This is a mock-up game proposal I came up with after reading all the great input in my Descent Into Madness thread. I decided to post it in a different thread since the replies I am looking for is different; the Descent into madness thread is a general discussion on the topic of insanity and games, but here I want you to post your thoughts and feedback on this particular idea. Thank you! ----------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION TO SHAMANISM: This game will be based around the idea of a Shaman - a man who has once been insane, but managed to cure himself, and who because of that now has the supernatural ability to cure others. From The Food Of Gods, by Terrence McKenna: "The novice shaman, after a history of psychosomatic ilness or psychological aberration that may be more or less intense, will at last begin to undergo a initiatory sickness and trances; he will lie as though dead or in deep trance for days on end. During this time he is approached in dreams by his helping spirits, and may receive instruction from them. Invariably during this prolonged trance the novice will undergo an episode of mystical death and resurrection; he may see himself reduced to a skeleton and then clothed with new flesh; or he may see himself boilden in a caldron, devoured by the spirits, and then made whole again; or he may imagine himself being operated on by the spirits, his organs removed and replaced with 'magical stones' and then sewn up again." In short, the the shaman is transformed from a profane state of being into a sacred state of being. He is more than merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself, who is cured, and most importantly, must shamanize in order to remain cured. This, in my opinion, makes for a very interesting protagonist in a game. SET AND SETTING: Reading the above you probably thought I was proposing some sort of indian game set in the amazon basin or wild west. Wrong. You are Aldous Turns, a private eye in depression era New York focusing on the occult and paranormal. When your wife and 5-year old son died in a car accident a few years back you turned to junk and alcoholism, and eventually, insanity, but unlike other madmen you were mystically cured and thus became a shaman. Your ability to communicate with the spirit world aid you greatly in your work as a private detective. The game will have a very "film noir" feel to it, picture dusty speakeasy bars, early jazz and piss stained gutter landscapes. At the begining of the game you take a job from a beutiful young lady (what else?) dressed in the clothes of mouring, begging you to track down her lost sister. Her motives for contacting you appear to be much greater however and soon you find yourself battling an army of "darklings" (must come up with a more creative name) who have infected the spiritual plane. THE ACTUAL GAMEPLAY: So Aldous Turns becomes a modern day shaman with the ability to share the subconsious visions of others, to do battle in other peoples minds. In addition he can enter the spiritual realm where he can communicate with spirits to gain important information. The two most important stats for the player is the "stability rating" and the "spiritual stamina". The spiritual stamina is a measure of Aldous shamanic abilities and works somewhat like mana in other games. Being in the spiritual plane drains Aldous Spiritual Stamina, and if he run out of it he will begin to loose hit points. It is in the spiritual plane that Turns will battle the darklings who posses people and poision their spirits. Which brings us to the other stat, the "stability rating," which represents your mental health. If you don't kill darklings on a regular basis, this will drop (remember, a shaman must shamanize in order to remain cured) and if it drops you become vurnable to attacks from the darklings of the spirit world, they will derange you and eventually kill your soul (the mystical equivalent of a frontal lobotomy ;P) So basically you will find people who are infected by darklings (maybe you can see some kind of weird light from their aura or something, i don't know), enter their minds (i don't know how this process will work yet) and finally eliminate the darkling. In doing this you will receive clues that will help you understand your situation, and find the root to this evil which is corrupting the spiritual plane. I guess finally you will eliminate the evil and the credits will roll, heh ;P. -- So what do you think? I haven't got much figured out yet, but I think it is the start of something that has some potential ...

Hmm, there seems to be a disconnect between your story concept and your gameplay concept. :/ If the unique thing about the character is that he cures his own madness, to me that suggests strongly that the gameplay should feature him fighting (possibly by solving puzzles rather than literal combat) and defeating his own madness before trying to cure the rest of the world. And the idea of 'curing one's own madness' does not at all match your dream examples, where 'spirits' are doing the actual curing. Instead your examples imply some odd sacrifice, such that your shaman can't be considered quite human after he is cured, which doesn't fit with the idea that curing others keeps him sane, or why and how this is so.

Why film noir? Why a dissapintingly standard kill-the-horde-of-monsters game mechanic?

"Why a dissapintingly standard kill-the-horde-of-monsters game mechanic?"

