@Toraque:
A dialog-heavy description of a game isn''t a great idea, but it focuses less on interactivity (which is the core of the game) and more on narrative/presentation. A game is about what the gamer/player does, not what he sees/hears.

Furthermore, I find that in games where the gamer is expected to identify strongly with the protagonist - essentially adopt that identity - speech by that character breaks the illusion. Note that Gordon Freeman never speaks in Half-Life, and reportedly won''t in the sequel. There''s good reason for that.

It''s also better to let the gamer explore and come to his own conclusions rather than presenting the conclusions of some "character" for the gamer to adopt.

When a film motivates the viewer by challenging them to predict the crescendo of the movie (Murder Mysteries etc) the use of an internal monologue is accepted as the player appreciated their role as spectator. As such, I would like to re-iterate the points previously made by other posters that having the character speak for the player draws them away from the role. I feel games are about immersing yourself in the provided environment and that an internal monologue would be conuter-productive if your game is going to be built around discovering the truth. The challenge for the player should not be to solve the problems of the character they are supposedly playing, but to solve their own problems

i.e
''Where the f**k am I?'' ''How the hell did I get here?'' and ''What the chuff am I supposed to do?'' Not, ''where does the story lead this character next?''.

It also allows you to side-step the potential pit-fall of finding voice acting and/or script material.


I really enjoyed the film Cube as it left me asking questions and trying to guess the reasoning and purpose behind the contraption. It would be nice to experience something similar, but from a personal and interactive point-of-view.

Its an interesting an idea... not really sure what a hypercube is but I'll give my opions none the less.

I think this would make an interesting opening and help to add the mystery of the story.

Starts off with no intro movie or anything.
It begin with all the character can is a white, pure white and nothing else. The charcter reilizes he's lying down, he stands up to find himself standing in a white room with a white platform which he was lying on and a single door.

Once the player leave the room. they find themself in another white room but this one has a telephone sitting on a pedstal and a glass wall across the center of the room. Immeditly the character takes over and pickups up the phone and tries to call home, however all they get is the sound of a phone off the hook that beeps over and over agian. placing the phone down the player finds themself with nothing left to do in the room eventually they return to the previous room. Only this time the room is slightly diffrent the room is still white except now there is a second door on the opposite side of the room and a dead body lying on the floor with a 7 digit number written in blood beside it.

Now you begin to mess with players mind a bit. No matter which door they go through they will arrive back at the phone and mirror room. But the first time they return there they will see a strange looking man with a distorted face calling someone, on a phone since the other side of the glass is identical to this side. The character then goes and bangs on the glass trying to get the other persons attention but to no avail eventually the other man walks out the door behind him and leaves.

If they leave and come back they will then be greeted with terrifing scene of the man with a distorted face banging on the glass.

Essentially the glass will act as window into the past, it may be tricky to program but basically it will show the last series of events that occured in the room. This could then be used to aid in story telling and problem solving. For instance at some point the player may see a creature or person dragging a dead body through the room. As for the phone it could act as way to manipulate the cube essentialy dialing correct numbers into the phone effects the orientaion of the surrounding rooms and cubes. The player knows they have dialed a correct number when they get a phone off the hook sound.

This could all tie in with the story maybe instead of the characters wife dying in car accident. There was a robbery gone bad at their home and the character returned there only to discover his dead wife lying beside a telephone with the reciever hanging off the hook.

Maybe he was even charaged for her murder atnd the cube is some kind of mental prison where convicts are placed until they rehabilitate themselves.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I'm a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document



[edited by - TechnoGoth on November 28, 2003 4:19:50 AM]

The more I think about this idea the more I like it, but I can't help thinking it would be too easy to fall into common traps. Dead wives and what-not are all a bit cliche. I like the idea of warped minds, and it reminds me of some crazy upside-down rooms in Max Payne (and the plot in fact, dead wife etc etc).

If you are going to use a warped environment generating questions for the player, you don't want them to go...


