Last Clan Standing - The Interactive Movie Battle Royale

In this episode of the Gaming Blender podcast, Scott and Matthew discuss a hypothetical game called Last Clan Standing. The game is set in a country that has fallen into anarchy after the death of a long-serving dictator. The country has splintered into small rival factions resembling criminal syndicates. These factions compete against each other to raid local countries' trade routes, such as oil tankers, trains, and cruise liners. The game incorporates elements of a Battle Royale, interactive movie, and base building. One player controls the interactive movie and base building, while other players represent rival factions. The goal is to be the last clan standing and secure valuable resources.

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Transcript

0:02

Hello all, and welcome back to the Gaming Blender, the podcast of hypothetical games. I am your host today, Scott, and I'm my diligent and loving co -host, those are two words that usually go together, Matthew. Matthew, how are you? I'm all the better for being described as diligent and loving. That's very nice of you. I'm doing very well. I'm ticking along. Welcome back. It's nice to have you hosting again. This is your first host in about four or five months. Yes, I'm back in the chair and loving it. Yes, I am. And I have the dice rolls ready for you, Matthew. I have what you're going to be doing today. And I must say, I'm intrigued. I'm intrigued about how you're to do. But first of all, as is tradition, I'm going to ask you about your gaming Fortnite. What have been up to? well, well, I have been I've finally got into Jedi Survivor. Finally, I was telling you about this, I went back to Jedi Fallen Order, put it all on the easiest difficulty to just fly through the last boss, flew through the last boss, and then went right straight into Survivor. And it is a lot better than Fallen Order. And that's not a patch of Fallen Order. I just think this is a this is really found their groove. Although I noticed that I noticed something in the way that they tell their stories, which they've done in both games. And now I've got it in my head, I can't get it out. which is they always start with a narrative device of throwing you in with a group of people that your character's meant to have known for ages. So essentially what happens is in the start of Survivor, you get thrown in, you're doing a job against the Empire, and you're with this ragtag crew that you don't really know, but you get told by the game, don't worry, you love these people. And without being too spoiler -rific, it doesn't go very well. And there are the moments where the game goes, feel sad now, and I go. I don't know who this was. I've got no idea. And then I realized I thought about they do exactly the same thing in the first game. have the the bloke in the junkyard. He's like, I it's lovely to see you here, because I've looked after you for x amount of years. And we have been great friends the whole time. Yeah. I do get what you mean. It's more for me when that happens. like, I believe that my character is sad. I am not sad, but I believe the character is sad. So I'm sort of sad for him? it's quite a good narrative framing device, though. I kind of like it because you do you means you can have a really high octane action is why they often do with games over films, because games you get really high octane action thing. And for that, you probably need to be fighting with people alongside you are not finding out whereas in a film, you can have that slow, slow sort of discovery askew. Yeah, you don't have that. But I don't mind it. It just made me laugh because he suddenly he sat down looking sad. And I kind of went, we're sad now. Okay, we're sad. Yes, sad face. Put on your sad face. It is sad face time. No, I'm not sure if I've got as far as you have on Survivor. I keep getting pulled away to actually do actual work whenever I want to sit down and play it. But I know. But I have just got to the first planet you do after the prologue. And I've already died many times. Why turn the difficulty up for it? Because actually I found that it's easier than the first game. The first game is much harder. Now, whether that's because the first game is slightly clunkier, I don't know, but it's definitely easier than the first game. So I whacked the difficulty back up. Yeah, I think... So I've just gone normal, what is it, Jedi Knight difficulty. And genuinely, I think I'm getting worse at video games. When I was younger, I feel like I listen to the game, my whatever approach... Say if I died. When I was younger, I okay, well that approach didn't work, so I'll try something else. Now that I'm older, I go, no, no, I will do it again and again and again and then just keep dying in exactly the same way. So yeah, maybe I'm just getting worse. But yeah, I keep dying to the super battle droids keep killing me. Which is, they keep rocketing me and it's very upsetting. The rockets are annoying. I'd like to put there's nothing worse and again than the moment you realize you've been splattered by rocket. It's very, very distressing. There are these two that keep walking along the cliff top and you go, right, okay. And I end up killing one and then my character literally looks up to go to the second one and then a rocket then immediately hits him in the face and I