The Power of Friendship

My plan for Kola Queen is to make a game about the power of friendship.  I know this is perhaps the cheesiest thing I could say but making friends isn't really something you see in a ton of video games and in my opinion is one of the best things in life.  Wandering around a game world and meeting old friends and making new ones seems like a welcome release from a quarantine standpoint.

There will be a real oddball cast of characters to meet and interact with.  Maybe you won't like everyone you meet but you're under no obligation to hang out with everybody.  Of course, they may hold the keys to a lucrative soda pop contract and so you have to smile a bit more than you might like to get Cola Galore across the Quad Cities.  It's a real wild ride.

From a purely technical standpoint, though, it does feel a bit crass to me to reduce the essence of a personal friendship to an invisible points system where you are rewarded a plus one for doing something a sprite liked.  But then again all of this is artifice and I think that the connection could be pretty genuine.  At the end of an old favorite show of mine--Perfect Strangers--over the end credits while they played the wonderful, wonderful theme song they would do some freeze frames of moments of antics from the episode you just watched.  Well, that got me thinking why not put something like that in a game.  In the last scene of Local Hero, a really great movie I watched this week in the last scene as the lead guy is coming home from his trip he tacks some snapshots on the bulletin board at his apartment.  Again, why not try that in the game?  Why not have the player hang snapshots of the friends you are making at your apartment in-game?  Sounds like a blast to me!  That way, as points accumulate behind the scenes you can have some way to engage with them in a way that isn't a chart or a lifeless graph.  Hey, this cola stuff is your life!  Get out there and live it.