Hey all. I posted this on the moddb and Hard Light forums, and I got great feedback from it (people were actually volounteering of their own will), so I figured I'd see if this would be interesting enough to delve into a full game with (NOTE: This isn't my main project, so forgive me if I post another request later...although if I get good enough interest, I'll put my main project on hold and delve into this one): EDIT: Sorry for any indescretions, this was orignally posted as a mod for DOOM3, but I have higher aspirations and such :) Sorry if this is in the wrong forum. NOTE: It should be told that I can actually do modelling and UV mapping, and I'm learning rigging and animating, so I wouldn't be completely useless if this got off the ground :) Here's the design doc :) Basic premise: An original sci-fi magical horror game, with shooter elements. Quick introduction: The player assumes the role of an anonymous space marine, who has been sent to investigate a derelict spaceship found floating in deep space. Target players: 14+ Single/Multiplayer (including numbers if multi) Singleplayer Basic backstory The player’s ship finds a derelict spacecraft floating in space, and sends a team to investigate. The game starts from there. List of Locations The TMS Flintlock. List of Characters: Captain John P. Calvin The shipboard AI, Flintlock-Main One Random Crewmembers. The Captain. The AI. The Doctor (just when he wakes you up). The Security Chief Your Squadmates. List of Miscellany Nothing else I know of  Dialog listings Classified, sorry. Everything that’s more than basic crew interactions is integral to the story. styles - clothing, weapons, architecture Clothing: functional military. Weapons: Blocky, heavy, small. Architecture: Futuristic interior spaceship. Variations to basic combat rules Shadow combat: All extendable mele’ attacks. Regular combat: weapons deal more damage. Need sneaking, there will be more sneaking than fighting...but of a different type than Splinter Cell. If SC is offensive sneaking, think defensive . I would need people to: Texture Map Code Sound Code Anyone interested? :) (the story) Anyway, the game starts out with you, the player, as a space marine (keep reading). You're ship, while on it's regular patrol route. picked up a large object on radar, located in deep space near its location (please keep reading, I promise, it gets interesting). It turns out to be a collossal ancient battleship, the Flintlock one that had been assumed lost during abnormal solar activity....your team boards the ship, attempting to find out what happened.....by the looks of things, everything's been dead for about 100 years or so. There are no remains of any human life on board, save for a few bleached bones. Your team's main mission at first is to restore lighting, full power, etc...however, once they get to the control room, they find the entire instrument panel is smashed. Nothing works, and it's impossible to start anything from the main bridge. The team is ordered to start everything from the auxilary control system near the main engines. They continue down, down into the belly of the ship, searching for something, anything...faint glows from windows illuminate the empty, corroded and musty corridors. Suddenly, a faint scream is heard....the team assumes it was nothing....but it keeps getting louder and louder, closer and closer. It sounds like it's coming from behind them, but suddenly it's from in front, then all sides. The shadows on the walls start to move, coming alive in the dim light. Dancing around, they move silently. Suddenly, one shoots a long, black arm straight at a soldier. He is slammed up against the opposite wall. Shooting wildly, his shrill screams of agony can be heard echoing down the hallway, mixing with the constant report of gunfire as he tries to kill whatever it is that has him. Suddenly, he straightens up, and his chest is thrown outward. Uttering one last scream, a blue light explodes from his body, and the shadow recedes into the wall, leaving him to slump silently to the floor. Shocked, the team is gven order to open fire. They (and the player) begin to fire off at the walls, trying to kill whatever it is that hides upon them. Howveer, it soon proves that the shadows are impossible to hit, because as soon as a round approaches them, they dart off to another corner. A shadow of a hand passes over a marine's pistol hand. Grunting, he's unable to resist it as his arm is pulled quickly over to a fellow marines, discharging a round into it, and doing the same to him soon after. It continues on like this for some time, the shadows slowly cutting down more and more marines, either by controlling them or by killing them with the same black tentacle. Eventually, all that's left is the player. Staggering, low on ammo and health, he is ordered to find his way back to the entry point. Running at full speed down a narrow corridor, his view shifts and staggers like the shadows on the wall (read: distortion effect). Suddenly, he hears the same screams approaching. They get closer and closer, until finally once again the shadows are on top of him. He fights desperately, but is soon overtaken, and falls. The view shifts as he falls to the ground, and when he hits the floor, the shadows slowly start to edge towards him, and his view fades to black. It stays like that for a few seconds, until the blackness is broken by a bright white light. It's blurry at first, but grows brighter and brighter, until finally everything comes into focus. The light is moved away and replaced by a smiling face. The player is told that he/she had taken a nasty fall, and had been sleeping in the infirmary for the past few days. The player is also informed (through small tidbits, like, here's your pistol, report to MP HQ as soon as you can), that he/she is a gaurd aboard....the Flintlock. However, when the player is allowed to stand up, he/she sees that it is not the same Flintlock that they first boarded. At least, not exactly. The corridors and windows and everything else are all in the exact same place, but the ship is fully lighted with a pale, white glow reflecting off its white-painted corridors. Crewman walk smiling by, and everything is functioning normally... And that's where the story that I can tell you ends.

