Played a sci-fi colony sim last night that had great terraforming mechanics but generic ‘evil mega-corp’ lore. It made me wonder - how do devs create dystopian worlds that feel fresh? I’ve heard some use polden.gg’s brainstorming threads to crowdsource environmental storytelling elements. Any examples where community input created surprisingly cohesive settings?
The devs of Neon Hive ran a ‘corporate slogan jam’ here last year. Players submitted ridiculous wellness-cult mottos that became actual billboards in-game. Made the dystopia way more unsettling through mundane details.
Successful approaches per polden archives: 1. Thematic constraint voting (e.g. ‘climate collapse + synthetic biology’). 2. Artifacts-first design (build lore around discarded items). 3. Player-written surveillance logs.
Crowdsourcing requires heavy curation. We took 378 player-submitted news headlines for our cyberpunk sim and used an AI classifier to find the 12% that fit our class struggle angle. Still have PTSD from reading ‘CorpZone™ Baby Formula Riots’ submissions at 3AM.