Content Warnings

While we hint at mature themes, the humoristic tone and indirect approach will generate a game setting and contents compatible with very low PEGI rating and not directly offensive to any creed or belief.

Project Introduction

Becoming Saint is a small, replayable strategic and tactic game with a rich,
evolutive and generative narrative component.
You are a young woman preacher from Assisi (Italy), about a hundred years after Saint Francis. You start with a small following; define the points of your creed, picked from the vast array of heretical beliefs of the time, and try to convert one small town at a time.

Every turn (a month in the game’s story time) begins with Jessica alone in her meditation location.
There she can pray and have dreams and visions. There she will also edit her current manifesto (teaching, rule, “Regulam”).

Then the turn proceeds with the meeting with the followers in the piazza, where you may deliver a sermon (e.g. about the changes in your Regulam), ordain, trials, order imprisonments, torture, executions, penitence, give benedictions, fasting or banquet etc. .

From this event your available “army” and charismatic power is determined.
The game loops around conversion “battles”, where you have to pick a fitting set of units required, deploy them within the chosen town, and then the confrontation begins: you can change units’ actions and there are fights and conversions on the spot (an evolved rock paper scissors mechanic).
At the end of the day, at sunset, you meet with your first follower and evaluate your results and state, before a night of prayer and meditation, or party and drunkenness.

Economic and political decisions are taken and consequences computed.

Adding counties to your domain, your power and influence grow, you can then pick in a wider spectrum of behaviour and political choices that influence your personal evolution, leading to greater power and/or personal triumphs and setbacks…

The game can evolve in different directions: the game can come to an end because of losing the last of the counties, and then say burn at stake as heretic, or because of you having conquered a large domain and then being proclaimed Saint, and even also Pope (or Anti-Pope, as happened at the time).
Political followers, justice, growth factor all influence charisma and drive the main character evolving story and her evolving relation with faith.

The tricky part of the plan is that there is a set of main personal traits that the character will evolve into in function of choices and conquest state: towards sanctity, charismatic democrat, cult leader, evil queen, focused on ecclesiastic power, or compromising for a larger realm.

Mixing contexts and references is the character of our games, inspired by Borges, Eco, Barthes. Our mission is bringing and mixing “high” culture with popular culture.
We released 50 applied games in 10 years and two small commercial games, Football Drama (2019) and Roller Drama (2023).

With Becoming Saint we continue experimenting with new narrative applications but in a different domain from sports: merging evolutive narrative and characters with tactical medieval battle mechanic.
Becoming Saint is a small curated and replayable strategic medieval game with a generative narrative.

About Developer

Open Lab is an award-winning studio founded in 2001. Since 2014, when we started game development, we released over 20 applied games with a strong narrative component. We also released two small commercial games, Football Drama and Roller Drama. We are currently developing a small strategy game to be released in 2025.

Our website describes in detail all our applied and commercial games, for several there are online playable versions: https://open-lab.com

Open Lab in 2022 has released its own narrative design and development tool, Homer (https://homer.open-lab.com/site/) as a free tool and it is now used by several European indie studios.