Brainstorming

[Stefan8000]

i am happy to see a new game from you.

first, a few wishes:

no qte or any othe button smashing. it is the enemy for all physically handicapped players.

immersion and atmosphere are the greatest thing in games, please add much of them.

write a good story with many story-elements in game.

dont make the game hard. i like a game, that i can play it fluid.

i like short games, but a 6 hour game is good too. but i dont think, you can build a game with great tension for over 6 hours. or, maybe you can do it, alien isolation is great in that part.

more from me, when i have more in my mind.

[gagaplex]

Yikes, I've thrown around ideas here and there over the course of the last year, but actually collecting them into one cohesive post is difficult.

[RightClickSaveAs]

Quicksand! Quicksand used to be huge in movies and TV shows but has basically disappeared. You could be the one to bring it back Matt! The character gets stuck in quicksand and trying to get out too fast just pulls him down more, so you have to slowly and methodically make your way out of it. Maybe this would be a good place for a unique QTE where you have to push the buttons in a certain rhythm.

Yes! Quicksand! I feel like QTE might break immersion a little, but if getting out relied on moving in a curtain way it could be pretty intense.

Some sort of bog, vortex of souls or an industrial vat of goo could work as a way to get the equivalent of quicksand into a level. A puzzle could be to find a way to safely cross the quicksand and if the player fails the character has to QTE back to the shore the player started from.

That's so much better, quicksand wouldn't make much sense unless there's a jungle section, but I was just so in love with the idea of QUICKSAND.

[gagaplex]

Just have a surreal whirl of melting floor boards.

[Stefan8000]

i would like to see a new sad story.

a few ideas for things in the game:

let the player loose a limp or an eye or something else. or make him physically handicaped. like let him use a wheelchair in a one or more levels. i know no game, where the player is in a wheelchair.

or try to simulate other handicaps in some levels, like blindless, so, the player has only a black screen and have to use his ears to follow the right direction. or hearing problems, where all is quit for some time. or tinitus, where you hear only high pich sounds.

or what about a player is for a long time in darkness, and when he is coming back to the normal world, all is very bright.

btw. here is an interesting link to make your game playable for people with handicaps. maybe you can take a look. there are not many developers, who make her games accessible for handicaped people:

http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/

[miumiaou]

being in a wheelchair is a good idea but it's already used in Silent Hill Shattered memories (and this moment was pretty intense)

[JPrice]

Well hey if we're brainstorming ideas here I'm just gonna go general things off the top of my head at the moment hahaa

Mutilation ideas!
- Classic (If cliche) idea: Slowly scratching at the skin, rapidly get faster leading to tearing skin and muscle off
- Protagonist carving something relevant to the story into a part of their or someone elses body
- Have hand facing palm towards the POV (Kinda like Vein scene but with open fist and more emphasis on the hand), slowly bends hand backwards until the bones break and pierce through the wrist
- Protagonist grabs knife and stabs into neck, slowly starts moving it across throat but have it be a struggle where each movement requires a good inch or so hard pull (repeated pulls)
- Have protagonist midway or just beginning to sow own eyelids shut
- Protagonist rips own jaw off, complete with tongue waggling out during the process
- Sawing own fingers/hand off slowly
- Being trapped within an oven, complete with skin bubbling and burning away
- Vomiting blood and parts of organs possibly
- Thumbscrew style device (Maybe nutcracker type thing) slowly turned onto a fingernail. Great detail on the nail cracking as well as blood pouring out
- Being eaten alive by a certain animal/insect, whether it be rats/dogs/spiders etc.

General ideas!
- Having the protagonist get his legs/feet incapacitated which leads to them having to crawl on the ground slowly
- Player has to navigate a portion of a house using only the thunder outside as a light source
- A section that has the player navigate around an area of sleeping dogs or something equivalent, similar concept to inmates where you have to walk slowly so as to not awaken them
- Location ideas (As abstract as they may get): Small suburban home, docks, empty city streets, hotel, theme park, ancient temple, church, warehouse, subway stations, department store, castle and offshore oil rig

-Any other ideas I get I'll edit them into here haha -

[LobsterSundew]

Some more wild brainstorming.

A horror stories can take the direction of having monsters that can be sympathized with. There is the memorable half-corpse scene in Return of the Living Dead. "Sorry, I have to..." or "Please don't... hate us" coming from enemies could be unsettling and create some hesitation in players to not just quickly dispatch them like in another action game. It is also something different from insane incoherent enemies.

A paddlewheel boat could be a cool setting piece. Multiple decks would work like multiple stories work in a 2D mansion. Another setting piece could be a static empty train with sudden jump scare flashbacks of the train when it was moving.

Backwards playing messages for creepy audio clips could be backers talking. That could be a reward tier opportunity.

