Culture Carom

Culture Carom is a cozy-casual flow game with strategy elements and a subtle educational focus. The idea originated in a mix&match mechanic of different cultures able to interact and show how they influence each other. The beauty of change and mutual enrichment. With the aggression-free and simplified depiction of cultural (ex)change we want to transport the very serious topic of cultural interactions and how they are the beauty of living culture that we can appreciate and actively take part in.

Culture Carom is our entry for the Auswärtig gespielt Game & Mod Jam on foreign policy. Move around in via RMB+drag or WASD, and interact with settlements via LMB.

This prototype is about an extract of an expandable/endless map filled with cultures living in it and how they interact with each other up to migration, diverge or hybridization. Choosing a culture to play as, the players can migrate to free locations or to a location already settled by a culture. In a free location, the player can either simply migrate to a new location to change their living parameters or get closer to other cultures to be able to connect or diverge from their original culture to add or ex-/change cultural traits according to an objective or a local attribute.

Moving to a location that is already settled the players can merge with the local culture and pick a roughly equal match up of their individual cultures. Migrating to a free location, when connected to another culture, the players can expand together and create a hybrid culture in the joint expansion, picking a roughly equal exchange of their separate culture traits, with the possibility to unlock new ones, rediscover secret or foregone traits.

In the end, if cultural evolution ever has one, the players are presented with their unique culture and a “family tree” of where it came from and where it’s cultural traits originated. One dimensional prototype of cultures being able to migrate and either diverge, merge or hybridize in a give and take that centers about roughly equal participation, some dominant vs recessive traits and a dash of surprise/randomness.