Rebel Inc - Junior Designer

I usually pride myself in being good at designing tight mechanics and writing mathematical formulae, but the main design philosophy for this scenario was "would this be funny?". I wanted to let players feel like they were cheating by giving them the kinds of abilities that could not exist in any other context. I am overall very happy with this scenario, and it was received very well by the community too! I think my favourite modifier for this is the one that locks the game at max speed.

This scenario was conceived when I was thinking about how to give the player more meaningful choices when purchasing initiatives. Usually you just buy whatever you need when you need it, but this scenario forces the player to make conscious decisions about what is most important in the current moment. Passing up on education now means it will be a long time before you see it again, so you better be sure you don't need it. Bolstering your military necessitates that you pass up on gaining regeional stability. These kinds of decisions keep this scenario interesting and has led to a lot of people really enjoying it. It definitely does up the RNG for playing on higher difficulties though.

When working on bug fixes or balance patches I often used the dev tools to speed through the testing of the game and it gave me the realisation that it is quite fun to have that time constraint, and it would be a really quick and easy scenario to implement for how interesting it is to play. The main design considerations here was making sure you can't pause the game by running out decisions so instead when a decision runs out it just picks a random option automatically, and second making sure the game continued even while in menus so that time pressure is always active. While this scenario is relatively easy (just play on the lowest speed) - players can really easily make it harder by playing on the higher speeds instead. Beating Mega-Brutal Real-Time Operation on permanent max speed is a genuine accolade.

For the Dollars & Disasters DLC we wanted a tie-in scenario to Plague Inc to be available for the main playerbase for non-DLC owners. I took a little bit of inspiration here from the board game Pandemic which I was playing a lot at the time in that you have the disease tokens appearing in zones and things get bad when you get ~3 of them. Overall this scenario mostly just gives another small micro puzzle on top of the regular game and adds a little bit of conflict as to what you spend your money on. I wish I could take credit for the Plague Inc music playing in the background, but I believe that was an idea from our narrative designer. It was a very nice touch though.