Feedback on Future Project Ideas
Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 2:55 pm
Now that a lot of the game projects that I've been working on for the past few years are pretty much wrapped up except for Flowering Nightshade and updates to the previous games, I'm starting to look into ideas for a new project to begin planning and prototyping for. The thing is, I've been focused on Eldritch Academy and Eldritch University for so long that I'm having trouble with deciding which ideas to invest more time into. Part of my reasoning for wanting to plan out another project before Flowering Nightshade is finished is so that I have something I can work with coding and art for, since most of that kind of work is pretty much finished for Flowering Nightshade unless I decide to put more money into a free game. While I'll have to make the final decision myself or I won't have the motivation to follow through, I thought I'd ask for some opinions on the ideas that I've been considering so far. Maybe if there is an interest in one of the ideas, that could help me find the motivation to commit to that project idea. (Alternatively, I could scratch ideas that would not be interesting to anyone.)
At any rate, I don't think many are too interested in the full background of why I'm looking into ideas for future projects. Unless someone wants those details, it's time to move onto the ideas themselves:
[TTL]
A psychological horror adventure game.
Story: Years before the story begins, A was involved in a ghost story where she ended up murdering another student and trying to kill her boyfriend. Her fragile mental state got her sent to a mental institution, and now she's starting to be reintegrated into society. However, the town she moves to is claimed to be haunted, with people disappearing on foggy nights. On one such foggy night, A is attacked by a ghost and is saved by I, a woman who has a program for tracking ghosts. Thinking that one of the ghosts might be connected to her past, A insists on joining I in investigating the urban legends and ghost stories about the town's disappearances.
Both women have deep regrets about their past that they refuse to let go. A's sketches and notes in her therapy journal depict her attempts to reconcile her thoughts with reality, while I's deep feelings of guilt show in the way she pushes forward with little regard to her own safety. The ghosts behind the disappearances try to use these flaws to prevent A and I from ending the haunting, but these ghosts have their own grudges and regrets that they can't seem to let go of.
Gameplay: Visual novel story segments with point-and-click elements for explorable locations. When exploring, the player is shown highlights around items that can be interacted with, and must find certain items or objects to progress. When in an exploration room, the player also has the option to ask the other character for a hint or move to a different unlocked location. (The map itself may be modelled as an exploration room, to make things easier to work with.)
Aside from simply clicking on items to trigger events, a major component of gameplay would be to find certain documents or similar items that explain the history of a location. Some of these are required to advance, but there will also be other documents that expand on minor characters and such.
At certain points, the player will encounter powerful ghosts that must be confronted or "fought". These encounters will often involve trying to appease the spirit until it can be exorcised. The player will be given a list of their discovered documents, items, and facts and have to pick the one that matches the point of conversation to progress. The final confrontation is different, where making a wrong decision (or too many wrong decisions?) will lead to a bad ending, and there are two options on how to defeat the final ghost.
Aside from a few one-scene locations, there are two major locations in the story. Based on the story outlines, the game would be roughly 90 minutes per location on a first playthrough.
Inspirations: Fatal Frame III, Corpse Party, Root Letter
Notes: This idea has been in prototype hell for years. I originally wanted a game that was closer to Fatal Frame, but I couldn't find a way to do most of the things I wanted in a 3D engine. I tried RPG Maker next, simplifying a lot of things to work similarly to Fatal Operation, but I couldn't find a way to make it feel like fun. Locations were either so small that you could run through them in seconds or so big that they felt devoid of content. And combat simply never got very far, real-time or turn-based, because of story limitations on the way combat would have to work. Thus, I arrived at the most recent iteration, where I use Ren'Py to make a visual novel with adventure game elements, allowing me to focus on the story while still allowing some optional exploration (such as collectible documents). This prototype still feels fairly weak as a "true game", but since a visual novel doesn't often need strong gameplay I feel like this isn't as bad as it was in the previous prototypes.
Also, I concealed the names of the main characters because they are returning characters that I don't want to reveal just yet. I suppose people can figure out who they are pretty quickly if they tried, but... I don't think that will be too likely.
[LD]
A romance/coming-of-age visual novel.
Story: A continuation of the story of Cho Fukuda, from Eldritch Academy, around ten or so years after that game. Now a costume and clothing designer, she feels like she's been typecast and no longer finds jobs that allow her to be more creative. After losing a commission for going off specifications, she is convinced by her girlfriend to take a break and try something different for a bit.
There would be a different storyline for each of Cho's potential love interests, splitting off immediately after the prologue. In each storyline, Cho is exposed to two potential career directions to take, leading to six different endings.
As the characters would all be in their mid-twenties, I'm also considering including scenes that are more sexual in nature than what could show up in Eldritch Academy. If such scenes were included, they'd likely be optional branches (similar to Eldritch University).
