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[Pineapple]

Something I've been working on recently is a game engine that would allow the creation of platformer and overhead exploration games (think early Zelda titles) easily, requiring only the development of the content, and minimal use of small scripts.

The idea for it first came about when I came up with the idea for Descended, which I posted about not too long ago. Unfortunately, my interest in the engine was starting to fade, but I've got a new idea that would not need as much work to bring the engine to a point where it can be well done than Descended, so my idea of a plan is to spend something around 3-4 weeks prodding my engine along to a workable state for making Bond, create simple prototype game to test the features, then get to work on this game.

So now, the actual game concept. The graphics will look like they could have been on the SNES, and the music will be primarily ambient, but it would sound like a lullaby. Not a single word of actual dialog would be spoken or displayed. My idea for some sort of game trailer is to show much of the introduction scenes, and the boy and girl sleeping at night, while a verse of "Twinkle twinkle little star" is sung by two children in the background.



The game starts with cutscenes showing people in a small, peaceful, and cozy town looking and pointing up into the night sky. (Cutscenes would be simply composed of a few moving sprites and backgrounds) There'd be a bright light coming down, and as it draws nearer, becomes discernible as some sort of spaceship. The ship's door opens, and yellow humanoid creatures step out. They greet the people, apparently in the town's own language, and generally act very polite and friendly. A subtlety will be that there are absolutely no youth aboard the alien ship.

The player is given control of a small girl in her home. It's still nighttime, and her parents are urging her to come see the visitors. They go off, and you're left to catch up. On your way, your character sees an equally young boy, and pressures him to come with her. You make it to the ship just as everyone else is returning to their beds.

This is where the core mechanic of the game comes into play. It's very simple, but it's the most significant part of the game's atmosphere. You directly control the girl, but you have no control over the boy. He follows you, but occasionally he will stop and loiter, and you'll have to go over to him and get him to follow you again. Both the boy and the girl have separate hitpoints, which will be shown on the lower part of the screen next to a graphic of each of them. As the game progresses, the icons will move gradually from the edges to the center of the screen, and will be shown holding hands when the game is coming to a close. The closer together they've become, the less he will go off like that. This will also be important to prevent frustration when the difficulty of the game's obstacles and enemies will begin to increase.

So here you are, leading the boy to the alien ship, which seems deserted now. There's a light shining from the open entrance, so the player's only real choice is to go inside. The boy and girl are promptly captured, transported by a couple aliens several miles away, dumped near a river, violently beaten, thrown into the water, and left for dead.

Here's where another aspect of gameplay becomes relevant. The health system will be unlike what has been seen before. You'll have some number of hitpoints, say, 10. You lose a hitpoint when you are hurt by an enemy or obstacle. If the player loses all health, it's game over, and you restart from where you last saved your game. If the boy's health is depleted, he loses conciousness and his second pair of hands can no longer be used to solve necessary puzzles. The player must carry the boy until sundown. (The game will have a night/day cycle) at which point you'll be able to go to sleep. Whenever nighttime comes you'll be able to sleep. If you sleep in an enemy hotspot, you'll likely be ambushed and receive a much smaller health bonus than if you sleep safely, but most places will be completely safe. Both characters will regenerate all or most of your health, and if the boy is unconscious, he will wake with half health. It will not be necessary to sleep when night comes, but several things will play into whether the player decides to or not. The location - is it safe to sleep here? Vitality - how healthy or close to death am I? And for more hardcore gamers, time - it will hinder how quickly I can get through the game. You'd get a different ending based on how quickly you go through the game, and sleeping through the night will, of course, cost you precious time.

So you're at the river as the girl, it's still night, and you see the boy out cold on the bank. The character goes over to him, and cries herself to sleep. Morning comes, the player discovers that the boy is alright, and the player begins navigation back to the hometown. Landmarks that could be seen during the scene where the aliens kidnapped and transported the children will be visible along the way. The player will have only one means of combat against enemies - there will sometimes be stones on the ground that the player can pick up and throw to rid of aliens. In addition to exclusively alien enemies, some wildlife will be hostile (wolves, bears) and there will also be robots deployed by the aliens.

As the player progresses and gets closer to the town, the vegetation and fauna will begin to diminish, and some of the enemies will be seen using tools to suck the earth dry. The power taken from the earth will be used to power terrifying machines that the aliens have built, and the player will have no choice but to flee when one of them shows up.

