Hi guys,
I'm going to make a game for the competition at jayisgames.com:
http://jayisgames.com/archives/2012/07/game_design_competition_10.phpand I could use an artist and a musician. I'll be programming the game in Flash. The deadline is September 3rd, and I'm only going to have about 20 days to work on the game, so its going to be very small.
The theme is "escape". My idea so far: Top-down 2D. Modern day. As you're walking along a residential street, your dog runs into an old house. You follow it inside, but it's nowhere to be seen. Though there is no one there, something strange obviously happened inside the house recently, indicated by the broken furniture and spilled water on the ground (or something). As you explore the rooms of the house looking for the dog, you come to understand some series of events based solely on clues in the environment. Ostensibly you're trying to find your dog, maybe we want to turn it into a horror game and end with the player trying to escape from some terrible person or truth(!). I'm kind of being inspired by HP Lovecraft, but I don't want it to feel cliche. We can work together to come up with something fresh.
It would be pretty simple on the programming end. The core gameplay would be walking between rooms and looking at the clues in the environment, trying to understand what happened. So, I imagine it requiring a high number of assets per room. Every room would probably need a handful of unique elements. Things like a broken vase, books, maybe a pool of blood(!!). I'm fine with the art being super low-res to compensate for the short timeline, as long as it has a consistent style that fits whatever mood we go for.
As for music...
I imagine we want most of the music to be pretty low-key since we will try to create the atmosphere of an abandoned house. I'm imagining just a few keys playing on the piano. But that' kind of cliche, if you an come up with something better, by all means. Found a musician!
If we win a prize, I'll split it evenly with my partners.
My goal is to force the player to use logic and inference to understand what happened to his dog/inside the house. If anyone played the lighthouse adventure in Skyrim, where you have to figure out what happened to the family, that's a big inspiration for this. I don't want it to be like an adventure game where you have to wander around until you randomly click on things in the correct order. There might not even be any clicking on things, just the player looking at the clues and trying to put the puzzle together. Now, will it be as fun as the adventure in Skyrim? I don't know - that adventure had an infusion of combat, which this game won't have (unless it's very brief and basic). Maybe we make the game just about finding your dog, which is a very simple task, but as you do so you see all the clues that, if the player puts them together, convey something very horrifying. But it's optional. Maybe not. Anyways, I think it's going to be very interesting to design from a gameplay perpsective, and I'd like to do so with you,.
I hope to hear from someone!
Bo
Jobs