Notes: While outlining and writing for Flowering Nightshade, a part of me wanted to see the main cast of Eldritch Academy as full adults as well. Since that didn't fit the scope of Flowering Nightshade, I decided it would have to be its own game if it was made. As for the focus on Cho, I felt like I didn't give her a lot of attention in Eldritch Academy compared to the other love interests, since her role and personality changed a lot between drafts and I had trouble keeping her personality consistent. And since Yue was a pretty divisive vierwpoint character, I felt like the more idealistic Cho might be an interesting change in perspective.
I also have some other ideas that are on indefinite standby or are potentially scrapped, but I'll include a few of them for completeness:
[GS], a magical girl VN/RPG. The idea was to combine a number of ideas (magical girl warriors, magical boys, three-way conflict, clothing damage, no evil villains) into one game, but some of the ideas required a level of complexity that was difficult to work with. For instance, the standard JRPG combat system assumes lots of fights, but it's hard to create a lot of diverse and interesting enemies (in story or gameplay terms). And people love to talk about how they want to have lots of things to do with no time limits or railroading and also have multiple endings, but trying to wrangle a narrative together without knowing who likes who and who hasn't met and who has been defeated before is difficult. (Even Alpha Protocol, one of the kings of reactivity, railroads you for most of the game.) By the time I had enough other projects out of the way to focus on this idea, I wanted to move away from having the leads be Japanese high school students. I briefly considered aging everyone up to college age, but I didn't think that would be enough to make everything else work out as well.
[RI], an idol/girl group management game. This idea came out of liking the idea behind Idol Manager, but wishing it focused on smaller types of groups. The idea eventually became flexible enough to not necessarily be about idols, but still had a base idea that came from small idol groups. The premise is that each playthrough is a certain number of turns, and you have to find a way to raise the resource/money stat "Influence" to pay off debts. (The reason it's not just a money amount is to account for potential alternate scenario/difficulty modes. So a "school idol" club would be trying to convince the student council not to shut them down, while an indie band would be trying to raise money and get attention for the place they work at.) At the end of each run, you get points based on how long you survived and can use these points to unlock things. Some of the unlocks affect gameplay (like improving the stat randomization of the characters) and some open story events for each character. The main stumbling block with this game is that I'm not sure how exciting I can make the base game, so the project would live or die by the characters. And if I went with the idea for different modes, then each character would have to at least have art for each age range, if not more. I'm also not sure if my gameplay motivations are interesting to others; the reason the game is played in runs that unlock things as you play more is to have some of the feeling of persistent unlocks (like a lot of mobile and MMO games) while still allowing mid-playthrough progression (like level ups). I feel like this gives more replayability at the "endgame" than doing the same raid battle until the next one comes out.
[??] Lastly, I sort of want to make an investigation game where there are multiple endings based on which information is found, without retconning the backstory in each ending like some games of that type will do. This is likely a ways off, though, because the character I want to use is slated to show up in another story and I want to know how that turns out before I start writing another thing about her. (I already had a character reference Eldritch University in a story I released like a year or so ago...)
Anyway, those are the ideas I'm working with right now. The top two are the most likely to go somewhere, but I'm interested in feedback for any of them. Thanks for reading this far!
At any rate, I don't think many are too interested in the full background of why I'm looking into ideas for future projects. Unless someone wants those details, it's time to move onto the ideas themselves:
[TTL]
A psychological horror adventure game.
Story: Years before the story begins, A was involved in a ghost story where she ended up murdering another student and trying to kill her boyfriend. Her fragile mental state got her sent to a mental institution, and now she's starting to be reintegrated into society. However, the town she moves to is claimed to be haunted, with people disappearing on foggy nights. On one such foggy night, A is attacked by a ghost and is saved by I, a woman who has a program for tracking ghosts. Thinking that one of the ghosts might be connected to her past, A insists on joining I in investigating the urban legends and ghost stories about the town's disappearances.
Both women have deep regrets about their past that they refuse to let go. A's sketches and notes in her therapy journal depict her attempts to reconcile her thoughts with reality, while I's deep feelings of guilt show in the way she pushes forward with little regard to her own safety. The ghosts behind the disappearances try to use these flaws to prevent A and I from ending the haunting, but these ghosts have their own grudges and regrets that they can't seem to let go of.
Gameplay: Visual novel story segments with point-and-click elements for explorable locations. When exploring, the player is shown highlights around items that can be interacted with, and must find certain items or objects to progress. When in an exploration room, the player also has the option to ask the other character for a hint or move to a different unlocked location. (The map itself may be modelled as an exploration room, to make things easier to work with.)
Aside from simply clicking on items to trigger events, a major component of gameplay would be to find certain documents or similar items that explain the history of a location. Some of these are required to advance, but there will also be other documents that expand on minor characters and such.
At certain points, the player will encounter powerful ghosts that must be confronted or "fought". These encounters will often involve trying to appease the spirit until it can be exorcised. The player will be given a list of their discovered documents, items, and facts and have to pick the one that matches the point of conversation to progress. The final confrontation is different, where making a wrong decision (or too many wrong decisions?) will lead to a bad ending, and there are two options on how to defeat the final ghost.
Aside from a few one-scene locations, there are two major locations in the story. Based on the story outlines, the game would be roughly 90 minutes per location on a first playthrough.
