design has the gameplay being managed from your desk looking at books and reports that come back from the units.

The main screen is a bunched of tabbed screens with data on them.