So at this point, the player has gone from the river, through the forest, and crossed the new desert and wasteland they used to call home. You come across where the town was. It's ravaged and most of the buildings have been either completely destroyed or burned to the ground. Your parent's corpses are one of the first things you see. You go to where the ship was, and there is a gigantic robotic suit containing their leader alien, who actually appears much younger than the others. The boy, in a sorrowful rage, picks up a rock and throws it at the machine, to absolutely no effect.

Now, the part about different endings. There will be two. One of them will be what you get if you get through the game at such speed that you made few mistakes in navigation and slept only a few times over the entire course of the game. The other ending will occur if the condition is not met.

The regular ending:
The alien abruptly grabs the boy in the robot's hand and toys with his flailing body a bit. Then he crushes the boy in the hand and the boy's mangled body falls to the ground. Your character flies into a bloody rage and runs to the robot's foot, scales its leg and torso, shatters the glass cockpit in the head, and literally tears the alien apart. The game ends.

The difficult ending:
Since you arrived more quickly, the robotic suit is not yet complete, which is visually conveyed. The robot will have stray wires, exposed machinery, and unfinished portions. The robot grabs the boy, but the character immediately jumps into action and interrupts the robot's leg workings. The robot collapses and the boy flees from the thing's hand. The boy and girl are shown returning to the ruined town. The game ends.




Comments? Criticism?

[SirNiko]

What sort of puzzles / obstacles do you have planned for this game? Will it be possible to navigate the game without the assistance of the boy? Do you see this as a game the player will play and complete in a single sitting, or something that will take several days of continuation from save points?

This reminds me a lot of the concept for ICO (Playstation 2 game if you've never played it). In that game, the second character did very little on their own, and often you had to literally guide her by hand. She could be harmed by foes, so during battles you had to place her somewhere safe or actively defend her.

Your concept strikes me as something suited to an arcade-style title with no save points. Run out of life and it's over, then you start again. Once you manage to complete the game with any ending, you keep trying for a high score (and superior endings rewarded for those scores).

If you intend to make this as a long adventure (lots of save points, similar to ICO) you might consider altering the puzzle design so that the injury of the boy forces you to repeat a segment (the challenge is figuring out how to get the boy across alive) or locks you out of an alternate path (Getting to the fork with an uninjured boy gives access to a more difficult route as a reward).

Alternately, you could ditch the puzzles altogether and focus on the interactions of the girl and the boy. You might wind up with something more akin to Heavy Rain, where the player makes conscious choices and later sees positive or negative results.

This concept's still pretty raw. I think you need to flesh this out a lot more before you'll have something you can work with.

-SirNiko

[Pineapple]

I plan for the game to be rather lengthy, not at all an arcade game.

Obstacles will present themselves in the form of enemies that can be defeated or passed by means of some special item. Each child will be able to carry only one item at a time, which will reduce your ability to defend yourself by picking up and throwing rocks, the primary method of offense in the game. The player will need to find the best and safest route to take to actually get to where the item is used. I'm thinking things like finding a fish on the riverbank near the beginning of the game and using it to lure a bear away from the path it's ferociously guarding.

As for injury of the boy, that's something I've been thinking a lot about recently. What I think I'll do is have the game automatically save. It will have two types of these automatic saves - major savepoints and an autosave feature. The autosave will be used simply to continue the game where you left off when you close the game. The purpose of major savepoints will be to know where to set the player back to when the girl dies. It won't bring you to the last, however, but the next-to-last. This way, needing to guard the boy's body and transport him to safety will be necessary and not something that can be avoided by simply reloading a previously saved game. I'll make sure the player doesn't start cheating by committing suicide to get to a previous point by making it count against getting the better ending. This way, players who strongly desire to redo portions are able to, but they won't be able to do it more than a couple times and still get the better ending, even if the time requirement is met.

As for the boy, he will be no more helpless than the girl. He will value self-preservation over the player's endurance. If he's holding a rock and an enemy comes too close, he will use it. If he has no rock, he will flee to safety. However, toward the latter portion of the game where the bond has been firmly established, the priorities will switch. It's not a believable bond if one of the members is retarded.

So for items, in addition to rocks and things, there will also be band-aids you occasionally find, most often as a reward for exploring a side path, that will heal you a bit. I want to emphasize the feeling that you're playing as a child, so allowing them to accomplish unrealistic feats (beyond the girl's radically violent rage when the boy is killed) is not in my interest.

If you have any suggestions for making the game more interesting, I'm absolutely open.

[SirNiko]

How valuable will reflexes be? Will a skilled player be able to avoid enemies without items, or will items be pretty mandatory for escaping unscathed?