Really, this is a story, not a game design. If you want to recruit people, try the Help Wanted forum. If you want feedback on the story, try the Writing For Games forum. If you want to discuss more about the actual game design, this is the right place but you'd have to actually explain the game rather than the plot outline.

Ohhh, well, sorry :) My bad...

Hm, alright, see, I'm sort of new here *clops head* could an admin please move this to...hm...I'm not quite sure. I guess wherever you think would be appropriate! Thanks! :)

'anonymous' is never a word you should use with a 'horror' game's character. Who cares if some nameless nobody in space dies a horrible death?

Name your character, give him life, and a player will care about him. Leave him as little more than an invisible person holding a gun and he becomes meaningless to a player, impossible to empathize with.

Thank you much for your suggestions :)
For the record, by the way: All that storyline I posted is where the game STARTS, from the first sentence. So that's not backstory, that's actual gameplay. Thought I should clarify that.

Run_The_Shadows: The player's name would never actually come up in the game, so really why have a backstory and/or name if it never comes up? I don't mean that in a negative tone, it's just a question. Perhaps you could suggest as to how I could implement it more? Doom 3 scared the pants off a lot of people, but the main character never had a name. It'd be the same deal with this one (except a more tension type scary, rather than GOTCHYA! scary). Perhaps I mis-labeled the genre?


trapdoor: That's a good idea! :) Although they wouldn't have much time for attachement...two to three training missions, and then they're all killed in the first mission?

Ok, here's...some more of the storyline, just so you know how this works. Please, if you don't want it ruined, don't scroll down.








SPOILERS:




















I'll be as brief as I can. Basically; you died. You are now on-board the Flintlock as it was one week before the incident that killed every single member of it's two hundred person crew. You wake up on board that operating table with a completley clean slate. Everyone else on-board the ship has been repeating the last week of their lives for over one hundred years. You, however, do not have this, so anything you do will be recorded. If you "die" the events will unfold as they had one hundred years ago, eventually killing the crew. You will be trapped in limbo forever with them, doing everything you did exactly as you did it, until you die, and the "incident" occurs.

Gameplay in the beginning consists of free-roam of the ship, mostly. You're simply strolling down, looking for infractions, most are simple affairs, some are violent, some are even rouge machines. However, as the storyline tightens, so does your path.

How am I planning to make this game scarier than System Shock II, Doom 3, and the myriad of other games out there?

Well, I'm planning to make liberal use of screaming, sound and scene transitions. You're walking down a corridor, patrolling for infractions. Suddenly, from the end of the corridor down, you hear "THUNK...THUNK...THUNK" as the lights switch off, plunging you into darkness. The scene brightens a little, and you find yourself in the real-world version of the Flintlock. A pail glow filters through the windows, and reflects off floating debree. Suddenly, you hear a scream far off in the distance...then another, closer. Closer and closer, more and more screams are heard. Just as they are almost right next to you, they all stop, and you hear a gutteral cry for help right behind you. Turning around to investigate, you fidn the shattered corpse of a woman crew member, clawing toward you. Long dead and rotted, her etheral spirit casts a faint glow on the surrounding area. More moans and pleas for help are heard. Suddenly, these "zombies" start to crawl out of the floor and the walls, coming towards you. They either attack you, or you shoot them first. The more you shoot, the more appear. Just as they seem about to overwhelm you, everything gets plunged back into darkness. The lights come back on, and the regular cheery scene from before is back. The only indication that anything unusual occured is a flickering light about three lights down.

