I've finally gotten back into working on You Are a Mouse, so here's the basic gameplay loop I've come up with.

Like I said in the previous post about YAaM, the game has a defined length of one year. I played around with how I wanted this to work, thinking about something with seasons, months, weeks, and what I settled on is a flexible system of "situations" that allows you to extend or shorten the game depending on how many situations you include.

At this point, I'm recommending 16 situations per game, four per season. There are four types of situations, events, tasks, challenges, and encounters. Additionally, the situations all differ depending on what season you're in.

Play progresses like this: you roll 1d4 to determine the situation. Then, you'll draw from a deck of cards to determine what's happening. The type of situation will determine how you'll respond. Events are something environmental that your mouse gets to experience, tasks are something simple you do for daily survival, encounters are meetings with another creature, and challenges are something you can succeed or fail at doing. Each situation advances you through the year, so, if you chose to play a 16 situation game, you'd play four situations in spring, four in summer, four in autumn, and four in winter. I'm working on a stat system, but I'm envisioning a mechanic where each situation affects your stats, and there are multiple endings you can get depending on what your stats are at the end of the game.

In this way, YAaM is kind of like a cross between Alone Among the Stars (Takuma Okada), a retro Fighting Fantasy book (I remember playing some old ones that I got from my uncle, I totally forgot that they count as solo TTRPGs! Here's more info, I remember some of them being pretty fun), and a visual novel/dating sim.

Here's the design roadmap that I've put together, it's definitely going to change. I think it'll be interesting to include it at the end of each post, just to see how it changes over time.

Design Next Steps
  1. Stats and stat generation
  2. Determine how stats are affected by each situation type
  3. Write the situations
  4. Playtest situations
  5. Revise
  6. Determine endings
  7. Playtest endings
  8. Revise
  9. Playtest full games
  10. Revise
  11. Beta testing
  12. Revise based on feedback
  13. Illustration, proofreading, and typesetting
  14. Beta testing
  15. More proofreading
  16. Final revision
  17. Final testing
  18. Release