Satin and Silk

Satin and Silk is a concept for an interactive fiction game, submitted as a seed for SeedComp 2023. Take as much or as little as you would like. The playable version (for which there is source code) is a dendry skeleton for the game's introduction, but if you choose this seed, feel free to implement it in any language.

Cover image source: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/910724

Satin and Silk is a stat-building/social-optimization game about the premier interplanetary beauty pageant for young women (what that means exactly depends on species and biotechnogroup). The pageant is a reality show taking place in a sequestered space station, where the contestants have to train over the course of 4 weeks, building up both their personal characteristics and their relationships with the other contestants and fans. Some contestants are experienced beauty pageant contestants. Others are superfans, or promising applicants, or people whose failures are likely to be spectacular.

You are one of these contestants. Your goal, of course, is to win the pageant, by any means necessary.

Mechanics:

The pageant outcome is decided by a combination of a judge's score and a popularity score, each counting for 50%.

The judge's score depends on the following stats:

• appearance
• talent
• conversation
• personality
• academics

Alternatively, consider the following stats (their meaning is yet to be determined):

• physicality
• parsimony
• eccentricity
• entropy
• kurtosis

The popularity score can be increased by doing random antics. If you don't do antics in a week, your popularity falls.

Each week, the player has 4 optional actions, for a total of 16 actions before the pageant. These actions might raise or lower stats or relationships, or give the player advantages or disadvantages. The NPCs will be choosing their own actions, and will develop their stats as well.

There is a mini-contest at the end of every week. The winner of each weekly contest gets some popularity and stat bonuses. The final pageant is at the end of the four weeks.

The player can have a starting stat distribution based on home planet: Terra, Luna, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Ceres.

Of course, romance should be a possibility in this game, with advantages and downsides.

Potential characters/NPC concepts:

C: Callisto (Jupiter): associated with appearance. awkward but beautiful, she's kind of a nerd about fashion.

R: Rhea (Saturn): associated with talent. oldest contestant, and is a mother. just a nice person overall, helpful, will get last place by default.

T: Titania (Uranus): associated with conversation. extremely manipulative and will betray you at every opportunity. a plant by the producers to create drama.

D: Despina (Neptune): associated with personality. put ups a front of being extremely nice, but is capable of bing pure evil and hides it very well.

E: Elasra: Hardcore metagamer who's watched every episode of the Satin and Silk show. associated with academics?

And of course, there's you, the player!

Player name options:

• Luna
• Europa
• Dione
• Phoebe
• Helene
• Ariel
• Cordelia
• Galatea
• Nix

Player backgrounds:

• Mercury
• Venus
• Terra
• Mars
• Ceres

The Universe:

The worldbuilding is entirely up to you. Is this a hard or soft sci-fi universe? Are there alien species? Are there robots who are competing in the pageant?