Hey guys, I'm a composer, sound designer, and writer - and I've had this idea for a while, moreso have wanted to just get the idea out so I know where I need to start, but here goes (I'll try to split it up into sections):
My name is James and I'm looking to create a game called
ingénue
SUPER SIMPLE GAME PITCH
I hope to create an open world, story-branching action RPG that explores the lives and cultures of 1980's China. You will play as a girl who, after being kidnapped and breaking free from her captors, can become an above-the-law vigilante, a private eye, a revolutionary, an organized crime leader, among other things (or a mix of all/any) - with the binding motive of saving other women throughout China.
INTRO
A big inspiration for this idea stemmed from The National Geographic's "China's Lost Girls" (which I totally recommend watching. Google "National Geographic "China's Lost Girls"), but I've done some more research since then. So in China, there's been a humongous problem with the one-child law, prohibiting parents to have more than one child (if they disobey this law, they pay humongous fines/lose their children) - and in result, a lot of parents only want to have a boy to continue the family name. A lot of the time, girls will be aborted, put up for adoption, abandoned, or sold - before or right after birth. Statistically, (especially in the 80's) girls in China were surprisingly likely to get kidnapped/sold into prostitution/etc because of this lack of female population. Which made me start thinking about a game.
I want to make an RPG that touches on this topic. I want the protagonist to be a girl who's been kidnapped, and after breaking free, she decides to become a vigilante, finding and saving kidnapped girls. But how you do that is up to you. You can try to find leads on your own (newspapers, television), create a rescue-squad, try to join the police force or change the government, or even ask for help from the Triad, China's organized crime syndicate. I want to have really solid, dark writing for this (dealing with topics such as organized crime, prostitution, rape, murder, etc.). I want characters to be real and relatable - maybe not being sure whether or not they're going to live to the next day.
COMBAT
I want combat to be scary. If you're fighting murderers and rapists, I want combat to show that. My main thought would be to have punches be slow and spaced (depending on your strength), so you can't just mash B and kill somebody, but rather try to make every shot count, in the same vein that Silent Hill can be. This makes me want to lean towards a real-time RPG over turn-based, where health and precise strategy are a large concern/realistic difficulty (things like kevlar would help if you could find/afford it, but multiple bullet wounds would still kill you).
INFLUENCES
On that topic, my influences for this project so far stem from text adventures (Namely Suspect and Planetfall), KOTOR, The Avernum Series, and L.A. Noire - As well as the photography blogs Humans of New York and Humans of Hong Kong. I want your decisions, your relationships, and timeliness to matter. So if you have three cases you could be working on at once, you have to choose which ones to work on - but they might not all be available by the time you're done with the ones you picked. You choose one case, and when you get back, you hear about two girls dead in the Sheung Yue River in the news.
The reason I chose the 80's was for a few reasons. One, I think the music and art can be exploited heavily(cityscapes with the lights, mix of dark and neon, pixel/synth), and two, I want endgame to be around the Tiananmen Square Massacre. I actually want the game to go quite a few drastically different directions. For now I could see it being:
A Vigilante game: Take on cases, fight baddies, create a rescue squad, gain notoriety.
A Detective/Cop game: See how the cops handle certain situations, having to take cases you don't want.
A Mafia game: Living in/understanding the corruption of the Triad/Government (and how they mesh/interact) and wanting to thrive in it/take it down.
And how you go about the game depends on the actions you take not just early on, but throughout the entire experience. Now I'm totally about multiple endings, but I think the environment of Tiananmen Square (theatrically) could serve for a really cool ending for those three branches. It's still obviously in the works, but I'm just throwin ideas around.
POSITIONS I'M POTENTIALLY LOOKING FOR:
WRITING
This will be the main focus. I want to essentially write a bunch of stories that have multiple progressions (maybe around 40-50 at first, based on fighting, stealth, persuasion, etc. and them having equifinality (as in being able to accomplish in different ways)) to have the player interact with - and how you go about the game changes all of these stories. So hypothetically if you tried getting help from the Triad to fuel your vigilante quest, you'd have to help them when they need it (as well as prove yourself) - and if you don't, then you'll have trouble from all sides. I also want the politics of the world to affect the game. I want money to be harder when the economy is worse, and have historical events provide context for quests! I feel like there's so much to do with good writing, that I could keep going, but I won't.
ART
This is probably the second focus/priority of my idea. I imagine it being isometric, and pixel (If you can imagine a more retro-indie Diablo II mixed with Hyper Light Drifter), with cinematics. I see a lot of gray/brown/blacks in lower-class areas, and red/yellow/whites in upper class areas - and lots of neon in the cities. I think it could be an open-world, but i'm still contemplating the idea. The protagonist should have to really travel China to track down some of these cases, so I want a lot of the action to happen in Hong Kong (resulting in mapping out a lot of it).
CODING/PROGRAMMING
My true weakness in the industry is that I cannot code for shit. I want creative coders to be able to brainstorm with me and figure out how to make this a tangible product! Again, this is really rough so far, but I really do see it as an Action RPG, with stats and conversation options and plot branching. The amount of branching so far may be too much, but once I start writing stories, I feel like it'll come together more and more. The main difficulty I see is applying so much change to a lot of stories. I imagine a KOTOR-esque morality/infamy meter (I like the idea of it being hidden moreso than being able to see it). You'd be able to understand your fame/infamy based off the news and how people treat you. If people know you as the girl-saving vigilante, kidnappers are not going to want to talk with you, so much as want to kill you.
CONCLUSION/CONTACT
So there it is, a wall of text that begins to explain my idea. I have written close to zero stories for this so far, but am in the process of planning it out in my head. I'm really busy with school right now, so I wanted to just put the idea into the ether. Shoot me a private message with your email if you're interested, and I'll keep you on an email list when I start hashing things out more! If this really started to look like a cool project, I would definitely want to Kickstart it, but that would be much down the road. Only message me if it sounds fun, rather than profitable.
Much Love,
James
Jobs
