ew.

the worst thing about actually kind of liking a game idea about cockroaches is that seeing one in my room prompts the thought, "aw. yeah, you'd be kind of cute in a video game." before gassing the thing to hell. now i feel sorta bad. damnit.

if i ever make that game, it's dedicated to you, cockroach in my room that died approx. 2am on the 3rd of may 2010.

memory loss

it's used a lot in games as a cheap storytelling technique. i can't think of a real reason why this guy is trapped in this room, so let's just say he's lost his memory. done.

but i'm wondering if there would be interesting way to use it in a game. you just got out of a nasty accident and have lost your memory and some of your ability to communicate. you're trying to talk to people who claim they know you. you could make the player paranoid by playing that these people are conspiring against you. they tell the doctors you need more medication when you feel fine? who knows. you could play on drug addiction too.

it'd be interesting. the player not trusting their environment, or the characters around them. everything tainted with paranoia and pain medication addiction. trying to figure out what happened before the game started, and trying to get through the game itself.

i get these random ideas but i couldn't tell you a single thing about gameplay.

also i'm reading duma key by stephen king, where the guy went through this nasty accident and lost a bit of his ability to communicate. coincidence i assure you!

oh dear.

also i hope i don't get dissertation sniped since this is a public blog! my ideas are so good! oh no. :O

zzzz.....

how about a game where you don't have to do exams or write 20 page papers? i would buy it.

post-apocalyptic

you play a cockroach and you have to search for food. and fight off bigger cockroaches. but as you're playing, as a player, you see the world post-apocalypse. as a player you piece together what happened to cause this (a big volcano somewhere in the states went off and a lot of people died and all the flights were cancelled) and you explore the world now devoid of humans. as a cockroach you're just looking for scraps of food among houses, but as a player you crawl over a diary page and read the last entry.

it's an exploration game under the guise of being a hungry cockroach. exciting!

secret agents are so cool.

so i was walking through this mall today and had this awesome idea for a game. imagine if you're some kind of secret agent who has to deliver a message or kill this one guy. you have a picture of him, but you don't know anything about him except that he's in this mall. and you have to FIND HIM using nothing but your sleuthing abilities! maybe there's a GPS tracker in his pocket to help you out a bit, and once you find him you have to create some kind of distraction in order to kill him/deliver the message. oh! but then! he KNOWS you're after him, so he'll go to really crowded places, like where there's an event going on in the mall or something. man, so awesome.

and you can't use weapons or anything, you have to blend in, not look suspicious. you don't have any tools, no interface, just hunt for the guy and make sure he doesn't suspect you. oh man.

or maybe i could just wait for assassin's creed 6, he should be in the 21st century by then.

story told through environment

i really really suck at blogs. it was all going so well for a moment there.

at any rate, i've been seeing a lot of stuff lately about how stories can be told through an environment, for the player that is willing to find it and it's definitely a subject that interests me.

bioshock, fallout 3 and fable 2 are good examples that immediately come to mind. all to give you a sense of world and environment. the random little stories in fallout 3 just added to everything, where you found discarded notes or piles of bodies - events that happened long before you got here. it's nice to see a world that isn't solely affected by the main hero.

i remember quite a few certain scenes in fable 2 that were there for no other purpose than to be found, and weren't easy to do so. there was one quest that you had to figure out on your own, to do with this rabbit trying to find an egg to bring back to his family. you read his diary, try to figure out what he's talking about, perform various tasks that you would have not known had you not found the diary, and an egg appears. you get a little freaked out, there was no fanfare or no glowing light as you've come to expect whenever you achieve something in a quest, it's just there.

you pick up the egg and try to find the rabbit's home (which wasn't easy i seem to remember), eventually finding yourself transported into this tiny underground house with a table and chairs and beds, and plates set on the table with big carrots and small carrots laid about. and not a soul in sight. overall the whole situation is pretty creepy, there's just silence. no NPCs, no opening sequences, no "quest complete!". there was no quest, there were no checkpoints, anything you had to do, you simply did it all out of interests sake because that's the type of player you are - and you are rewarded for that. interestingly enough, there were also no enemies.

it says a lot for atmosphere too when you want to grab the carrots and get the hell out of there before some giant zombie rabbit appears (which you more than half expect).

i love this style of optional extra storytelling, which is only revealed to the players that actively seek it. this means there are no players bored waiting for the story to finish so they can slice something, and there are no players annoyed at the constant break from the story where they have to slice something. completely perfect, and it doesn't take away from the experience if you don't find it, simply adds to it.

at any rate this technique described doesn't necessarily tell the entire story to a game, though it can. that's the idea that i'm interested in. there are plenty of players out there that don't want to waste time with cutscenes, and there are plenty of players out there that eat this stuff up like chocolate sauce on an ice cream sundae (myself included).

and also maybe i'll start writing some more. probably not.