#2: Legion

The Recipe

We (Claudia, Majka, Lisa and I) made LEGION as part of our game development course with Leiden University. Though we started off with grand ideas and little to show for it, 6 weeks of work have produced a playable prototype!

Inspired by an odd mixture of Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Pixar’s Inside Out, we sought to create a game that could capture a multiplicity of contradictory selves inside a single vessel. Weeks of prototyping, scrapping said prototypes and starting over resulted in LEGION!

Development Notes

Personally, trying to translate the personalities I’d come up with (Chief, Viscera, Resolute and Aspirant) into playable characters and mechanics was the most fascinating part of designing LEGION.

The Dune Board Game played a big role in inspiring my approach to this: creating a clear gameplay structure where each player would diverge from through special rules and exceptions. If I were to iterate further on the project, it would probably be to figure out new ways for their personalities to interact with the core gameplay loop.

Something that fell by the wayside as we were producing the prototype was the setting behind the game. Our focus on mechanics made our approach to themes and background minimalistic. Our desire to capture themes of existentialism and absurdism definitely weren’t realised. But hey, with 6 more weeks to go in this game development course, the next iteration of LEGION might finally meet this ambitious goal.

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