What if?... the fun of chaos

What if the good guy doesn't win? what if a blacksmith uses a spoon to fight a dragon? what if the key to solve a conspiracy of biblical proportions is at the back of  a milk carton? I want to talk about one of the things that I love about our game, Empire TV Tycoon, and one of the features, without doubt, that we've enjoyed most while working on it, the movie scripts.

Empire TV Tycoon is a game where you manage a TV channel. As the director you can do a lot of things, decide the content, hire workers, sign tv advertisements and much more, but the one that really makes a difference late game is the possibility to produce your own content.

The process is fairly simple, you hire a scriptwriter, he writes a movie script, you look for a pair of good actors, distribute your available production points in a proper way for that movie genre (for example, a sci-fi movie will need more points in post production than a gameshow) and the production begins. This is the way it works but I want to talk specifically about the movie scripts created by your workers.

When we began to think about the system we had two options, you can produce a dull script with a rating that says "action movie script" and that's all or, we could go one step further and create a "real" movie script for it. Real? well, I think nobody would use those for a real movie but, what if?. We've chosen the option b, and that's where the fun begins.

In Empire TV there are 12 movie genres (sports, music, comedy, etc.) and when you want to create your production the first step is to choose that genre, maybe you want to fulfill a comedy quest or you want a drama tv show to compete in the industry awards, it's up to you. The quality of the worker affects the time that it will take to have your script ready and after that time passes, you are presented with a movie script of a random quality, from crap to master work.

The process that creates the script takes a lot of variables into account and merge those variables in a random way to get results. Vehicles, places, professions, relations, bad guys, their bad plans and of course, different kind of plot stories that will give you a finished, chaotic, funny, movie script. Because chaos is funny. Let's go back to the beginning, what if?, would you watch a movie where a gang of motorbikers are conspiring to build a big antenna to brainwash people and make them eat tofu? I would because, tofu. The best part is that the good guy fails to stop them and, of course, the world is doomed, but that's another history...

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Empire TV Tycoon is a TV and movies management game that's being developed for PC, Mac and Linux. You can support us in Greenlight (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=449635561). 

Here are some of the movie scripts created ingame