Postgame
Here is the sheet for the game.
First, thanks to everyone who participated. I believe we had 28 players total, for 20 slots, and, as I sort of expected, we did not hear from some people after C1 began lol. There were some slots which did not speak at all after the game began, and others which fell behind on keeping up and never really saw a need to reengage.
I think next time, what I would do instead of allowing hydras, is run two parallel games, splitting the overage of players into two groups in the hopes of encouraging more people to be active. I think it is easier to feel like you NEED to do more if there are fewer people you can look at in the server and go "oh someone else must be handling it," but this game also proves my theory that the whole "ugh village leader makes us sheep" thing is not really a problem for a lot of people, who are content to sit back and sheep/let someone else submit for them.
I would give the MVP of this game to Nuxl/eli, head 1 of the Chimchar slot, who took the lead at the start of the game and submitted the vast majority of actions. He stepped up and performed well - there are of course a few changes to his submissions that I with my infinite host knowledge would make to optimize them, but I think he tackled the puzzle-solving elements at play here very well.
Secondary props go to AG, the Mudkip slot, who did the lion's share of the work on the alias-matching list. While I think a couple wheels were spun on narrowing down the final few mafia TM:Pokemon matches, and this is a shared responsibility between submission of info role targets and the alias-matching sheet, overall there was a lot of attention to the details here to rule out invalid matches.
The sentiment from those who were active, but dropped off, was "this is a fun game but I'm just busy irl," which is a very fair thing to have happen, especially in the northern-hemi summer when everyone is vacationing and doing fun stuff. Smaller-player co-op puzzle games like this might be best served queued during the winter, like January or February or something, when going places outdoors is not as convenient lol. If the goal is to get more of the game's players to seriously engage with it.
Design
The Pokemon moves went through several iterations, and I think a couple older variants of moves are still on the sheet. Originally I had identical versions of 'classic' roles, RBer, SG, inspector, etc, so that each floor could have 1 of each important role. I felt like this wasn't really challenging enough and changed it so each move was unique, although some have almost identical overlap. I also went through a stage where almost every unevolved target was random, but I felt like that would be frustrating to have such little control, especially since the mafia would never rand their roles onto each other, so only a couple rand-targeters remained.
The evolution process was also more linear, with targets going from 1 mon to 2 mons to 3 mons; in the final build, very few explorers could target 3 when evolved. I also tried to put in a couple environmental mons, Chimchar and Piplup - neither of these was particularly effective and their situational use came later than would've been helpful.
The mafia were designed to be identical between floors, although I did wind up having Basement's movement-impactor turn mons around instead of simply stopping them in place (the original design) since Basement was an easier level to clear. I designed Middle first, and while it's the dungeon I'm proudest of, that hard left path was particularly grueling to clear, and I did not properly count how many turns it would take to complete Upper's hard left (a full-map dead end). Though it could've been cleared in 12 turns, if nothing went wrong, the explorers turned Charmander around to check the bottom corner, which essentially doomed them as Charmander could never reach the exit in time from that point on.
I also adjusted a couple evolutions midgame - terrible hosting practice, I know - when it became clear their moves were simply not playing out as desired or expected, and some tweaks would be positive for game health. I think this is alright because, what, the NPC mafia are gonna complain? The humans all being on one team lets midgame adjustments be made without inconveniencing any time.
The original concept was that once a mon went to a floor, it was locked there until the end, and there was very little interaction between floors. This shifted at various points in my designing and I think the rules were written at a point where Dig let the explorer go between floors, leading the players to believe there would be more cross-floor targeting than there was.
My goal was to make a puzzle game where one needed to use what mafia-based info they gained to deduce aliases via logic, and give the explorers objectives in exploring the dungeon floors. The dungeons I sprited myself, and I think they look really sick with all the mons on them walking around. They are, at their core, very linear, and pretty easy to complete, because my total tiles used makes pretty much every choice a simple right or left and you'll hit a chest there. Someone with perhaps more speed and experience with spriting could make a very elaborate dungeon to navigate that rewards and punishes navigation choices more.
The mafia were designed to target three things: movement, move (ability/role), and information. The 'head' mafia, Gastly, could block info roles on all three floors. The others could impair movement, trap explorers, or roleblock them. One thing I will say is using movement to refer to the tiles progressed and move to refer to the explorer ability was confusing to keep straight, so anyone else who does this will probably want to use more disparate terms. Originally, the mafia had four unique moves names between them (Mean Look, and the 3 blocks); I changed this so all 10 had a unique move name, thinking that made it a little more personable, and could help with solving.
How It Played Out
I am largely pleased with how the game went (myself miscalculating how punishing Upper hard left could be aside). People had fun solving together, compiling the pieces of info they got to rule out impossible alias matches and confirm others.
