I want to make a game.
I've recently been bouncing ideas around with a friend for a game that I would like to make. Obviously we both know that there is zero percent chance of that every happening, but it's a topic we both enjoy, so it's become one of our more regular discussions. We've really started to flesh out some of the ideas and I'd like to share some of what I've come up with so far. This blog won't be even remotely funny, so anyone wanting a giggle can tune out now, but if you're at work and you want something to read, well, you're already here. May as well read it.
When I thought about the kind of game I wanted to make, I thought first about the games I love: Crysis, Escape from Butcher Bay, System Shock 2, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, Half Life, Grand Theft Auto. I wanted to take the best parts of all of those games and combine them all into one glorious whole. I wanted a city-based free-roam FPS with some character building, but only to the extent that it would result in emergent gameplay, not to the extent that it shoehorns a player into playing the game in a particular way.
I hate amnesia as a story device. I truly, truly hate it. But I was thinking about the kind of game I want to make and the kind of story I wanted to tell, and it just fits. It works. So it makes me a hypocrite like everyone else, but my story begins with amnesia. And a frame. Okay, so I'm a hypocrite and I'm only capable of clich̩. I can live with that. The central idea is that you wake up in a lab with no memories (blah!), but escape. You quickly find that, as well as being pursued by the lab-guys (whoever they are), you are also an extremely wanted criminal Рso you're also pursued by the police when spotted. The player's ultimate goal is to uncover his own identity, find out who the lab-guys are and what they did to him, and why, and ultimately clear his name of the crime(s) for which he has been framed. I don't want to give too much away, in part because it's undeveloped and in part because I don't want you to steal it, but I already have an end planned that's sort of a cross between the end of The Fugitive and the end of the Spanish zombie movie REC.
My setting is a cop— sorry, is inspired by Blade Runner's setting, which I recently saw for the first time. I'm also a big fan of other overpopulated and polluted Eastern/Western hybrid future dystopias like Cowboy Bebop and Firefly, so the concept isn't one entirely new to me. I'd probably want to set it in a city reminiscent of something found in America, but I would want there to be so many distinct cultures, so many distinct peoples and at least three languages used (one of which the player does not and will never understand in any way), so the location is hard to pin down. I would aim for a city size around that of Vice City, and I would want monolithic shopping complexes and corporate towers and skyscraping residential buildings, all bordered by broken shanty towns and bustling flea markets. I would aim to have every building in the game as go-in-able as is practical.
Although the player is 'good' (or believes himself good), he is a wanted man, so his only associates during the game will be criminals. It is by completing missions for his criminal contacts that he earns money to fund his main mission (he will need to pay for tips as well as buy supplies) as well as his other vitals, such as a place of residence. A place to live is important for the player as a base of operations, a safe house when things get too hot, storage for all his stuff and one (of many) means of being contacted by people in the world. You will be able to give your address out to anyone in the game world, but they may choose to pass your address on to the police (or worse), so choosing who to trust is a decision the placer faces. You can have multiple places of residence, but this will be a greater cash sink, meaning you need to undertake more criminal missions.
My goal with the story is that it is itself linear, but how it progresses depends on the actions of the gamer. While the side-missions will never be linked too directly to the central story arc, they do exist for a specific purpose – to enhance the bank balance and reputation of the player. But because nothing money earns you is vital to how the story progresses, or to playing the game, it is entirely up to you to undertake or ignore the peripheral criminal underworld. You can live as a homeless bum if you like, meaning your expenditure will be close to nothing, meaning you need almost no money. Being a nameless bum on the street makes you harder to find, but it also means you won't have any associates to help you during the game. Because you're a wanted man, you'll need to make liberal use of disguises (more on that later). I'm still playing with ideas like needing food and water to survive (it's been done before, and it's more of a chore than anything else), but I would definitely like a day/night cycle.
The game will be played entirely from the first person, including during all cut scenes. I'm playing with the idea of a third person camera when the player is driving a vehicle, but generally I'm opposed in principle. And the game will be a FPS. But it'll be a FPS in the ways that Crysis and Escape from Butcher Bay are FPS games. I am in love with the idea of the player being able to approach any situation in a number of ways, and I started thinking about the core gameplay mechanics surrounding this concept and how they would work in a FPS.
I gave the idea a name: GROe.
Ghost – stealthing.
Rambo– running and gunning.
Orating – cunning linguist.
evacuating – running away like a girl.
I would want the player to be able to approach every single situation in the game using the GROe system. The player, at any time during any situation will, provided he has the correct tools (not that some necessarily require tools), be able to stealth, go run and running, talk his way out of a situation or just run for the hills and come back later.
Stealthing is a pain in the arse in FPS games, so I'm aiming for a scifi vibe, so the player would be able to buy tools that enhance his awareness of his environment and the people in it. Heartbeat monitor, thermal imaging, an ability to monitor ambient sound as well as his own sound output – things like that. The player will be able to hide under, behind and inside objects found in building interiors, and would be able to mingle in with a crowd (and is able to put on and take off clothes). I would not want some kind of 'cloak' ability, but I would want the player to be able to disguise himself, sort of like Agent 47 in Hitman, but he can also change the way his face and hair look (using some form of hologram) to allow him to take the identities of others.
One idea I was playing with for the disguise idea is that everyone has friends and family who may recognise the player's disguise, and may approach the player and engage them in dialogue. The dialogue system would not be overly complex, but I would like a minimum of three stock lines of dialogue the player can say to random people on the street, and at least three responses to every single dialogue prompt during any given situation.
An example of this in gameplay might be the player isolating a guard at a warehouse he needs to infiltrate, taking the guard down and assuming his identity. The player can then walk right through the front door – but any other guards he meet may or may not speak with him, and the player may arouse unwanted attention by acting suspiciously. But the player would also be able to infiltrate the warehouse by sneaking in, perhaps by breaking or opening a window, sneaking around taking guards down lethally or non-lethally. Similarly, the player may just want to fill a truck with explosives and smash it into the unloading bay and blow the whole thing up, or slaughter everyone in a firefight – or all three. The player may choose to disguise his way past the guard, then stealth kill him, disguise to his mission objective (using stealth to avoid detection), then fight his way out. He may stealth through the entire sequence if he chooses. If you've built up a series of contacts and associates through criminal missions, you can bring in associates to help you fight. But the more noise (so to speak) you make, the more police attention to provoke. But the player is always in control.
And this is the most important thing for me. I don't want the player to be shoehorned into a particular styIe of play, and as great as character development is and as much as I love it, that's exactly what character development does. You wanna play a stealther, you gotta build a stealther. You wanna play a soldier, you gotta restart and build a soldier. Inspired by Crysis and Tron 2.0, I would want to implement a system where the player is always in complete control of his own experience. But I also don't want to simplify the whole thing to the point that it is trival – and balancing that kind of thing is what I'm having trouble with.
I would not want to neglect character building, but some roleplaying mechanics are just ludicrous. My bullets are suddenly doing more damage? I'm suddenly more attractive? My biceps just gained two inches of girth? It's too abstract and contrived, and I think stat-based character building, even in roleplaying games, is archaic. I don't know a better solution, and it will all boil down to numbers of one kind or another in the end, but if my character goes from 4 strength to 5 strength, I was just taken out of the gameplay experience and was just given a sharp reminder that I'm playing a computer game with all kinds of artificial contrivances. No thanks.
And that's just about all I've got at the moment. This is the first time I've ever really put my ideas into writing, and I don't know if, having read this, you think it actually was worth reading, but I've enjoyed tapping away for the last... wow, it's been an hour. Well, there it is.
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