Suggestions?

[evilkinggumby]

lol this. i want this.. as the next game. in every single detail.. lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPz9Fcvb1II

I want an entire alphabet of death, similar line artwork and animation, and a whimsical yet dark rhymey nature to everything. That would be slick.

[matt]

That's really cool. It seems like a parody of Gashlycrumb Tinies mixed with Doctor Seuss. I can safely say that the next game is nothing like that.

[evilkinggumby]

Well, no need to worry about any copyright infringement.. but I am sad to hear it. This seems like a pretty nifty combination of styles to make a game. Sort of like if Bastion was Gashleycrumb-esque in style but the continuous narration was Seuss like. hehehe.

Also I think whatever the next game is.. it would be kind of neat to have one enemy in it be sort of dunwich horror like, where it is generally invisible, except maybe some footprints you come across in spots across the nightmare, and you only can track it or know it's nearby based on the audio cues and seeing objects it moves near shake/fall over or swing on the wall. bonus points if the semi obscured view narrows tighter around the player as it approaches so when it finally attacks you are both pinpointed and fixated on the character as claw marks and gashes form in them out of thin air.

you could use a basic object or skeleton for the creature since it isn't rendered and most of the work is programming it's pathing, animating objects to shake or swing as it passes, and a gliding shadow effect that widens and narrows around the screen. of yeah and a great death animation. heheheh that's scare the funk out of me pretty good.

[matt]

Doing positioning of an enemy purely based on audio cues is challenging. I'm not sure if you've tried Papa Sangre on iOS. It is a really cool idea, but I found it pretty much impossible. They also have audio software to do HRTF for special headphone modes like Neverending Nightmares, but even that seems inadequate. It is interesting that people are getting more interested in HRTF because of VR now. Hopefully more audio engines will support it moving forwards.

Anyway, that is a bit of a tangent since you outlined a number of visual cues. Your idea does kind of fit into the setting of our next game, but I'm not sure if it fits in with the theme. I'll definitely give some thought to if I can make it work.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[Grabthehoopka]

I re-read that bird "puzzle" I suggested earlier, and it reminded me of the idea that inspired that.

My original idea involved needing to get past a locked door to progress, but the locked door is in the back of a hunting lodge/cabin/shack or whatever. Inside it is a room, and in the room is a fox, with each of its legs caught in a separate fox trap, and each one is chained to a corner of the room and shut with a padlock. Yeah, I went there.

What followed was an extremely complex puzzle and series of events where the player would have to backtrack out the door and search the surrounding area for keys. The first one unlocks two of the traps, and you remove them and the fox wuvs you (excuse my technical terminology). The second key doesn't open any of the traps, but unlocks the locked door you need to go through to progress, and the fox whines, two of its legs still stuck, as it watches you go. So the player could go, if they suck, or, continue backtracking and find the last key.

Either right before or right after entering the cabin, boom, scary spookman shows up! Once you enter the cabin, they start banging/axing/chainsawing the door open, and the player is on a very limited time limit. They can either ignore the fox and run out the other door to save themselves, or try to unlock the last two traps. They'll obviously go with the latter, so the first trap comes off alright, they go to unlock the second one- fumble, and drop the key, which falls down an open drain in the floor, or a nonsensical grate or cattle grid that the fox was on top of. Bonus points if the fox doesn't react to this in any way and still expects you to open the last trap, or if you could interact and show that the key is juuuuuust out of reach.

Anyways, the point is, the player would have no choice but to leave the fox behind before spookman comes through the door, and they can either watch or hear it killing the fox, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Also, as an optional thing that only added to the complexity of it, I was thinking about the key landing in mud. The player can dig through piles of mud, looking for it, and sees something metallic gleaming in the mud. They dig it out to find...a saw. The key is gone, no matter how much they look, so, the dillema is supposed to be to cut the fox's one remaining leg off or leave it to die. If the player cuts its leg off, they carry it with them, but it bleeds out and dies in the next area anyways.

So, as you can see, I really, really liked the idea behind this, but it was sooooo crazy, and there were sooooo many ways it could go wrong that I had to try to design around, and it was soooooo much work for one thing, so at the end of the day, I figured that there had to be a simpler way to do the same idea, and I came up with the bird idea.

So. In summation. I think the reason why I clung onto this idea for so long was because I really like the image of a fox with all four of its legs in traps that are chained to the walls in an empty room with a cattle grid running down the middle of it for no reason.

[matt]

That is a cool idea , but perhaps too complicated for our game of our scope. There are some twisted ideas there, so it is definitely something I'll keep in mind or brainstorming. Thanks for sharing!