"So where the hell am I then?"
"Ah yes, I'm in another plot involving murdered wives"

quote: Original post by TechnoGoth
As for the phone it could act as way to manipulate the cube essentialy dialing correct numbers into the phone effects the orientaion of the surrounding rooms and cubes. The player knows they have dialed a correct number when they get a phone off the hook sound.

Great idea TechnoGoth.


Maybe you could incorporate an operator as some form of helper, a link with sanity, or even the eventual cause of the whole cube conundrum.

/me get's excited

ooh, ooh and if there were some sort of mathematical basis behind actions and cubes etc then you could call the game "operator". Woooh, works on two levels.

[edited by - m_wherrett on November 28, 2003 4:33:31 AM]

Wow, you guys are making me take a good long look at my assumptions here. Let me see if I can explain them.

The strong backstory and dialog heavy plot was chosen in my original idea to keep the player involved. My worry was that, if you put the character in a room with a telephone and no explanation, their first question won’t be ‘What am I doing here?’ but ‘What kind of game is this? This isn’t fun.’ That thought process hinged on the design being a hybrid, though—if it’s explicitly stated to be a puzzle, then the players’ preconceptions will be different. If they’d be different enough, I don’t know, but those are the choices you make.

I disagree that a character’s voice can intrude and break immersion. Half-life didn’t have it, and Valve explicitly stated that they chose not to have it because they wanted to have the player—Freeman, or Everyman, really—be transparent. Like any technique, it can be used badly, but there are enough examples of where it works that it shouldn’t be ruled out off the cuff.

The question is, though, once the player is in the first room, why do they care?

A second point on this line is: design to available skills and technology. I’m a terrible modeler, but a decent coder, writer and voice actor. With the tools available to me, the formula makes sense: use only one real model—the player—and have him fight himself. Lacking other characters to interact with, there’s really not many other ways to propel the story in a way that makes sense—explaining that the player’s in a virtual reality simulator that violates normal laws of physics, and why, isn’t going to be easy to do by showing them rooms where gravity is messed up.

But, since creativity on demand’s one of the most valuable skills you can have in this, let’s see what we can do. What do we know?

The player is in a virtual reality simulation where the normal laws of physics do not apply. Thus, we have, a world layout that’s a hypercube instead of a normal 3-d structure, limited time travel is available (a player can observe his previous actions, occasionally) and the means of getting in and getting out of this world are indirect.

We know that the player knows nothing of what has gone on before, and nothing about where he is or why he is there. I’ve always though amnesia was overdone, but if it’s necessary then there’s ways around it.

We want to avoid combat or action of any type—this lets us avoid having to model damage or weapons, which is a good thing—and morbidity is out, which is kinda sad from my perspective, since I usually have at least a 75% fatality rate in anything I write. Yeah, I also make a lousy PnP GM, but that’s another story.

In this puzzle, the story exists as an explanation and a goal—figuring out where the player is, and how to get out—rather than a driving element. The puzzle elements open up the game world, rather than providing plot points. Gameplay proceeds through interacting with world objects in order to solve individual riddles.

We avoid voice acting entirely. On the bright side, this would reduce development time considerably.

So, how about this:

Our player is an intelligence agent, sent to China on some mission with the cover story of being a reporter. The Chinese, not being very happy with this, want to find out who he’s working for—but his training has imprinted his cover story to such a degree that the only way to get past it is by hooking him up to this VR simulator, and picking his mind. Of course, they tried the usual routes of drugs and whatnot before this, so our hero’s in none too good shape mentally at this point—which explains the surrealism of the world he finds himself in.

The telephone dial is a direct link to his interrogators, and as such it gives us an opportunity for some interesting ‘The Prisoner’ scenes, if you remember the old television show. Any time it’s activated, we go into an option based text conversation mode, which starts out as the interrogator answering the phone with “Operator.” As the game progresses, different conversation options appear, which gives us a vehicle for moving the story—although the player has to solve the puzzles, and open up the world, first.