[Edited by - Unknown Target on October 14, 2004 5:41:34 PM]

Honestly, this sounds a bit like The 7th Guest style gameplay. Finish a puzzle and see a bit of cutscene.

Your story seems to have a lot of fodder characters as well, I suggest rewritting the black tenticle scene to the player and a squadmate or two. Give a reason to care about his teammates death, or else it'll be another boring nameless star trek death.

IMHO, your gameplay strategy is to disorient players enough to be suprised when things jumping out at them. I feel horror games should always have the feeling of "desperate but do-able", which puts the Locus of Control on the player, rather then the setting.

Players should never be forced to die, unless it's obvous they have no choice. If a player gets use to dying, he might not know which situtation is winnable or unwinnable, which makes for confusing gameplay.

Forced to die? Ok, there seems to be a confusion here:

The beginning of the game is backstory to the bulk of the game. There is no point to the whole marine squad, other than to introduce the main bulk of the story. Think of the whole marine situation as a prolouge to the story, which all happens after the player dies. You only die once. You are supposed to die. The game takes place in the afterlife, not in the real life.
For some reason it seems that you're taking the marine section (about maybe 5-10 minutes of the total couple hours of gameplay) and thinking that that is the main portion of the game. The main portion is after you die...hence, detailed marine characters are pointless.
You drop in, explore the ship, get killed, then the actual game starts.

Also....all that stuff I just said is not cutscene. There aren't puzzles in this game, at least, not "pixel-hunting" ones...not sure where you saw the puzzles and then the suprise pops out of the box. I never put anything in that description remotely like it.



Sorry if this post seems condescending, angry, or anything like that. I am simply explaining the story that I wrote :)

Quote:Original post by Unknown Target
Forced to die? Ok, there seems to be a confusion here:

The beginning of the game is backstory to the bulk of the game.

I thought you wrote:

Quote:Original post by Unknown Target
For the record, by the way: All that storyline I posted is where the game STARTS, from the first sentence. So that's not backstory, that's actual gameplay. Thought I should clarify that.

Quote:Original post by Unknown Target
You only die once. You are supposed to die. The game takes place in the afterlife, not in the real life.

But you throw the player in a death scene here.

Quote:More moans and pleas for help are heard. Suddenly, these "zombies" start to crawl out of the floor and the walls, coming towards you. They either attack you, or you shoot them first. The more you shoot, the more appear. Just as they seem about to overwhelm you, everything gets plunged back into darkness.

Quote:Original post by Unknown Target
Also....all that stuff I just said is not cutscene.

All the stuff is not cutscene and all the stuff is gameplay, yet some of this stuff is or should be non-interactive.

Quote:Original post by Unknown Target
There aren't puzzles in this game, at least, not "pixel-hunting" ones...not sure where you saw the puzzles

You'll have puzzles, or else your game should be a rail shooter, rather then a FPS. Every game slows the player down with stupid tasks, because trigger happy action gets repeditive fast.

What I envision as the puzzles are abstract to the story. They may not be where you see the puzzles though, more on that below.

Quote:Original post by Unknown Target
then the suprise pops out of the box. I never put anything in that description remotely like it.

Quote:I'm planning to make liberal use of screaming, sound and scene transitions. You're walking down a corridor, patrolling for infractions. Suddenly, from the end of the corridor down, you hear "THUNK...THUNK...THUNK" as the lights switch off, plunging you into darkness. The scene brightens a little, and you find yourself in the real-world version of the Flintlock.

Quote: Turning around to investigate, you fidn the shattered corpse of a woman crew member, clawing toward you.

Honestly, I do believe you have an interesting game, but you need to design how your game works, not what is happening in your game . Even if you stuck with the mod, you need to comunicate your ideas explicitly, not implicitly.