A Digital Ghost Story
A mostly kinetic short story about experiencing someone else's past
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"In the early 21st century humanity discovered how to convert memories into a digital format. With this advancement came a startling discovery; when memories extracted from a recently deceased human were inputted into an AI code, the “AI,” began acting well outside the designs of its code, even blatantly ignoring them in many instances. Instead, these “AI” took on the personality of the recently deceased, even showing signs of sentience. To this day the nature of this phenomenon is the subject of much debate. Has humanity accomplished the digitalization of the human consciousness? Is it a continuation of life for the deceased or is it an entirely new life? Can it even be considered human? Can it even be considered alive?
"One thing is for certain, though: something exists within those digitized memories. And that something has come to be widely referred to by the name of 'ghost'"
"One thing is for certain, though: something exists within those digitized memories. And that something has come to be widely referred to by the name of 'ghost'"
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Plot: In this world, "ghosts" are stored in what are known as Ghost Cores, a self-contained "application" (sorry, no idea what term I should use here) that contains the ghost's digitized memories, a AI code specifically designed to be used by ghosts, and the ghost itself. Occasionally, however, the ghost will enter a dormant state, and the AI core becomes inactive. The player takes the role of a "Ghost Whisperer," a person whose job is to "forward" his conscious into an inactive ghost core, find the dormant ghost, and awaken it.The means by which the player is instructed to find this ghost is by experiencing the ghost's memories, as the memories and ghosts are intimately connected. Under the guidance of a person monitoring the conscious forwarding, the player begins experiencing fragments of the ghost's memories, often out of order, as they follow her experience of first love.
In short time he meets the ghost herself. Asking the player to stay inside the core for awhile longer (the player can refuse; there will be minor branching), she reveals the rest of the memories, including the tragic ending.
In between the memories, there will be minor interactivity between the player and the Ghost (the Ghost speak the player, and occasionally ask a question).
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Setting: An undisclosed period of the the 21st century. The general idea is to have a near-future setting, but realism isn't going to be a major focus.
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Ending Ideas: (Note: the story will remain for the most part unchanged; you choice of answers to the GHost's questions, and the resulting endings will only have the effect of different dialogue from the Ghost)
Reject the Ghost's wish that you experience the rest of her memoirs (pretty self explanatory)
Reject the Ghost- Accomplished by treating the Ghost in a cruel manner
Listen to the the Ghost- Accomplished by listening to the Ghost, and generally accepting who she is; but doing nothing future then that
Accept the Ghost- Accomplished accepting the Ghost and accepting her in her entirety
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Planned Assets:
4 BG's: 3 shall be "real" world settings, but with a "hologram" effect to them; the 4th would be the bg for the core, for scenes spent between memories (it would be very basic)
2 sprites: One for the Ghost, and one for a major character from her memories (maybe a 3rd one... maybe?)
CG: Maybe one for each ending? Not a must for me.
Music: Probably going for an "Experimental" electronic soundtrack
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Project Background: This is actually my first VN. My main inspiration and the source of my drive to make this game is Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus. And the setting draws inspiration from that wonderful series called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
The goal of this project is to serve as a starting point. My desire for awhile now has been to become a professional writer. And I have found that VN's are the medium by which I want to write. So basically, this will hopeful serve as the first of many VN's from me as I polish my skills and (if my talent matches my dream) eventually go pro.
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Progress report:
Writing-
"Memories" section more or less completed
"Out of memories" section is about 80%-90% done. (Working on the last bit right now, which contains branching narrative; and considering I have never done anything like this before, it's taking me awhile)
Word length is at 7k and I expect it to reach 7.5k-8k words
Art assets-
0% (I going to concentrating getting the story side finished first)
Music-
0% (I'm probably going to use CC music for this; found a nice site)
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And now for some questions:
-How should I go about getting art and music assets for my VN?
-What do you think of the endings?
-What is the logic behind a collection of player choices leading to different endings? How would I go about writing and programming something like that?
And...
-What do you think?
) I got the accepting ending first go. I liked the varying flavor text in the endings.