die and I'm like, Awesome. It's incredibly annoying. On a slight side note, I think I mentioned it before, I've been clawed back into, just to touch on what I've been doing, game wise, I have been clawed back into Skyrim again after after 13 and a half, no 12 and a half years of it being released. I've been clawed back in again. I'm not particularly proud of myself. So we're not going to talk about it. I've lost my sobriety. I've lost my Skyrim sobriety and I've fallen back in again. We're not going to talk about it. Moving on. We shall actually do the podcast now listeners. the podcast? haven't said what it is yet. if you are new to the podcast, welcome. If you are returning, welcome back. this is the, as I mentioned before, the gaming blender podcast, what we do each, each fortnight or each episode, is we take, we take half an hour or so, and, we imagine a hypothetical, game with a, with a, do you take a randomized genre, randomized mechanics? we'll, we'll cobble something together. in about 20 minutes or so and then we'll spend the last 10 minutes or so maybe shoehorning in usually a narrative at the end, which again is randomly generated. And Matthew is going to taking a swing this week. Are you feeling confident? I'm feeling confident. mean, one thing that slightly threw me off actually is when you said we take we take about half an hour, which I wasn't I expecting that. was all the intros we've done. We've never started with the amount of time No, this is true actually. But to be honest, I mean, think about it, we usually preamble for several minutes and talk nonsense as we usually are doing. And then there's a summary at the end. actually it's more like 20 minutes, which actually makes listeners that actually makes it more impressive that we give you half an hour episode. 10 minutes is nonsense. And 20 minutes is us actually doing what we told you we were going to do. And, you know, I think that makes it more impressive because it's a short amount of time. are you, are you ready for your? I am ready. I am ready. Okay, so the dice roll has given you for your genre number 20 which is Battle Royale. So Battle Royale a la Fortnite. For your mechanics, obviously we'll do the narrative later, but for your mechanics you've got number 36 and number 10 which are interactive movie Eww, in a battle royale. Yes, and base building, which is Battle Royale. So you've got one mechanic that is, one mechanic that isn't. Yeah. I mean, I'm well, said base building base buildings. I suppose it kind of is if you have big, big versions of games like rust and Daisy, where you, you, head off and you fully have to do something, but interactive movie because interactive. movie I think is going to be your difficult part of this. What are your thoughts? my thoughts are, I possibly could have had a better use of my lunch. Interactive movie is the one that, okay, so interactive movie for those who don't know, it's like until dawn. It's when you have a game that essentially plays through majority of its cuts in, you choose routes throughout it. Would you say, do you remember the Walking Dead Telltale games? Yeah, I would say their interactive movie, aren't they? I would say to interact movies is a descendant of the choose your own adventure books where you make important choice and spin off. My first thought, the first thing I was thinking was you kind of have voting system a bit like everyone goes on one side a bit like where they you have to two trap doors to choose from and then one will go through and drop everyone off. So you're playing a movie with tons of people. But in theory, you won't be making or making the same decisions all the way through so that the number will filter down. But I think that could be quite prohibitive, you could play through once and be like, okay, although I suppose you could choose different things, but you'd get quite irritated if you consistently were seeing the same movie over and over over again, you're like, okay, I've seen this, seen this one play out. Base building easy enough. Base building, I feel like you just increase the size of the map, you just add a bit more tension. Maybe what you do is you separate them, not in the sense that they're cheating, but you have two plot lines going on. You know, in the hunger games, obviously have, they have the elements where you can, they control the environment. They like rebuild the, the, the, I want to say ring, suppose, yeah, let's call it ring. They rebuild that they rebuild the ring and they, they start adding things in and they say, here's a swarm of bees and stuff like that. And here's a, here's an angry man with a knife. I feel like you do something, you could do something similar, like you have people existing in this world while this interactive movie is playing out, where say a couple of players are making the important choices throughout between two characters, and those choices affect what happens in the world. okay. I have an interesting... I like it when this happens, you have an idea and then the idea spawns another idea when you're in the middle explaining your first idea. Go on. It's what it's what I call an idea iteration. So you are and you're have to stick with me on this somehow. no, I've changed my idea entirely. I've got a better idea. Read it. It's slightly more realistic. What I was going to suggest is like you were controlling a body and