Genio is a videogame about engineering, art and power: building the Renaissance. A card based real time strategy game that anybody can play. Watch your teams parade through narrow streets and be jeered and cheered! The game play universe is Renaissance Italy; each town will flourish through artistic innovation and conceptual breakthroughs. You start by designing new inventions using your deck of builder cards, getting inspiration from your ever expanding Book of Ideas. Once your blueprint is ready, your team of builders will parade through a town of your choice. Being cheered or jeered will make the success or failure of your march, hence conquering or losing ground. Once reached its goal, your team will build what you planned. And with new constructions you will get new ideas, in the form of more pages in the Book if Ideas, and eventually more builder cards. Keep the Renaissance sun burning with a continuous flow of ideas and artistic creations.
In presenting Genio to friends I have often made the analogy with Plants vs. Zombies for usability and because of the card and tower defense mechanics. Is there a game genre to which Genio belongs? How is it classified as game type? Turns out that this is not that easy to say; this is a common problem of new ideas in games.
In this post I define four criteria for classifying a game as simple RTS, and then we see three examples of such games: Plants vs. Zombies, FTL and Genio.
Genio is a videogame about engineering, art and power: building the Renaissance. It is a card based real time strategy game with a simple, approachable...
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Genio is a videogame on the history of the Renaissance and has Leonardo da Vinci designed toys as Kickstarter pledges. All the details on the toys and...
In the video I go through Genio game design, commenting the animations and also introducing the historic context of the economy and politics of the Renaissance...