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[locknic]

Hi guys. My sister and her husband are releasing an indie horror/slasher movie next year, and I'd like to make a short game based on it. I am having some trouble trying to come up with the core gameplay and was wondering if anyone had some ideas. Here are the details.

I was thinking that you would play as the killer in this game. The way the killer kills her targets is by hurting herself. So for example if she breaks her leg, her target's leg breaks. If she slits her throat, her targets throat gets cut open. If her target shoots her in the head, the targets head gets smashed open. Etc.

Any ideas on how I can translate this to a small 2d game? I was thinking about doing a top down (gta 1 style) game where you have a certain number of targets on a level and you have to kill them in different ways before they escape. So there might be various hazards on the level that you can injure yourself with, or maybe objects on the floor like knives that you can cut yourself with. Kind of difficult to translate this into a game with simple controls. Something like press x to cut your throat would be boring after the first kill. The game needs to be quite simple, maybe around the scope of a game you would make during a game jam. Anyone else have any cool ideas?

[rj]

Top down is perfect, I think; something like a puzzle version of Hotline Miami, where the challenge comes not from the twitch aspect of running into a room and attacking but from making sure you can hit every target without dying beforethen; ideally, each time you hurt yourself, that component of gameplay should become hampered. So you get shot in the head, you die, but it's fine if every target on the map besides the person who shot you has already been killed, because the level is one and you move on. The trick would be to kill everyone without dying until the last person kills you (or at all).

What makes this interesting especially is the abstract thinking involved; if you can't -directly- kill them via yourself you need to make sure that the way you hamper them causes them to move into harm's way. A good way to make this a little easier on yourself is by including the condition that multiple targets within a certain radius would be affected the same way, so if you get shot in the head by one person close as long as someone else was -in the room- they'd go down too.

[The Translocator]

To add onto what spellmynamewithabang said, I think the best ways to add depth would be:
1. Make both you and the target actually suffer from the same effects (i.e. cut your arm you start bleeding out) but make it possible for BOTH you and your target to recover in some way (i.e. get bandages to stop the bleeding)- you have to find a way to lure your target into a position that makes it impossible for them to recover in time but that also gives you time to recover.
2. Make it possible for the targets to hurt you. You have to avoid getting spotted and/or killed by them while trying to get them to injure you in a specific way that kills them without killing you.
3. Maybe you are immune to pain from experience and your targets are not, making it harder for them to think straight?
4. If pain from a specific side of your body caused you them to run in the opposite direction you could get hit on a side that would make them run into a trap.
5. Maybe simply seeing you would cause them to run away?
6. Light/dark mechanic that makes vision-based scares not work but allows you to hide and makes audio-based scares more effective and gives pain more of a reaction (after all, they don't KNOW whether their arm has really been ripped off or just cut if it's too dark to see it...)