then you were everyone's microbes inside a body. And that's how you were doing the battle royale and trying to eliminate each other. But let's ground this a bit more in realism maybe. What you've got is you have a big tanker. Now a tanker is big enough to fight in and to hide in and stuff like that. And you can also, for the sake of base building, it's quite a loose term base building. You can take materials and you can take elements and you can start piling them up and making sort of fortifications using what's around. say you get some planks of wood and you can make it really difficult and funnel people into certain areas and use the base. mean, a bit like, yeah, scavenging, know, in Captain Phillips where the crew go to the bottom level of the ship and kind of act sort of guerrilla warfare -ish. Quite similar to that in a sort of base. So maybe not full on base building, but more so forming traps and modifying it. While what's happened is you have this ship that's been overtaken by pirates who are fighting it out to take this tanker. However, the captain and the crew have locked themselves in the cabin. Now, while they have locked themselves in the cabin, movie, interactive movie, is essentially playing out on what's... happens to the boat. So the cabin of the crew are like arguing going, what do we do? Do we report it? we we do we sail the ship off? Do we just still try and make a destination and get to the port with blockaded the thing? So while that interactive movie plays out, the entire of the ship are at war with each other. So loads of so essentially, they're all fighting for possession of this vessel. But the crew can dictate your like they can say, right, there's a storm over there. Let's head into that storm, because that will make it choppy and really difficult. or let's try and run it aground or let's inform the lifeguard who will send some people out. And all these decisions have good and bad things for the people who are fighting down below, causing them to have different gameplay elements. Like if you head into the storm, the ship's swaying. If you run aground, the ship can start sinking. If you call the lifeboats, then you'll have extra enemies appearing who are policemen or whatever. I don't know what you call police, army. Marines, that's the word, Marines. I forgot it. I forgot the word Marine. I know, there's a word I know and I can't remember it. Okay, so are we saying that the players, so this is multiplayer game we're saying? So the multiplayer element, the players are playing, in this case, the pirates, in this case. The crew are NPCs who are like below decks and their decisions. cause the interactive movie to move along. that what we're So. are made by a couple of players because what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to say I want to be in the movie part, I want to play out the narrative. So these players, so essentially you have two players who are not part of the battle royale who are controlling the narrative and essentially kind of being games masters. Okay. Okay. By the basis of a battle royale, my understanding, is a battle royale has to be everyone against everyone. There's no teams in a battle royale. no teams by the way. Well, Fortnite obviously go around in squads of two, three, four. Okay. So I say that's what you do because you say all these little boats are groups of pirates that have come onto your ship. So there's tons, let's say there's like 20 teams. Okay. How about this? To build, to, to build on it, to flesh out that bit then, to flesh out the sort of the battle royale bit. Could you, could you build it in that essentially you, you know, let's say, let's say there's, there's, let's say, like you say, it's an old tanker. Let's say lots of sort of pirate factions have all said, right, okay, this old tanker is there for the taking. But, you know, it's a free for all. You know, we get there. We all attack it at the same time, but there's no rules. Like we can kill each other. Last man standing gets it. Is that, that, is that how you do it? Because then what you can do is you can, you can, you can pull, I know we'll get into the narrative later, but you can, I know, but you can, I think you might be okay. So you can, you can pull that out to be more of like a, more of like an excess, existential is the wrong word. more of like an overarching storyline where there's like a. a very loose criminal underworld, we could say pirates or it doesn't have to be pirates, like, where you, you know, you, where players can choose like which particular pirate clan they want to be a part of or whatever. You can have loads of them. And then that means then you can, you can do other things other than all tankers. could do, you could do stuff that's, know, other stuff that's based on land. He could be, you could just, you know, rot. crime in general like robbery or whatever like you can think, I suppose actually the interactive movie, you, although you don't need to be moving around on it, you could do things like, okay, well, in the interactive movie, we're to make this decision to lock the doors, or we're going to make this decision to ring the police, or we're going to do these. So you do have ways you can vary this up. And I think the two players that end up playing, you know, essentially like the NPCs that decide what happens in the interactive movie, I think the decisions