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We try to create a system where you don’t need social skills to play a character with social skills, while still keeping it fun for players who are more extroverted and eloquent.

‘The Coalition’ is a Sandbox Roleplaying game. The goal of the game is for the players to create memorable and enjoyable characters that fit into the lore and feel of the world, in whatever way you desire. Whether you want to play as space pirates, a political party, a hacker-activist group, military personnel or a small family running a mining corporation, the rules of ‘The Coalition’ aim to create interesting and fun gameplay for all these types of games, and more. We hope that through the rules, we can spark your creativity to make the story you want to experience.

To give you the building blocks to make a diverse game, we have chosen three main focuses in our system, which we define as the three Pillars. These are Combat, Hacking and Social.

Combat is a dynamic system in which you can use various different actions like suppressive fire, moving information and making evasive manoeuvres. You can incapacitate your opponents (or allies, if that’s your thing) with an ordinary pistol, or high-tech weaponry such as plasma rifles, soundwave guns or nano blades. But this is not a Hack & Slash game. Position, tactics and timing are just as important as the size of your gun.

Since this is the future, almost anything has some sort of computer chip in it, and is, therefore, susceptible to a hacker. Making hacking a single roll with either success or failure was therefore too easy, repetitive, and simply not realistic. Instead, a hacker makes their way through a network using a wide array of actions, or Scripts. Think of it as digital dungeon crawling. Hacking happens real-time, but be careful you’re not picked up by the system, most people tend to dislike hackers.

Social game mechanics are harder to implement. Combat and hacking are relatively easy to turn into separate actions, but social interaction is much more fluent. We discovered a problem with some other games. Want to play a mighty raging barbarian while in real life you’re not really the athletic type? No problem. Your character is one of the greatest race car drivers but you failed your driving test thrice already? Cool! Want to play a slick-talking playboy rock star while in real life you’re dealing with social anxieties? This is where various game systems fall short. We try to create a system where you don’t need social skills to play a character with social skills, while still keeping it fun for players who are more extroverted and eloquent.

And to add to that, all three Pillars work together in unison in a real-time system. You are not bound to act in your turn and stand by idly when your turn is over. Instead, you carefully decide when, in a round, you want to act. This makes for more tactical, interesting and most importantly realistic gameplay.

Right now, we are working hard on in-house alpha testing with a great group of playtesters. We plan on starting beta testing in early 2017, which we hope to do in collaboration with game shops.

In later DevBlog posts, we will talk more in-depth about the various systems and underlying ideas. For now: let us know what you think in the comments below!