A good deal of explorer thought went into floor assignments based on what will make info roles the most 'conclusive' even when they were in their unevolved states. This unfortunately resulted in the heavy-hitter mons being on basement level, with severe overlap between their utilities (the two RBers, three movement-guards), and too many info roles on mid with unique, but very situational, support units (Chimchar and Piplup for stone control, Mudkip for bonus movement which was wasted anytime Corphish or Drifloon targeted Mudkip's target, Trapinch's proximity-based SG instead of Chikorita and Mareep's targeted SG).
Middle quickly fell behind the other floors and had no way to recover, as none of their evolutions would ever deal with movement or move blocking. With the exception of Flygon, who could protect the entire floor from being roleblocked, as long as the mafia did not rand Flygon. This was compounded by the explorers only choosing to send Torchic hard left, by far the longest, windiest path of any dungeon (outside of Charmander's long walk), and Torchic being randed by the mafia heavily early.
This raised some questions to me about how much info denial for the purposes of explorers making uninformed decisions at the start of the game was really useful, and how much was just a misplay by them in assigning mons. I concluded it would be best to have X roleblockers, where X is the number of dungeons, who can all block multiple mafia when evolved, and if players still choose to leave a floor without a roleblocker, well, that's on them. In this build, there were not three full roleblockers, and it's very unfortunate two went to basement.
The info roles worked as I intended - some good targeting and the aforementioned explorer strategy led to some very early matches. Then things sort of stalled midgame (and the IT'S JOEVER smogon dot com mafia player salt kicked in a little, as is tradition) and I felt like they stopped utilizing all their info tools to solve. The mafia moves were not considered, and their info roles were flung a little more randomly than I felt they ought to be, when many of the gaps in knowledge were which mafia was which. That's me having all the info, though. The alias list was solved by Cycle 12, as I intended it to be, and then the info mons became fully useless after lol.
I also had to modify the mons only going to the final chamber once they finished their floor, instead allowing basement to bum rush middle, because of how far behind middle had fallen. The players were holding off on evolving to avoid the mafia gaining more targets, and still struggling because the entire floor had nothing to do against Corphish and Drifloon. Once basement arrived, bringing their mafia with them, the explorers were still easily able to clear the floor 14 vs 7.
Another thing to consider is the mafia were never randing each other, since they were 'informed,' outside of Gastly, because blocking information on its own teammates is perfectly viable. So the explorers were much less efficient with their targeting early, outside of basement lucking into mafia aliases super early and the mafia repeatedly attempting to movement block Larvitar, whose role was to self-guard against that...
With the couple of tweaks made to the wincon timeline, and the cross-floor rules, the explorers were able to complete the game just in time, and win.
Modifications to the Format
I go back and forth on whether I think more roles like Trapinch's, which force the explorers to be even more intentional about what mons they send where, would be better/more interesting, or if it was a source of perceived impotency compared to the other SGs and it would be better if more control was available for every role.
A big tweak would be to make Chimchar and Piplup's moves floor actives that can be used X times or activated in some way by the explorers on that floor, instead of essentially wasting two slots on those moves which are very useful, but were nearly impossible to execute on. Middle floor could've had two moves useful for fighting the mafia, instead.
I think one of my game design strengths is that everyone will have fun, and the games are accessible without being too complex/needing tomes (and I use pictures when I have tomes!). That is also a weakness in a co-op format like this, where some more mysteries/puzzles for explorers to put together could improve engagement and give more people things to do. For being the experimental game of this format type, I think my level of puzzles and their difficulty was fine, but I would really enjoy seeing a hosting team who put a lot more time into developing additional mysteries to be solved for the wincon. Especially since the whole conniving social game element is absent, and solving together is all the players really have.
Maybe larger dungeons? Maybe one massive dungeon with far more paths, instead of separate floors? I think future hosts could take this any way they like.
I also think this game may have been tighter if I didn't design it over so much time - the dungeon floors were designed months apart from each other and the 'rules' for them varied based on which one I was making, and my intents for abilities would shift, the dungeon would be designed with that in mind, and then changed again later and something like Upper having a puddle completely 'block' the path when it shouldn't have been blocking it would happen because the rules in my head for puddle traversal changed.
Another thing to consider is how much info on everything the players get to base their initial decisions on. One edition of this had Water types being able to walk over puddles (so only a Water type could travel through Upper hard right), but then without knowing where these puddles are, since fog of war was on, explorers would be unable to make a good decision about where to send a Water mon, and could potentially lock themselves out of the turn limit by having to turn around.
We had some good chats in the Discord server (which worked splendidly for hosting/info purposes with the channels I set up) about other possible things to do to better the format. I think it worked well and was fun even if it became easy to disengage from lol.
Thanks again to everyone for playing!
. It definitely didn't look easy to host at all and it was a completely new thing in comparison with the average game in the queue.