that they get given a choice on, so let's say you can do this or do that, that can be based on what the players do. So let's say that the players, rather than actually making any progress or capturing the ship, they just decide to kill one another. Okay. that obviously gives the crew more time, so they might make different decisions. Whereas if they go, okay, temporary truce, we're gonna kill each other inside the ship once we're actually inside. And then obviously the crew are in bit more immediate danger, so they might choose something else. So perhaps the choices differ depending on the actions of the players. because what you might have as a situation where they go, you could hear if you were fighting on the ship, let's say, you got some news and you managed to work out, my goodness, they're trying to run the ship aground, which means we're all doomed. So you would think, right, the first thing we need to do is we need to get up and eliminate the crew and take control of the bridge. And then we can go back to killing each other. That adds a nice sort of extra element to this, to the the battle route, because you think, God, it's actually all going to go up in flames unless we team up. So I think it might be better to have one player who gets to play essentially the ship's captain and who then gets a little bit like in Helldivers 2 where there's one person that works at Arrowhead Studios called Joel who controls the whole galactic war. You have one guy who is able to, and all the people below him are all NPCs, he's got NPC crews. And he, and he, he can see using like the CCTV, he can see where all the, where all the enemy players are, what's happening. And he can tell his NPCs, right, set traps there, close that door, do this, do that, right. You call the coast guard and all that sort of stuff. And then, because then the, every single game will be completely different because each individual person will, will make a different choice. Yeah. think you not make it difficult, but I think you'd have to learn a lot from the horror games that released the people obviously until Dawn, but they did a lot more of them. They did the quarry and stuff like that. But that approach where you can still make the wrong decision because you're being put into the shoes of the characters. that make sense? Yeah, sorry. Yes, no, no, sorry. No, that doesn't make sense. Okay. Okay. So with the one thing I think we need to flesh out slightly more is the base building element of it because right. I think we've got a bit of a cop out at the moment. like the idea of guerrilla warfare, but do think it's full -on base building? Do think we cheated? Hmm, maybe slightly. Maybe you could, okay. Okay, you could expand it slightly more where you could say they could be players that play the crew and the crew are the people that get to do the base building. Because then you build defenses and fortifications and the traps and all that sort of stuff. And then that is how you incorporate the base building into it. Because at the moment, the players are fighting each other, killing each other and trying to, let's say, capture the tanker. That doesn't require them to do any base building because they won't need to. Well, there's also what we could do is we could, another way we could do it is you design the or the bank. So the base building actually happens before the match starts. So the building is actually, and you have to have, you'll have to have quite tight constraints because you'll be playing at the interactive movie up top. So they won't be able, they won't be able to be completely reactive. You'll be able to like, you have traps, you have this, you have an entrance and stuff like that. And then that's. all you know and the game would have to be quite clever reacting to your choices. But so for example, the amount of choice you get is if you put a door, say if you're doing a bank one, if you put a door somewhere that the police could get in easily, then the interactive movie could react by going, the police are already in. And that's a line you could put in quite quickly because the game just needs to register the police are in. It's not working out what you've put in your base, if that makes sense. It just, it's just, you've just triggered something. So I think that could work quite nicely. And then also you've got a full design thing. this has been done before as well, where there is a game out there, can't remember the name of it off the top of head, but you people designing dungeons for other players to go in. that's the whole point. And they're setting the traps up. Okay, so we're saying that the ships in this case the base building comes in when the ships are designed by by players Okay Yeah, that could work. You could also put loads of different types of ships in so you could say it's pirates attacking a cruise liner or Or attacking like an aircraft carrier or do you know I mean like something just completely different Okay, okay, would you like your narrative. Yes, I would. No, I'm dreading this. Okay. You have... Forbidden... No, you don't have forbidden love. No, you have number eight, which is rivalry, which I think you can work quite well on this. that tucks straight in because it is that I'm assuming that's assumed that the any the NPCs don't know about the rivalry, but the setup is the war in this we can invent a fake maybe we can