Inspirations: Fatal Frame III, Corpse Party, Root Letter
Notes: This idea has been in prototype hell for years. I originally wanted a game that was closer to Fatal Frame, but I couldn't find a way to do most of the things I wanted in a 3D engine. I tried RPG Maker next, simplifying a lot of things to work similarly to Fatal Operation, but I couldn't find a way to make it feel like fun. Locations were either so small that you could run through them in seconds or so big that they felt devoid of content. And combat simply never got very far, real-time or turn-based, because of story limitations on the way combat would have to work. Thus, I arrived at the most recent iteration, where I use Ren'Py to make a visual novel with adventure game elements, allowing me to focus on the story while still allowing some optional exploration (such as collectible documents). This prototype still feels fairly weak as a "true game", but since a visual novel doesn't often need strong gameplay I feel like this isn't as bad as it was in the previous prototypes.
Also, I concealed the names of the main characters because they are returning characters that I don't want to reveal just yet. I suppose people can figure out who they are pretty quickly if they tried, but... I don't think that will be too likely.
[LD]
A romance/coming-of-age visual novel.
Story: A continuation of the story of Cho Fukuda, from Eldritch Academy, around ten or so years after that game. Now a costume and clothing designer, she feels like she's been typecast and no longer finds jobs that allow her to be more creative. After losing a commission for going off specifications, she is convinced by her girlfriend to take a break and try something different for a bit.
There would be a different storyline for each of Cho's potential love interests, splitting off immediately after the prologue. In each storyline, Cho is exposed to two potential career directions to take, leading to six different endings.
As the characters would all be in their mid-twenties, I'm also considering including scenes that are more sexual in nature than what could show up in Eldritch Academy. If such scenes were included, they'd likely be optional branches (similar to Eldritch University).
Notes: While outlining and writing for Flowering Nightshade, a part of me wanted to see the main cast of Eldritch Academy as full adults as well. Since that didn't fit the scope of Flowering Nightshade, I decided it would have to be its own game if it was made. As for the focus on Cho, I felt like I didn't give her a lot of attention in Eldritch Academy compared to the other love interests, since her role and personality changed a lot between drafts and I had trouble keeping her personality consistent. And since Yue was a pretty divisive vierwpoint character, I felt like the more idealistic Cho might be an interesting change in perspective.
I also have some other ideas that are on indefinite standby or are potentially scrapped, but I'll include a few of them for completeness:
[GS], a magical girl VN/RPG. The idea was to combine a number of ideas (magical girl warriors, magical boys, three-way conflict, clothing damage, no evil villains) into one game, but some of the ideas required a level of complexity that was difficult to work with. For instance, the standard JRPG combat system assumes lots of fights, but it's hard to create a lot of diverse and interesting enemies (in story or gameplay terms). And people love to talk about how they want to have lots of things to do with no time limits or railroading and also have multiple endings, but trying to wrangle a narrative together without knowing who likes who and who hasn't met and who has been defeated before is difficult. (Even Alpha Protocol, one of the kings of reactivity, railroads you for most of the game.) By the time I had enough other projects out of the way to focus on this idea, I wanted to move away from having the leads be Japanese high school students. I briefly considered aging everyone up to college age, but I didn't think that would be enough to make everything else work out as well.
[RI], an idol/girl group management game. This idea came out of liking the idea behind Idol Manager, but wishing it focused on smaller types of groups. The idea eventually became flexible enough to not necessarily be about idols, but still had a base idea that came from small idol groups. The premise is that each playthrough is a certain number of turns, and you have to find a way to raise the resource/money stat "Influence" to pay off debts. (The reason it's not just a money amount is to account for potential alternate scenario/difficulty modes. So a "school idol" club would be trying to convince the student council not to shut them down, while an indie band would be trying to raise money and get attention for the place they work at.) At the end of each run, you get points based on how long you survived and can use these points to unlock things. Some of the unlocks affect gameplay (like improving the stat randomization of the characters) and some open story events for each character. The main stumbling block with this game is that I'm not sure how exciting I can make the base game, so the project would live or die by the characters. And if I went with the idea for different modes, then each character would have to at least have art for each age range, if not more. I'm also not sure if my gameplay motivations are interesting to others; the reason the game is played in runs that unlock things as you play more is to have some of the feeling of persistent unlocks (like a lot of mobile and MMO games) while still allowing mid-playthrough progression (like level ups). I feel like this gives more replayability at the "endgame" than doing the same raid battle until the next one comes out.
[??] Lastly, I sort of want to make an investigation game where there are multiple endings based on which information is found, without retconning the backstory in each ending like some games of that type will do. This is likely a ways off, though, because the character I want to use is slated to show up in another story and I want to know how that turns out before I start writing another thing about her. (I already had a character reference Eldritch University in a story I released like a year or so ago...)
Anyway, those are the ideas I'm working with right now. The top two are the most likely to go somewhere, but I'm interested in feedback for any of them. Thanks for reading this far!