I am never ever going to make this videogame. Not only is it too vast a scope for me to complete alone, but I never want to run a social media website even if it sucks on purpose. Also I think this might deal actual psychic damage to anyone who plays it. This is a case of "I'm writing this just to get it out of my brain so I have room for other things"
Overall this is a game about writing silly internet sentences from a limited set of words, and figuring out how to game an Algorithm that hates you.
You have a deck of at least 30 words (you can upgrade the maximum size if you want).
Posts are made in Streaks, each consecutive Post in a Streak has a bigger Point multiplier than the one before it (x2, x3, x4, ...). A Posting Streak ends when your deck is empty, so there are two main build categories:
- Large decks that rack up huge multipliers and get Points that way
- Small (and therefore inherently more consistent) decks that get Points just by making better Posts
How Posting works is this:
- Draw a hand of 7 words
- Click one word to add it to your Post
- Two words are then discarded at random
- Draw 3 new words
- Either finish the Post, or go back to step 2
- Either release the Post, or send it to the drafts, ending the Streak
- Either begin a new post and go back to step 2 (unless your deck is empty), or end the Streak
- Streak ended, all used words and words in the discard go back to the deck
You get Points for each upvote your post gets, multiplied by the post's index in its streak.
You don't build a deck out of individual words, words live in Packs of 5 that always stick together. So for a 30 word deck you just select 6 Packs you own. Packs are randomized when you buy them.
Packs have Themes, pools of words they draw from. You use Points to buy Packs, which have various different prices depending on their Themes. Themes can be basically anything, from "the basics: articles and punctuation" to "the 100 most common words" to "the entire lexicon of this public domain novel" to "the 50 words that people have discarded the most frequently when composing Posts".
There should also be a dusting mechanic where you can get rid of Packs you don't like and get Points
You can also use your Points to upgrade a Pack, giving a word in it a random Keyword. That's right, this is a CCG, words can have Keywords!
Examples of Keywords:
- Durable: If you would discard this word, instead put it on top of your deck and it loses Durable for the duration of the Post Streak
- Selective: When you add this word to a Post, you get to choose which words to discard instead of it being random
- Cantrip: When you add this word to a Post, don't discard any cards, and just redraw one
- Trusty: When you add this word to a Post, put a Token copy of it without Trusty on top of your deck
- Repetitive: When you add this word to a Post, put a Token copy of a random word already in the Post on top of your deck
- Backup: When you add this word to a Post, put a Token copy of a random different word from its Pack on top of your deck
- Summon: When you add this word to a Post, put a Token copy of a random word from its Pack's Theme on top of your deck
- (Token: This word doesn't belong to a Pack and disappears forever at the end of the Post Streak)
- Reanimate: When you add this word to a Post, choose a word from discard to put on top of your deck
- Trendy: This word has double weight for Algorithms
Oh, right. The Algorithms.
There are five different Feeds you can scroll through, each with its own inscrutable Algorithm. Two of them are relatively stable, the other three are based on genetic algorithms which are scrambled periodically (one monthly, one weekly, one daily).
You get Points for upvoting or downvoting Posts you see in a Feed. Each Feed can give you up to 50 Points daily. (Up to 30 from upvoting, 20 from downvoting.) The actual effects of upvotes and downvotes vary (and may be somewhat counterintuitive to their names based on what the Algorithm is doing that day), the difference that matters is upvotes also give the poster points, whereas downvotes do not.
You can reply to a Post by someone else, if you do, a Token copy of every word in that post is shuffled into your deck first. There aren't reply Streaks, instead this is where the PVP mechanic comes in.
If you reply to a post, the Points you get from upvotes to it are put on hold for half an hour. If nothing happens, you get those Points as normal. If the OP replies back, however, Discourse is initiated.
Discourse is very similar to a Post Streak, but it happens back and forth between two players, and occurs in its own little bubble. You can do other things during it independent of your Discourse deck, which is locked in once Discourse is initiated.
As a Discourse thread goes on, neither of you gets to put your discard pile back into your Discourse deck, you're only consistently fueled by the token copies of the words you throw at each other. Over time, Discourse is likely to degrade into repetitive mindless nonsense.
Discourse ends when one of you runs out of cards in your deck, or half an hour goes by with no replies. At the end, whoever has the most upvotes has Ratio'd the other and gets all the Points for every Post in the thread, regardless of author.
(I thiiink Discourse should be guaranteed to end? Every word you put in a reply gives one word to your opponent's deck but spends 3 from your own. I haven't worked out what exactly happens in edge cases like what if every single card in both players decks has Cantrip though, maybe Token copies from replies lose all keywords.)
The game has all sorts of other bullshit mechanics, like following players (there's no following feed, instead each Algorithm handles what exactly to do with posts from people you follow differently) and word metrics (you get bonuses for using words you've frequently discarded in the past, if you put two words next to each other often they become best friends and are more likely to be drawn together, other stupid ideas) and trading (maybe???)
Before you send a Post you can click the words to cycle them through lowercase, Capitalized, and ALL CAPS
Oh yeah I forgot to mention you can also spend points to increase the maximum number of Packs in your deck, maximum number of words in a Post, and maximum character count per Post. No hard cap for any of these but the price increases with each upgrade