Turns

G uses a series of turns. More specifically a game runs for 52 turns, because there are 52 weeks in a year and, well, each turn is a week. That's why the year without human contact works for me, it's enough time to carve it up into a bunch of turns but not, y'know, ludicrously long.

It's my intent that a turn only takes a few minutes at most but that the player doesn't have to take any more than one at a time. So I could play this in a few hours or over the course of a week or I could take one turn every week for 52 weeks if I really wanted. There's no hurry or rush or schedule.

Each turn involves two things.

The first is that either something happens or nothing happens. That probably doesn't make sense. What I mean is that either it's an uneventful week and you're bored and lonely and all that stuff. Or it's a week where you're scared you're going to die and there are things going wrong, some sort of major problem. There should be enough boring weeks that you wish something would happen. The things that happen should be terrible enough that you wish for nothing again.

The second is that you produce something. You journal or you video or you record a dream you had or you do something of the sort. Each week you do this so by the end of the game you have 52 individual items that map and record and express the mental state of your astronaut.

The turns (and inherently the game) must guide and inspire these two elements of each turn while still allowing creative freedom.