invent a fake country that is essentially broken down into Marshal Well, attempted martial law, but then it's just broken down into clans and civilization and survival of the fittest. And well done for disguising that sneeze. Very well done. you. Thank you. But what is done by breaking down, by breaking down all that, everybody's just out for their own. Now we'll have situations where, say the tanker, the part of the interactive movie is the start that they're like, we have to go through the uncharted waters of whatever we call the country. And then they go, but that's really risky. That's going to cause lots of issues. And then maybe with a bank one, you could have a story about the fact that maybe the bank is a neighboring country and they've this... nation have started to get bolder and they're sending raiding parties over because they're losing control. So maybe that's what we do. had this, country had a dictator for let's say 40 years. The dictator passed away without any, leaving any succession, which led to a power grab from a huge community of it's his senior advisors. But what happened is the senior advisors, none of them could agree everything. So they just split it off into smaller and smaller pockets. And that's how it developed. And you ended up with these very, very small tribes in this country. And each time you're going, as you said, you're representing a tribe in this world. Okay. And the, we saying that could, could there be different settings as well? Obviously we've, we've given the example in this case of a, an oil tanker. Obviously that makes sense because you, oil is a very, know, useful resource that, you know, people in real life actually want to, want to take hold of. So that makes sense. So potentially you could do something that is resource -based in that it could be in this case, it's an oil tanker. It could be it could be a ship carrying food. It could be a famine and you need the food For your part of the fuel part of the country or you know, whatever it is Here's the thing that you're going to hate me for saying this phrase, but maybe that's how you do the in -game currency is the power of your tribe. So as you win more, your tribe gets more money and that's how you buy. We're not going to call them upgrades because I hate pay to win. you're going to call, actually, that's a question. How do you kit out? Do you have one class you go into? Are we going to build that into the narrative that as your tribe goes up, you get more complicated weaponry? Yeah, I think that's an interesting one. Could it be, could you incorporate that into your bass building in some way? Maybe, maybe you just go a bit meta with that and then the people who are setting the bass builders can put where the drops are. That would be quite amusing for people to be honest, to be in control of that. Yeah, because you could be quite devious and you could put them... you could do like a cornucopia type thing like in the Hunger Games. They're all in the same place. But you're gonna have to get there. would be quite yeah and maybe you could and you could do it tactically you could put all the guns by the by the door where you know the police will come in if you're doing the bank one be like what the no damn it Surprise. So are we saying that the rivalry we're using the rivalry of the these individuals with like criminal syndicates that basically now like control their own little bits of territory in this country. And they and so we're basically saying that everyone then Are they raiding local countries' trade routes, basically? think they're raiding local countries because what you need is you need these because a country that's fallen apart this much wouldn't have a bank, for example. So you need it to raid normal -ish places to then have these normal setups. You're gonna love me for saying this. Could you do a train setting? Where everyone... set, it'd be slightly tricky. You'd have to do it or, okay, they say you'd have to do it. You'd have to have some sort of big goods yard and you'd have to turn up in the, essentially the right, you'd have to turn up in separate trains or wagons or whatever. you'd, the people who ran the station would be the people locking themselves down and they would have to redirect. trains coming in, going like, there's some relief support coming in, direct them onto the main line kind of thing. Could you not get them to raid a train that's in transit? Well, you could, but imagine trying to fight all the way up and down and formally. You just be stood next to people all the time. Well, you could, you could, it would be. thing. So what you could do is that let's say you've got eight teams all attacking this train. Let's say it's like one of those massive trains that you get in countries that have lots of natural resources, like massive long trains that say it was just like a mile long of just iron ore. Let's say for example, yeah, let's say for example, it's iron ore. Okay, it's like raw iron ore. And, you know, most of those are You know, they're not compartments you can move through. have to run along the top of the train. The thing about that is, that, and then there are a few bits inside like guards vans and stuff where you go down into the train and then come back up again. You got to think that your goal is to take all that iron off. But the issue you've got is that all the different factions are