EXEMPLAR

Twitter | Website

Hi. We're OneCoin, a two man team from Brisbane, Australia. We'd like to show you Exemplar. Exemplar is a procedural card and comic game set in a pseudo 50s era of super heroes and government organisations that recruit them.

The Basics

In Exemplar, the player takes the role of the head of a government organisation established after an unexplained surge in the number of people being found with extraordinary abilities. Many of these present a threat to those around them and in some cases, the planet as a whole. Others are willing to join the agencies to help keep the world safe. Gameplay itself is broken into two parts. The procedural card game, and the procedural comic.

What's a procedural card game?

That's a fair question. In Exemplar, you don't build a deck of Heroes. You build a manifest of sorts. Your "Hero Deck" describes the type of gifted individuals your agents seek out. As such, each card represents a classification of hero. When you choose to recruit one, you are symbolically sending out an agent to follow up on a fairly thin report. There are cards in the "Agency Field Deck" that can increase the amount of information known about these recruits before you bring them on board, but most of the time you don't now anything about them until you recruit them. At that time, their name, traits, costume, symbol, personality, origin and physical features are all generated. Suddenly the card that had a vague shadow on it, now has an amazing super hero, ready to be equiped with powers and gadgets and help you save the world.

The rest of your cards go in your "Agency Field Deck". These cards represent the mobile HQ capabilities of your agency. They include things like medical facilities, mobile laboratories, barracks etc and they allow you to support your heroes wherever their mission might be around the world. These aren't 100% reliable, and you never know exactly how powerful a card is going to be until you use it. But again, there are cards that can improve the minimums or otherwise help you make your choices.

OK. So where does the comic come in?

Ah! Glad you asked. I mentioned missions. Given the increase in these somewhat unusual individuals, and the nature of humans in general, the world as a whole is in a rather uncertain state. There are people calling themselves Super Villains that are taking world leaders hostage or threatening to blow up buildings, there are sad individuals that have lost their grip on what's real and what's not that are inadvertantly putting people in danger, there are, as always, people using what they possess to perform petty crimes. And there is also an alarming increase in natural disasters. Floods, fires, volcanic eruptions. You name it, it seems to be happening in the world. It's up to you and your agency (and the other agencies springing up around the world) to try and save the innocent from these events. These events are represented as cards on the global map. There will usually be a few in play, each with a countdown on them. If they aren't stopped before that timer runs down, the world "takes a hit" and there are only so many hits it can take before it's lost. Hero(es) are assigned to the event cards when you are ready to deal with it. You take a guess on which of your heroes is most equipped to deal with it.

In Exemplar, these events are expressed as issues in a comic book series. Each double page presents a problem to the player and the possible solutions. The left page shows the story of you hero(es) arriving at the problem site. The right page shows possible solutions based on the abilities and gadgets of the assigned hero(es). You choose what you think your hero(es) would do, and the right page will transform into the panels that show the outcome. Eventually, either the world ends, or you reach the final confrontation (often the super villain) of the issue. It is possible to face the final confrontation at any time, but each event that is nullified shifts the confrontation slightly further in your favour.

Here's an early test of the tech for the comic books.

We're still quite early in development. Working on the card generation at the moment. The turn based framework is in place already. There is still a lot to show and talk about though. The final look of the comics is still to be done. Saving comics and exporting issues to your favorite comic reader, having heroes that survive issues persist into future issues, how multi player will work and the extra layers of strategy that entails. We're also in the process of planning a Kickstarter campaign with the intent to launch it in Jan/Feb next year. So we'll keep you up to date on that too.

We would love to hear you thoughts and feedback as we go through the process of making Exemplar, and we'll have plenty more to show here soon.