General Information
• Game Title: Conscience
• Platform: PC
• Genre: Survival Horror and RPG
• Theme: Survival Horror / Western RPG
• Camera View: First Person
• Release Date: October 2013
• Team Size: 24 Part-Time Developers
• Project Started: January 2012
Features
• First Slasher genre WRPG in development for the PC!
• Twenty three killers with unique behaviors and methods of attack.
• Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence that Flanks, Hunts, Tracks, and Traps you like no other game before it.
• Persistent Injury System: Real time damage to the player causes the gameplay to adjust to their injuries.
• Multiplayer co-operation allows players to promote or hinder the progress of other players depending on the situation.
• Multiplayer Dialogue Trees.
• 60 Community Perks that you can receive for helping or hurting the youth camp community.
• Community tied directly into your progress. Death of individuals in the community means a loss of social points that used towards earning perks.
• Over forty different endings depending on how you play the game.
Overview
"Conscience" is a multiplayer first person psychological horror RPG set in a lakeside camp where players take on the responsibility of managing the grounds and looking after the youths when a group of masked individuals invade and begin killing everyone they come across. Part "Manhunt", part "Resident Evil 4", and part "Heavy Rain", "Conscience" is a brave new journey into horror, offering gameplay that is fun, exciting, and provocative, and an experience like nothing else from the industry.
Developed inside CryEngine 3, "Conscience" brings together a number of the mechanics found in your favorite games, including an expanded version of the dialogue tree mechanic found in games like "Fallout 3" and "Mass Effect", the trap setting and AI mechanics found in the iconic opening village attack of "Resident Evil 4", the intense atmosphere of "Manhunt", and the mature storytelling of "Heavy Rain". Each choice you make in game. Each person you save or abandon will then end up factoring into one of over forty endings you receive at the end of your playthrough, resulting in unparalleled replay value for you and your friends.
Premise
The premise of the game is based around the Slasher film genre. The genre had not been explored properly by the videogame medium in recent decades and felt like a fresh opportunity make some new headway into videogame horror.
Story Flow
The game begins on a bus heading into the camp. The player chooses a character and then begins to introduce himself to a variety of individuals on their bus. Once they reach camp, they receive a roster sheet with the name of everyone attending the camp. As players get to know different NPC characters over the course of the next twelve hours, the nearby town erupts into flames. Hours pass and soon individuals at the camp start vanishing.
Upon looking for these individuals, a fog descends inside the crater. In the distance shapes appear stalking the player. Not too soon afterwards, these individuals viciously lay siege on the camp. The players can retreat to the other NPCs or can try escaping the camp on their own. Depending how the player plays the game, the outcome of the story will change.
Target Audience
"Conscience" is aimed at the 18+ market and fans of Horror and Western-RPG games. It will not be aimed at children as the content is not to their benefit.
Setting
The game is set inside a forested crater. Filled with water, the base of the crater has become home to the counselors running the expensive youth camp. However, the shape of the crater has served to act as an entrapment meaning that there is only one way in and one way out. In the event of a terrible tragedy, reaching civilization would be relatively difficult to achieve. The only means of access is the local radio tower and signal booster which helps connect cell phones to the outside world. If that were to ever go down, the inhabitants of the crater would truly be isolated...
Player
The intended player experience is meant to center on two specific experiences. The first is the experience of getting to know the community you are in and getting attached one way or the other towards those NPC characters. The other experience is of the terror of being attacked in the darkness by those who wish to hurt those you've grown attached to. We will incorporate gameplay ramifications of losing those individuals where you will lose the social points you will have gained by doing missions for individuals. The loss of social points will be retroactive resulting in the loss of earned perks. The player will have a choice of which perks they must sacrifice for the loss of those social points.
The killers will typically try to ambush, hunt, and trap the player character. This will result in a constant state of fear and terror. A heartbeat meter based around hearing and the proximity of individuals will help keep a lump in players' throats and make the experience of playing the game far more intense than it otherwise would be. They will never know who is approaching. This will be exacerbated by the save system which works on a time oriented mechanic rather than allowing the player to save the game themselves. The fact that players will have to survive in order to reach a time based save point will further emphasize their survival and make the gameplay experience even more realistic for them (like Day Z).
