So, you might have heard about our prophecy generation system in one of our previous posts but you may wonder how you get these.

In Call Shot Dead, you play Billiard so you can expect traditional gameplay on that front, but we take some degree of liberty where we need to.

The main principle of the game is that each ball (excluding white but including black) carries a specific theme (ie: career, nature, love, etc) and when 2 of these collide, a prophecy is generated based on the themes involved. A prophecy can be positive or negative, and this would be decided by the place where the collision happens. The table is divided into positive or negative areas and the size or polarity of these will change throughout the game.

We're designing the game so that the player has an incentive to do a lot of collisions and create a richer story.

For that reason we decided to experiment with having less balls on the table (we're currently trying with having 3 balls to pocket instead of 7) because having many balls means having a lot of collisions at the same time and this would create too much prophecies early on, while giving the sensation of nothing happening later when most balls would already be pocketed (and it would also require more themes, meaning way more data to feed the algorithm).

We also decided to change the rule saying that pocketing the black ball while you still have other balls to pocket is an instant loss, because we think that having a story abruptly cut short on a single mistake wouldn't be fun. So this will just inflict a major penalty when it happens, but the game will still continue.

Finally, we removed the rule saying that it's a fault to hit one of your opponent balls first (or the black ball if you still have balls to pocket). This would make the themes of these balls much harder to exploit and would just go against the main principle of the game.

We have though of 2 systems to diversify the gameplay, and motivate the player to do more collisions rather than just trying to pocket all their balls as fast as possible.

The first one is the "cheating" system.

Cheats are various powers you can use to alter the game, and both player are able to use these before the shot of each player. We haven't ironed out exactly what they will do yet, but we already have many ideas written down. You can expect things like changing the friction coefficient of balls in an area to make them slower, placing obstacles on the table, shuffling the positions of balls, reversing the polarity of an area, etc.

These cheats should be very helpful to create more "chaos" and thus more collisions, while also giving ways to quickly pocket balls when needed. This means that you'd be able to focus on creating prophecies as much as you like without risking to put yourself in a difficult position when it comes to pocketing balss and actually winning the game.

Cheats can be obtained by multiple ways:

• pocketing your balls
• penalties received by your opponent
• making call-shots

Call-shots are the second system I pointed at just before and are an adaptation of a traditional billiard rule saying that you're supposed to call which ball you're going to pocket and in which pocket.

We decided to repurpose that by making the calls about collisions.

This means that before each shot, you'll be able to select the balls you are going to make collide, and if your call actually happens, you'll be rewarded by being able to keep playing, and you'll even win cheats.

Each consecutive call on a single turn will ask you call more and more collisions for a single shot so you cannot play infinitely.

We hope that with all that, players will want to create stories with many prophecies, and enjoy what silly things happen to the characters because of that!