Watching the enemies in The Evil Within, I had an idea about zombie rules. Normally there is the rule that zombies need to have their brains destroyed to finish them. For a supernatural zombie presence, the idea is that both eyes need to be destroyed. Eyes would glow. Enemies could convert more people into glowing eyed zombies by forcing them to stare into an object like an amulet. This setup would allow a zombie with half a head to keep moving as long as there is one eye intact. A melee move to surprise takedown zombies from behind would be to gouge their eyes out. This would probably work better in a more action oriented game.

The way that creep spreads in Starcraft or in Natural Selection could inspire a similar visual effect of a room being corrupted over time.

A 15 minute demo could end with a two stage boss fight after the player beats the first stage. The demo would cut to an end screen just as the second stage of the boss finished transforming. The fight itself could be a puzzle instead of combat, such as how the first Portal game had a timed puzzle of getting cores to a incinerator for a boss fight.

Rule of the Rose had a very interesting mechanic for how the dog will guide players to items when given a scent. An example is that a biscuit tin provides the scent to find biscuits. A scrap of newspaper provides the sent to find the remainder of the newspaper. What I found interesting is the player could choose what objective to go after first this way. It made the game not feel as linear.

Types of adventure game puzzles could serve as inspiration. Puzzles could involve outsmarting traps like how they throw a boot in The Cube to trigger pressure sensors before entering.

[Lauren]

Neverending Nightmares is a game that never set out any true jump scares and didn't automatically frighten the player/viewer. I loved this. The game really seemed like it would, as if at any moment something would actually pop out. I believe that building up suspense, creating an eerie atmosphere, foreshadowing and implanting creepy into the environment definitely makes a whole new level of horror! This type really leaves feeling into the player/viewer and causes them to think rather than freak out and laugh. The events that occurred happened slowly yet suddenly, and maintained that scary tone. I look forward to the next game and that the fear eases on similarly.


In the closet, under the bed, behind the dresser...not enough imagination? What if the monsters are invisible? Or only project their shadows and reflections?

Stitched together bodies with "Together forever" written in blood on the wall.

Interactives?:
Chainsaw.
Pencil sharpener.
Electrical outlet.
Shower curtain.
Rake.
Old hand written letters.
Blanket.
Gnomes.

[Grabthehoopka]

I propose replacing the candle with a box of matches. Using a light source to light up the dark environments was I think one of the really iconic things in Neverending Nightmares and we'd be remiss if we took it out, but two of the problems you're trying to address is more interactivity and some light puzzles.

I know that Matt doesn't like adding buttons, so maybe instead of adding a button, you could hit the interact button when not next to another interactive object and the character could fish a match out of the box and then strike it. Matches wouldn't last forever like the candle, so eventually they would burn out, leaving you in the dark again until you light another one. The player shouldn't have to deal with running out, so I'm not saying we should introduce item management, but that doesn't mean you can't screw with the player and make them think that they have a limited quantity, like an idle animation or maybe part of the lighting animation where they shake the match box and listen to them rattle around, and then make it sound like there are less and less matches in there as they progress through the level, and have a scripted event or two where they light the last match and run out.

The first thing this addresses is proactivity. Provided that the length of time a match lasts is long enough that it doesn't become annoying, it gives the player some simple things to do while exploring. We could borrow an idea from amnesia and have it so during sequences where the player is navigating dark areas with matches, most if not all the candles or lanterns in the environment will be unlit until the player lights them with a match and illuminates the room. This ties into proactivity, and I think exploring might be a little more interesting and, depending on how you use it, have more depth, if a player enters a dark room, and knows that they're supposed to look around for a candle or lamp to light.

The second thing this could address is puzzles. By having this one recurring game mechanic and conditioning them to associate it with exploration and progress, you can start using it in puzzles. I'm gonna guess that lighting something big on fire is sort of out of the question, unless you find a cool and easy way to do it with the art style, but you can easily think smaller than that. I know you have a separate thread about puzzle ideas, so I'll save them for that, but anyways, you want to make simple, logical puzzles, and having a few in there centering around an established mechanic seems like a good idea.

The third thing, obviously, is spook factor. I don't need to tell you that there are plenty of opportunities to make the worst of leaving the player in the dark. They're going to have a light source, but there will be some unavoidable moments when they are completely in the dark and totally vulnerable. There's the lingering threat of them running out of matches you can hang over their heads, and, perhaps more importantly, by making this a central game mechanic, you can expect that the old axiom of giving the player a hammer and all problems looking like nails to be true, so once the player knows the score, you can start to predict how they will react to something, what they will look for, and generally make it a little easier to predict their behavior and thought process and use that to set up scares and screw with them.

So, in conclusion, I think that matches should be a thing.