This could be fun, though I'm not feeling the interactive portion. I'm thinking maybe you have a pretty large map with one starting location and one ending location and numerous branches along the way, but otherwise the game always moves forward. Different paths offer different options, with some being more dangerous but also more direct, or giving access to items that would make later paths easier (Get a fish, avoid the bear).

Creating variety in the environments would lend a lot to the game. Give the player the impression of progress, ie, they start in a forest, then at a branch they can either explore an old factory or a highway. The highway leads out of the forest into an empty city, while the factory leads to a sewer or a mountain, the sewer and city both lead towards a river, while the mountain leads somewhere else, etc. Each location has a few little sub-locations, like the forest has a bridge, and old cabin and a short cave. Ideally, the player could look at a screen shot and be able to tell where in the game that shot was taken, within a few screens. This pulls players through as they want to see where they arrive next.

The other thing is the types of puzzles and obstacles you devise. An exploration-only game with simple obstacles that take different amounts of time depending on the path you took could lend itself well to multiple playthroughs to explore all the areas and try to find the most efficient path.

It seems like you've put a lot of thought into the intro and the ending. I wouldn't even bother with those at this stage. Focus on the interactive part of the game and get that working and fun as soon as you can. Develop the game map, and figure out what puzzles and items are available. You can go back and make a brilliant introductory movie later, if it's even needed. That's just my personal opinion.

-SirNiko

[Pineapple]

How valuable will reflexes be? Will a skilled player be able to avoid enemies without items, or will items be pretty mandatory for escaping unscathed?

In most cases, an item will be mandatory. However, there will still be a number of obstacles that would be bypassed easily enough with either a bit of stealth or a bombardment of rocks.

This could be fun, though I'm not feeling the interactive portion. I'm thinking maybe you have a pretty large map with one starting location and one ending location and numerous branches along the way, but otherwise the game always moves forward. Different paths offer different options, with some being more dangerous but also more direct, or giving access to items that would make later paths easier (Get a fish, avoid the bear).

I'm hoping to have not only the sizable overworld, but dungeons as well, in which combat is basically unavoidable, and the boss enemy at the end would be guarding an item critical to your advancement. Whenever practical, there would be more than one dungeon in the same relative area lending themselves to the availability of entirely different routes.

Creating variety in the environments would lend a lot to the game. Give the player the impression of progress, ie, they start in a forest, then at a branch they can either explore an old factory or a highway. The highway leads out of the forest into an empty city, while the factory leads to a sewer or a mountain, the sewer and city both lead towards a river, while the mountain leads somewhere else, etc. Each location has a few little sub-locations, like the forest has a bridge, and old cabin and a short cave. Ideally, the player could look at a screen shot and be able to tell where in the game that shot was taken, within a few screens. This pulls players through as they want to see where they arrive next.

This was something I was already hoping to do, though the environments would not have urban manmade structures like cities, highways, or sewers. It'd primarily be alien structures, aged ruins, and natural formations.

The other thing is the types of puzzles and obstacles you devise. An exploration-only game with simple obstacles that take different amounts of time depending on the path you took could lend itself well to multiple playthroughs to explore all the areas and try to find the most efficient path.

Absolutely.

It seems like you've put a lot of thought into the intro and the ending. I wouldn't even bother with those at this stage. Focus on the interactive part of the game and get that working and fun as soon as you can. Develop the game map, and figure out what puzzles and items are available. You can go back and make a brilliant introductory movie later, if it's even needed. That's just my personal opinion.

The idea sprung from the ambition to make something with gameplay elements similar to Zelda 1, then I got the idea of playing as a girl leading a boy around, then I decided it needed to be a sad game and have aliens in it. So I'd decided on the basic gameplay beforehand, then figured an interesting story to go with it. Now I'm just trying to fill in the blanks.

[sjakaus]

why are the children kidnapped by the aliens?

[Pineapple]

Because they're horridly mean.

Why do you ask?

[Aik]

Sounds interesting.

What I'd like to see as part of the gameplay is picking an effective route and lots of sneaking. Decisions along the lines of 'do we try and go over this mountain or is it better to risk the ravine?', as well as perhaps being able to see if there's been people around where you are and whether you need to sneak along off the road for a while. Stuff like that, anyway. If you're facing off aliens, it seems like they should very easily be able to kill you.

But anyway, I'm not entirely sure if that's your intention. A game that's actually about travelling through hostile territory with your friend would be awesome though (as opposed to a game that's about fighting enemies with your friend, which is pretty standard).

[sjakaus]

Because they're horridly mean.

Why do you ask?

it just seems like wasted effort on their part if they are able to dispatch everyone else so easily. Adding a little more depth to them than "they're evil" might be a good thing.