You're playing an infant - scene ideas?

[8bitRainbow]

I need some inspiration! I was inspired by Alter Ego (the game where you're born and make choices throughout your life to see how you end up) for my current WIP and I've taken the challenge of having the player experience something similar. So far, the rest of the game is coming along great! However, that first year of life... man, it's rough to make interesting. Or at least I'm experiencing severe writer's block. My WIP is in a modern setting with room for fantasy, though it's primarily slice-of-life and focusing on relationship/character development.

I'm not looking for fleshed out scenes by any means, just fun scene or choice ideas if you happen to think of any. I've been coming up with a lot of "oh no you're in the crib alone at night, what do you do??" scenes but they're boring to write so I bet they'd be boring to play. The narrator is the PC all grown up talking about their upbringing (unrevealed) so I'm not restricted to working just through the infant's perspective. The player can make decisions about how their parents chose to parent in certain ways or how their family unit developed. I do know this phase is mostly focused on setting up whether or not the PC was an "easy" baby.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!!

[parttimestorier]

Well if you want to totally bypass the issue instead, you could just have the story start from age 4 or 5, which would make sense for the narrator telling a story about their childhood - I don't think many people actually remember much from before then.

But for baby ideas, maybe you could look up which development milestones tend to be in the first year or so of life - like saying your first word maybe - and write scenes in which the baby is trying to figure out how to do that. Maybe a scene where the baby gets to eat food for the first time and they can decide whether to co-operate or to throw the food everywhere. They could meet some relatives, maybe including another baby, and decide how to interact with them.

[8bitRainbow]

Yeah my backup plan is to just scrap the infancy stage altogether. Even by a year old things get more interesting - you're moving around to different parts of the house, trying to communicate, dealing with the first personality stats. I'm just posting here to see if anyone might think of anything I haven't yet about how to make that first phase fun to play.

The milestones are kinda where my head has been, thanks for the suggestion! I just have to really stretch outside the box to find the fun gameplay element. I feel like it's there. Maybe. Possibly.

[Katy133]

Playing as an infant sounds interesting! For ideas, you may consider using surreal imagery and symbolism to portray how an infant may see the big, wide world (like showing scary things as monsters, or giving the player character a Teddy bear who talks to them), similar to the adventure game, Among the Sleep.

[8bitRainbow]

Oooh, I really love your suggestions Katy133. Especially the imaginary friend plushy that's viewed as an interactive, alive NPC.. maybe until your character grows up enough to make the heartbreaking decision to put make-believe behind them. (Totally makes me think of Inside Out and that imaginary friend guy, haha). I will definitely use this idea!