References & Ideas Part IV

Continuation of the ‘References and Ideas’ series. This post will be theme and storyline ideas. Enjoy!

• Themes: Themes to explore other than the good vs. evil
  • Man vs. self (psychological battle; can address certain mental illnesses [e.g. bipolar/schizophrenia])
  • Explore human sin—the consequences of peoples actions and words
  • The Fiction of fear—fear is all in our mind
  • Desperation and despair but turns into happiness and acceptance or vice versa
  • The Horrors of mankind—how mankind is successfully destroying everything that mankind supposedly loves or just show how evil man can be, whatever you prefer. In this particular case evil is fighting good or vice versa, it’s more like we’re playing through the eyes of someone who has no concept of right or wrong, someone who is morally compromised and see’s everything that they are doing as fine. The player has to live in that mindset the whole time; the player is forced to make decisions that they wouldn’t necessarily make in real life. OR…
  • Antihero: So, here you a story where everyone is basically the bad guy in one aspect. The main player has to make choices that aren’t really good in order to deal with his/her circumstances. In essence, the question is: is our protagonist a bad person, the product of their environment, or a survivalist? It may not be such an easy question to answer.

• Storylines:
  • A game based solely based on choices; these choices definitely change the outcome of the game
  • Somebody dies but doesn’t know it—I know you guys have done this in Phantasmat but maybe you can execute the storyline differently.
    • Something like The 6^th Sense
    • Could be about a slave
    • The game could be played as if the player is reliving the protagonist’s life or the person is already dead but the people around the protagonist thinks he/she is alive (the clues have to be subtle!!)
  • Drawing/creating new worlds. Something similar to the Nickelodeon TV show Chalkworld
  • Playing at the microscopic level
    • Inside the human body and we have to fight off foreign diseases. Basically, there is a plaque spreading through the world and the only way to fight it is to find patient 0 and get inside their body to cure him and find an antidote.
    • Inside a computer where we get to travel to different websites and correspondence through e-mails and messages.
  • Cites in Space
    • Earth is destroyed, so everyone who survived relocated to cities in Space, however, Earth is not really destroyed. Someone devised a plan to ‘hide’ Earth. Earth was transported into another realm, a realm that exists outside a time or space. No we have to find a way to get Earth back.