There isn't really a horde of monsters per-se, in fact there is only one darkling (or whatever I am going to call these things) for each person you are trying to cure. So in this way its gonna be more like Shadow Of The Collosus really. You wont kill a darkling by simply slashing it with a sword or shooting it with a gun, you must solve some kind of puzzle inside of this guys head in order to do this - you need to figure out what it is in this persons psyche that the darkling feeds on. So other than those battles on the astral plane, the game is going to be combat-free. All of the real world work will consist of talking to people, searching for clues etc. So it's like a detective game with a twist.

"Why film noir?"

I always liked the feel of film noir movies and it is really an enviroment where I can see this bizarre Aldous Turns character step in. He is supposed to be like something out of a Lovecraft novel - a middle aged literature-geek obsessed with the occult donning a moustasche.

"Hmm, there seems to be a disconnect between your story concept and your gameplay concept. :/ If the unique thing about the character is that he cures his own madness, to me that suggests strongly that the gameplay should feature him fighting (possibly by solving puzzles rather than literal combat) and defeating his own madness before trying to cure the rest of the world. And the idea of 'curing one's own madness' does not at all match your dream examples, where 'spirits' are doing the actual curing. Instead your examples imply some odd sacrifice, such that your shaman can't be considered quite human after he is cured, which doesn't fit with the idea that curing others keeps him sane, or why and how this is so."

Well he is not insane anymore, he is just liable to become insane again unless he keeps on shamanizing. The best analogy I can think of is how vampires need
blood.

I am sorry I am not that good at expressing ideas in text.

Madvillain.

*shrug* No need to apologize, I'm just posting my thoughts because you asked and because I think the concept is interesting. I'm not personally a film noir or lovecraft fan, so I'm probably not even in your target audience, and any of my opinions should thus be taken with a grain of salt.

So why do the darklings exist?


(Here's a random thought - maybe a Shaman, instead of curing his own madness, goes the other direction and embraces it, learns to use it. And he needs to 'eat' darklings to fuel his madness?)

Oh no, I thought your post was great because it made me push a little harder to get explain myself. I am sorry if my response sounded a wee bit aggressive though, I definitively did not mean for it to sound like that at all. Rereading I realized it sounded like I was defending my point in a debate or something!

I want to make the darklings represent somehow the leap our society has gone from the more spiritual world of the archaic shaman. I realize I am probably going to have scrap this idea because it just come from my tendency to antagonize the corporate world we're living in. But politics doesn't really belong in games in my opinion. After all, playing a game is supposed to be an escape from all that, right? On the other hand I do want to make games that actually express ideas the way books and movies often do, employing more literary devices and symbolism than games normally do.

Thank you.

-Madvillainy.

Well personally I think the meaningfulness of literature is based on philosophy, including political philosophy, so if you want to have a literary quality story in a game you have to put your philosophy into it. Look at Final Fantasy 7, one of the most popular RPGs ever and it has a quite blunt preachy anti-corporate environmentalist message. If you think something about modern life is bad for people, that's a good thing to incorporate into your bad guys.

The idea that machines and other artificial parts of modern civilization are bad for the soul is a fairly common idea (although a somewhat ironic idea for anyone interested in computer games to hold). If you were to investigate what philosophers have said on the topic and come up with some fantasy worldbuilding which logically supports your position, that would probably give your game a strong and interesting theme.

So what makes the modern world less spiritual than the ancient one, and what do darklings have to do with it?

I think the spiritual-vs-materialistic contrast would be interesting to explore, personally. The game concept sounds interesting but is a little disjointed, as sunandshadow has already addressed. I'm definitely all for philosophy and deep, thought-provoking content in games.

A quick suggestion off the top of my head: why not have these darklings simply be the corporation-fed, materialist "demons" of each individual? Perhaps your targets are corrupt CEOs and managers (think Enron scandal), or maybe mindless consumers who have lost their logic to the allure of advertising media. Maybe each character you have to save has some edge of insanity themselves, and you have to confront it to save them and move closer to the overall "big plot element."

There's two basic ways you can take this concept. One is to help people override their insanity, and the danger is that by coming into contact with that insanity, you risk becoming it. Basically, the protagonist's natural level is "sane" and overcoming the game challenges requires flirting with insanity but not succumbing to it. In this case your character needs some kind of altruistic motive. (Or maybe you can play up the apparent contradiction between this self-serving, be-a-shaman-to-survive thing, and the fact that it's actually changing the world.)