going to go, are going to attack different points of the train. And there's no necessary benefit to having any one particular part of that. So you can't just sit and camp because. I was to say. you have to go after each other. So then the only benefits are to try and be on the end so then you know there's only going to be people one way. Do see what I mean? So then that then puts people in the thing of, well, if we're all going to go to either the front or the back, then there's just going to be an immediate bumfight at the start where people that enter the same bit of the train just start mowing each other down. Do see what I mean? The interactive movie at the front would be everyone going, my God, a hundred people have bought... wait, 50 people have bought it. there's three of them left. Nope, they're all dead. It's like every single faction decided to join the back of the train and just murdered each other immediately. And one bloke is left just covered in blood. Okay, I think. And on that wonderful image. I think I mean, that was quite we jumped around a lot. So I think I've got what I need to, to summarize. Have you Are you ready with a I've to think of titles, haven't I? Yes. to think of a title while I... I will try to explain our 20 minute hodgepodge while you... I've got some some hastily scribbled notes while you come up with a name. listeners, what we have there is a Battle Royale title set in a country that has fallen into the depths of anarchy after the death of a long -serving dictator. The country has splintered into small rival factions that now resemble criminal syndicates. In order to compete for resources, these criminal syndicates are now essentially competing against each other to raid local countries' trade routes. Oil tankers, trains, cruise liners for some reason. Yeah, yeah, cruise lines were in it. why not? Why not? and, the way this will work is, there will also be, what's the word, interactive movie and, base building elements. had it, I had the words around and then they just, they just fled me. the, and where it gets interesting is the, these two, the interactive movie and the base building parts, will be elements almost solely controlled. by one player who is going to play, who in each battle is going to play the part of whoever is trying to defend what's being attacked. So let's say in the case of the Alltanker, the captain of the Alltanker, there will be one player who will either be selected or choose to play that role. And they will essentially be almost like the dungeon master of the battle. And they will have lot of NPCs under their control, like the crew of the Alltanker, who will then go out. place traps, shut doors, and do all sorts of things to foil the rival factions as they're shooting one another and trying to get into the depths of the ship. The choices that both the captain and the players make will trigger scenes from the interactive movie, which will show you different scenes of perhaps the coast guard arriving to help the ship, or perhaps the captain you know, tries to save weight from the ship and jettison some of the cargo, killing some of the players or some other such. There'll be a vast system of interactive movies that will span all of these different settings. And obviously the goal for the rival factions is to beat each other to the prize with this underlying rivalry theme, which we're going with. And this game is going to be called... Right, I've got our traditional three choices. First choice, broken country. Okay. Second choice, a bit more anarchic and fun. LCS, Last Clan Standing. Okay, yes? And final one, which I kind of like, is it sort of leans into the desperation of it. Kill or be killed. Hmm. Hmm. I like all of them for different reasons. I'm leaning towards numbers two and three. I like the anarchic, the anarchic, anarchic? Yeah, anarchic. The anarchic nature of both of those. Do you have a preference between them? I kind of like the idea in my head of LCS just being last clan standing as a sort of what you're doing tonight and playing LCS again. I can see that being a battle royale game. Last Clan standing. Well, we will go with that. I'm feeling this is both console and PC. Probably a console, I think. Gonna get ported to mobile so some nutters can start playing on a mobile as well. Maybe you could play the interactive movie on the mobile. That'd be quite fun. who like mobile games, do apologize, but I despise mobile games with a dark, heated passion, which is probably wrong of me. As a long -time gamer, I should embrace all forms of gaming, but alas, I'm a gaming bigot in this instance. But that was the Game Blender, and that was Last Clan Standing. We hope you enjoyed it. If you have any requests of us, if you would like to write in and ask us to theorize a game, let's say you're sat at home now and thinking, do know what? I really want to play a tennis game with spreadsheet manager and a forbidden love theme. Please do write into us and we will make it. We will, we will make it. yes, and we'll really, yes, and hypothetically make it. We will pontificate about it for half an hour. But yes, all of the content details are in the tagline. But we hope you've enjoyed that. Thank you very much for listening. In the meantime, I have been Scott. I'm the Captain now. Very good. And we shall see you next time. Keep blending. Bye bye now. Bye! It's not stop.