Self study 4, game ideation

Coming up with game ideas for the theme "change" took a bit of thinking. I would be hard pressed to find a theme for games more encompassing than change, especially in the games medium. All games that are at least half decent have change as their main driver. There is no fun if there is no change. From this, it is obvious that the first thing I had to do was to come up with narrower themes. Themes narrow enough to base a game around. I came up with the following list:

• change in the character
• tower defence
• traditionalism vs industrialism
• change through time
• change through perspective

After pondering on them for a while, I realised that, even though they were more narrow than the original theme, they weren't nearly narrow enough to base a game around. I decided to take each theme and see if I could make a few themes that are even narrower that would come out of them. This is the list of narrower themes that I came up with:

• body augmentation (and the consequences)
• shape-shifting
• breaking enemy's morale
• changing your environment for your defence (crafting defences)
• traditionalism vs industrialism
• increasing speed and reaction time (changing perspective through speed?)
• exploring what your environment can do changes your abilities

After playing around with those themes and doing some mixing and matching, I came across two themes that sounded the most fun to me: change through breaking free of your fears (change of consciousness) and exploring your environment to unlock new abilities (change of perspective through knowledge). I created one game idea for each of those themes. The first came idea was such:

Theme: break away from your fears

The premise: The main character uses stealth, shapeshifting, mind control, and, most importantly, telepathy to progress through the levels and take down the king.

Aesthetic: 

- gothic 

- Rome 

- sewerage 

- dishonored (the game) 

Story: 

young girl who lives in an oppressive society ruled by a seemingly strong but actually scared and paranoid ruler. There used to be magic in this world, but it was outlawed a long time ago. One day the girl finds an old book containing spells that allow the witch to get into a person’s head and see all their fears. She shares her discovery with her parents, but they are terrified to hear it. To understand why they are so scared she decides to use the spell on them. After calming down the fear of losing their child in them, she decides that she wants to help others as well and makes it her quest to overthrow the government or die trying.

Mechanics: 

At the start, the player will traverse the world by simply walking around, trying not to annoy the guards. They will have no way to attack, but they can run. Running annoys the guards so it’s best to reserve it. When the player decides to entrance the guard, they go to an arena filled with monsters that represent the guard’s personal fears. Each guard will have different disposition of monsters and monsters will behave differently depending on the fear they represent. 

The reason I decided the main character to be a young witch is because I wanted her to embody change, a new generation. The reason I decided to make her fight an oppressive dictatorship is because I wanted the enemy to represent fear and stagnation, absence of change.

My other game idea was this:

Theme: change your environment by changing your mind

Premise: A monkey that suddenly became more intelligent than it previously was. At day, it is attacked by robots, at night it can explore its environment to find tools to better defend itself against the robots as well as rest. The robots become tougher every day so the monkey has to find better ways to deal with them. Monkey has to balance time and energy to thrive.

Aesthetic: 

- lab 

- child's perspective of a house 

- alien 

Story: 

Monkey who recently had brain surgery done on it. It is a part of an experiment to see if monkeys can become as smart as people. To induce faster learning scientists are sending waves of robots every lab day (lab day is when the lights are on). To monkey everything in its environment is alien and it needs to learn how to use everything around it to survive.

Mechanics: 

The monkey can pick up each item and learn something about it, which will consume time and energy. Each item will have a different energy requirement and the more the monkey learns about it the more time it needs to learn new things. Monkey can sleep during the night to restore energy. During the day the monkey is being attacked by a combination of different types of robots, increasing in difficulty every day. Once the robots are defeated, the day ends.

 Here, the change is of your own perspective, rather than in other people/things. Change is tied very strongly into the gameplay. Your goal is survival and your only way of achieving this goal continuously is studying your environment and changing the way you look at things. I'm not overly attached to the monkey idea. The main character simply needs to be in a new environment (as well as being sentient enough to study said environment). It could be an astronaut on an alien planet or a child fighting imaginary monsters. The reason I decided to go with the monkey in a lab idea is because it would be easiest to create the environment as well as animate the enemies (robots).