The other route is that your protagonist defaults to "insane" and has to sort out these darklings to keep a level head. IMHO this would be a more hazardous way to design it, as the main thing that affects difficulty is time; if the player is fast, they never get too far gone, and they're fine. On the other hand, if the player takes a side trip to explore some cool little side feature in one of the bars, they get artificially handicapped. I can't think easily of any ways to mitigate the difficulty aside from time and still make sense in this approach. It fits with the "ascent from madness" idea from your last thread, but doesn't quite add up to an interesting game mechanic as far as I can see at the moment.


Of course, you could get really dark with it, and have your protagonist dispell his own insanity by strategically moving parts of his insanity into other characters... that'd be pretty twisted (which I don't think is in any way a reason not to do it), but you could get some really fascinating philosophy in there [smile]

"have your protagonist dispell his own insanity by strategically moving parts of his insanity into other characters"

Now we're talking! I really love this idea. It's like you are saving people by telling them "reality is not really what you think it is, have you ever thought about that?" ... Man, that'd be so sweet, but how does one incorporate that into gameplay?

"why not have these darklings simply be the corporation-fed, materialist "demons" of each individual?"

Originally, this was my idea, but I am afraid it will seem a bit cheap if you know what I mean. Also, if I would go with that, I'd probably be better off with a cyberpunk setting, which I feel is rather trite (even if I am a total Gibson/Sterling/Stephenson fanboy). I would like the darklings to embody this whole "will to power" concept: people who become powerhungry become corrupt, forget about Gaia (or mother nature, whatever you call it) and become receptible to this "spiritual disease". But yeah, the people who have darklings lurking around them are probably going to wind up being mindless consumers and CEOS.

Do I sound to much like a lysergic acid-fried hippie tryin to make a game,
or do you think this is moving toward something that would be worth someones
time?

The way I see it is: since I am all indie anyway, I have no need to satisfy
a market like the big boys. So I can just mess around with it anyway I want. =D

-Madvillain

Well, you'll have to walk a bit of a knife edge. The problem with trying to portray a compelling philosophical point, in any medium, is that it's easy to come off as trite, preachy, or just plain cliche.

I don't really have any experience with doing this kind of philosophical concept in a game, so take this with as much salt as you like: but personally, I'd recommend that you figure out the overall "point" you want to make first, and then find the most interesting way to deliver that point as you can. A good tactic is to use contrast to help highlight your point: these power-hungry, corrupted people are causing trouble (via the meddling of the darklings) and they have to be "freed" by the more environmentally aware people who are trying to keep things in balance (or whatever). In gaming, this contrast can be tied directly to the gameplay mechanic for best results.


As for actually creating a gameplay mechanic... that's the tricky bit [smile] Here's a quick idea that might work nicely:

Aldous has occasional abrupt "flashback" sequences where he recalls various segments of a long vision he once had. Various elements of the world trigger these recollections; walking into a certain bar might reveal a part of the vision that pertained to that bar, etc. The flashback isn't done in the usual "put everything in a white mist and make the sound echo a bit" mode; instead, the flashbacks occur by way of the actual game world appearing to become very surreal and bizarre, in a sort of hallucinogenic way. Aldous might see the face of an important character form in a puddle on the sidewalk, and reach out a watery arm, grab his ankle, and start tugging him into the underworld, etc. Basically, crazy stuff happens, and the player has to figure out how these events are related and connected.

Where it gets interesting is that each time Aldous recalls a segment of the vision, he makes a note of it in his journal. These notes can be used, in some special location (or with some special items, or both) to distill the essence of that vision segment and capture it in a special potion or tonic. Giving this substance to a character in-game causes them to experience that same part of the vision. Once this segment has successfully been passed on to another person, Aldous is "free" of that part of his nightmare.

When a darkling-possessed character experiences the "right" vision segment, it will trigger a train of thought in that character's mind that will help free them. For instance, some power-hungry CEO is shown a vision of his family trapped in a burning building (feel free to make that significantly more dark if you like) and re-evaluates his life priorities. So basically the game comes down to figuring out the right things to stimulate people with to help them.


Of course the actual details of the system have to be ironed out: how do players get hints as to the right combination? How are segments discovered and administered to the targets? How do you prevent a possible situation where the player has 200 segments, 200 targets, and doesn't have any idea who to give which segment? What happens if a target gets the "wrong" segment? etc.