Any number of endings could be based on this, but it’s a start.

No don''t get me wrong I love the prisoner but I think the the idea of spy isn''t the best vehical for this kind of game.

I''d rather see a game driven from an intense trauma the character has under gone. Ideally if your writing skills are up to the challenge it would greatly add to the surrilism of the game if every object in the game was drawn directly from the truama, perhaps from the two most traumatic moment of the characters life. In that way that when the game reaches its climax or conclsion the player is rewared with a short movie showing the trauma and the player will be able to recgonize familer items and objects in the game.

As for the story the game should be driven forwards by the story the puzzels should be more then just vechiles to open new areas they should have a signficance with the rest of the story and ultimtly relate back to the trauma. Altough I should point out the game events should relate back to truma events in chronological order.


For instance if at part of the truma the character starts fumbling with his key chain to find the correct key to open his front door. This could be come an ingame puzzle that lets call it the key hole room puzzle. The room coom consits of dozens of key holes all along the walls. There would also be a pile of keys each diffrently shapped and sized, either in the room or in another room. The puzzles goal would be to either find the correct key and keyhole or the correct combiation of keys and keyholes to unlock in order open the new area. Depending on how morbid you want the game to be. You could have the key holes spray blood coating everything in a layer of blood, except for a series of numbers.

Part of the game should consist of discovering the mathmatical formula behind the manipulation of the cubes. This would then allow the move about the world freely and ultimatly bring them close to final freedom. perhaps the final way to escape the cube could be placing all the rooms in correct order so that player travels through the truma from its end back in time to its begining.



-----------------------------------------------------
Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

first off, I think the most important element here will be keeping the hypercube mathematically acurate. rooms should not be moving around with relation to each other any more than the square faces of a cube should.

The phone to operator idea is a good one... however, just as in Myst with the red and blue books, it should be them talking to you... not vice versa. Better yet, different colored phones could allow you to contact different people, all who were trying to manipulate you in a different way.

One of the things that was great in Myst and Riven was the ability to see things in the distance... things you wanted to get to, such as the massive golden dome, but were hard to reach without first making your way through puzzles. This drove the player to explore. Locking the player in tiny rooms that contain single items will make the world feel very linear, and open ended exploration would be preferable. The puzzles should be solvable in any order, and each upon completion aids in adding a bit to the story.

An idea I just had... make one of the faces a 'skybox' so to speak... completely empty. The 6 cubes attached to it would be situated so as to make the natural direction for down away from the sky box face. in this way, so long as you never go into the bottom room (opposite the sky box), down will stay 'correct' for all of the six rooms around the sky box. I'm going to use the cube example again, just to make it easier.

   ______  /|~~~~/| /~|~~~/ |/~~|~~/__||  /XX|XX/| /XXX|X/|/XXXX|/  

the plane marked with '~'s would be the sky box, and the planes touching it would be the regular rooms. now, in each of these rooms, walking through a door in the wall to an ajacent room keeps gravity consistent, relative to the sky. So long as the plane with X's is never entered, this will remain the case. Looking up at the sky from any room will yield a view of all the other explorable rooms (except the X one) from different angles. Imagine this in 3d :D.

[edited by - origamiman64 on November 28, 2003 4:16:29 PM]

A sky is a pretty huge difference for a room to have. What will this sky have? It could change in relation to how the player is doing in the game. From a vanilla sky to a crimson red sky to a deep blue moonlit sky. Phases of the moon could also play a part. Perhaps even have something like saturn in the distance of the sky to make it seem outerworldy. what happens when a player leaves something in the room when its angled properly, and then comes back to the room so it is upside down? Would it fall into the sky or would soemthing even crazier happen and it gets ripped open and inverted in on itself?

OrigamiMan64:

Have you thought about hashing together a quick example? Just something where a player moves the camera around in a hypercube, and can look around. I’m intrigued, but I’m having a real hard time picturing this.