This is just a concept here so please bear with me. I was thinking that it might be interesting to try to create a truly "interactive" action movie. These are the main points in this concept. The game should last about 2 hours played straight through from start to climatic finish. The game should feel seamless, fluid cutscenes should be in there to provide quick changes between stages and hide loading. (i.e. the character reaches a car at the end of a stage, and jumps in and begins a quick drive that loads a driving stage. The player should be unable to "Lose." However actions taken during the game will change the outcome/upcoming stages, and various endings should be available depending on actions taken. The goal here is to pick up the game, and have an interesting two hours of play that you can sit through and yet still have some replayability. I know this isn't so much a game concept, but just a more of a genre concept. Ideas for games could be: Western with gun fights, horse riding etc. Star fighter with lasers and ships. Die Hard, etc...

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The entire game is a retelling; every time you die, you hear the prince say, "No, no, no... that's not how it happened," or something else to that effect. The cutscenes are short, rendered with the in-game engine so they look seamless, and the camera does some "cinematic" things in certain contexts.

Play it, if you haven't.

Just a quick question to ponder while doing your homework:
What is an interactive movie?
interactive movie = game
non interactive game = movie

That beeing said:
Game with movie-like gameplay: Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy
Movie where you can change the outcome: Ray - Part 1

The idea sounds basicly like a sandbox enviroment game with a time-limmit on 2 hours.

Regarding the subject of the player dying, there are some options:
*make it really really hard to die - and then throw a gameover, along the lines of Prey or 24(the story continues from another perspective).
*save each 5-10 minutes and have a flashback style, or something. Something like a what-if movie like Lola Rennt ot something along thoose lines. Basicly if the player dies, load the game that was saved 5-10 minutes earlier in a flash back/replay style.
*make it impossible for your character to die, along the lines of Superman or Unbreakable.
*make it impossible for your character to die, only transport him/her/it to the closest hospital with some optional character that says "I thought I lost there for a second", something like gta.

on the other hand I think the OP means that the player should be able to die, not loose a mission.

^ my 5 cents

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Original post by Anonymous Poster how would the game handle the player dieing? it would be very boring to watch your character die and then come back to life through some plot device, evey level.

Who said the player had to die?

Ever play startrek borg? You could make and action game similarly. The main idea
with the game being
that it is a movie, from a first person perspective (could be third person) where
the main character can reach plot points and choose a path to take. Most paths in this game
were dead ends, just fun ways to watch yourself get killed. But it is something to think about.

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Just a quick question to ponder while doing your homework: What is an interactive movie? interactive movie = game non interactive game = movie

I understand this. But I'm looking for an experience for a player where at the end of the roughly two hours they get up from the game with the same feeling as if they had just watched a really good movie.

Its not quite a sandbox. The term sandbox is used more to describe free play sorts of games. This concept is not like that at all. Imagine "Stages" in the game having certain if/then checks in them depending on what happens and choices the players make.

I.E. A fight with a boss scene, if the player wins, he goes on to scene A where he finds out critical information and makes his way to "Mr Big." From this point on he's on Track A of scenes.

If he loses however, he moves on to scene B, where he wakes up in Mr Bigs mansion in a jail cell and must figure out how to get out...this puts him on Track B of scenes.

Some gameplay scenes could be as simple as Resident Evil 4 Cutscenes where button presses made at the right time, or they could be Driving Scenes, Starfox fighters on rails scenes etc.


However in all cases, the player should not reach a game-over screen until the story(as played out by his actions) resolves.

The player should be allowed to fail scenes, but these lead to alternate scenes and endings than if they succeded.

Similar to an gameish choose your own adventure book.

So the user goes through some flowchart of stages where he can only do what he is allowed by the plot points and there's a time constraint for each level? So its like Time Crisis, only instead of dying you go to a different level? Or is it more like Dragon's Lair? What prevents the user from f'ing around and making the story seam...uh...ful? I would assume the challenge is to get the "best" ending. How is it challenging, why is it challenging?

Basically, you're talking about Phantasmagoria which was released on seven CDs at a time when most games didn't fill one.

It is by far the most unsatisfying title I have ever experienced in over 25 years of gaming (and I've played some real stinkers). I still can't believe that Roberta Williams (the designer of the King's Quest series) put her name on it.

The main problems with it were:-

1. It cost the same as a game (much more than a movie).
2. It had virtually no gameplay.
3. The images were of a much lower standard than a movie.
4. The player had limited control.
5. It had limited replayability.

Basically, it was not as good as a game, nor as good as a movie.

I've always thought that games like Tomb Raider: Legends and Halo were created to flow like a movie. I definitely walked away from Halo feeling like I watched a terrific movie.

I've actually played more games that flow like movies than games that do not.

It's an interesting idea in concept, but I fear that it will fall in practice unless you make some compromises. There are some incompatibilities between film and games that you'd have to work around.

Firstly, part of the magic that makes a really good film is the choices of camera shots made by the cinematographer. However that usually doesn't translate well to an interactive game where you need to have a relatively stable view of the environment - especially in an action game. You'll have to lose some of the filmic quality right off the bat.

Second - most films, even action blockbusters, only have short snippets of action dispersed with plot dialog. Will you make only the action sequences playable, or will the dialog be interactive as well? Plus the action sequences may be a little short if you go with the movie length; most movie to game conversions pad out the action sequences enormously. You can probably work around this but it will give a different "feel" from most action games.

Thirdly though, films generally have a certain structure to their plot that you'll have to do away with if you make it interactive. For example: an action film often goes along with an introduction to set things up, bad guy does someting evil, hero tries to stop bad guy but gets beaten up, hero then trains up, slowly beats all the bad guys minions in order of strength before big climatic show down at the end (include romantic subplot as well [smile]). If you have a different structure, it will lose some of the dramatic punch. If the hero just keeps losing, he isn't much of a hero. But if the hero just keeps effortlessly winning, then there isn't much of a threat for him to prove his heroic nature.

However what I think will be a serious setback is what you do about all the possible choices the player can make. I'll assume the player can make one plot critical decision every ten minutes in your film-like game, and each decision is binary (i.e. yes/mo, win/lose, true/false etc.). That's not a lot of decision making power - in a two hour movie that's only twelve decisions made. Yet if every decision counts and subtly effects the ending, that means you'll need to cope with 2 to the power of 12 different paths through the story - that's 4096 possible endings! There's no way you can do that, so you're going to have to make some compromises as to which decisions count and which do not. But this will have an effect on your interactivity and make your game much more like a movie than a game.

In essence, I'm not sure it will work well. The strength of a movie is to be offered a story that has been hand-tailored by a team of talented artists to be a single linear experience, whereas the strength of a game lies in the interactive choices and the challenges presented to the player. There's some overlap in the two genres and certainly you can take some elements of quality film making and apply them to games, but taking that too far will leave you with something that resembles a bad movie more than a good game.