Original post by zer0wolf I thought about this and I'm sure a lot of other people have to. The concept seems cool, but you need a reason for it or it'd just be a gimmick.
What if you accept that it's a gimmick? Gimmicks can be entertaining. I'm a fan of mind games, and enjoy being fooled. Perhaps not many other people are the same?
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The problem I see with the ideas you lay out is that they seem be more like cinematics than gameplay, or interactive experiences. Having a hokey dream sequence isn't something that is really going to add to a player's experience.
The biggest incentive (for me) to show dreams would be to play out interesting scenarios that can't happen in the game's reality without ruining it. Beyound that, they would be just as interactive as the real world.
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..you could view the fight through the eyes of a bye-stander (such as the dying damsel), or you could literally redo to the fight.
That's a good one. Seeing your character through someone else's eyes. It would be an obvious dream, but a cool one. Perhaps fighting yourself with a bad guy character would be interesting.
I'd recommend formalizing this a bit, so that when it happens it always happens at the beginning or end of some organized sequence (like a transition between mission). This could prevent frustration where you think you're making progress but you're really not.
It would be cool if you could do this like the dream sequences in the first Terminator, like the one where Reese has stopped his car to get some sleep near a construction yard. It was cool how the treads of the bulldozer slid smoothly into the treads of the Hunter Killer. Unfortunately, that's something you have control of only when you can control the camera.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
I've considered this as an aspect of gameplay before. One possible use for a seperate dream-like existence can be to search the protagonists own subconscious.
Although the worlds are the same, the interactive characters (town/local NPCs) act slightly differently (possibly as different aspects of the character's personality?). This ties in nicely for allowing there to be some benefit to the addition of the dreams as well as keeping some sense of immersion.
The game I applied this to was a bit of a mystery/adventure-style game, which allowed for plot progression once you'd found out more information about yourself and your past. The sequences were brought on by certain events triggering memories in your character and were never during any kind of battle or other interaction with environment or supporting characters in the game.
Admittedly the game lacked some of the possible graphical touches that could have made it a more enjoyable additional feature. I guess the thing to watch out for (as already mentioned) is to make sure it fits in with the story and style of game.
Could be interesting to make a "psychic" ability for the character that the stronger psychic they are, the more likely they are to dream about something around them. Say an upcoming drought or an enemy king has just dispatched their army to attack the player's town...
Original post by JasRonq Make the dreams have consequences for the player character, but not on the game world.
This one sprang to mind immediately. Let any wounds, items gained or lost, and even player death carry over to the real world when the player wakes, but don't change the real world itself. This makes dreams a little dangerous, but potentially very beneficial (perhaps a powerful artefact can only be obtained in the dream world). I think the idea came from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels.
The player walks his character up to a desk and searches it. A cut scene begins. The cut scene is automated so you have that standard transition effect. You see him pull some documents out of a drawer and maybe there's a voice over (or text) with his thoughts about their relevancy. Scene ends with another transition effect. The player expects to have control in the waking world but the character is actually lost in a day dream. The room, fresh in the character's mind, looks identical (or at least very close) to what it is in the waking world. As the player moves further away, the dream world coresponds less to the real world and more towards what (and where and who) the character is thinking about.
Any place where the character would have time to think about things or sleep could be a potential entry point into a day dream. Transition effects that we've all come to expect along side certain gameplay elements is your opportunity to sneak the player into dreamland.
I also thought of the Wheel of Time books, and the "dream world" that parodied reality there. In that story, though, it took a lot of training, talent or supernatural artifacts to purposefully inhabit the dream. I'd rather see dreams as premonitions, hypothetical scenarios or opportunities to scout your own subconscious, for character development or clues, instead of an expanded map area with restrictive access rules.
One of the older Wavinator threads dealt with insanity, and game situations where a monster would be shown in the space occupied by an ally, or a poisonous, HP-draining cloud would be imagined in a room. The player deals with the situation that he sees, but when the madness passes and reality returns, he finds himself riddling his mates' corpse with plasma bolts or cowering in the corner of a normal corridor, turning blue from holding his breath for no good goddamned reason.
That's what I'd like to see. The need to rest at regular intervals seems ideal for this. You wake up, head over the hill, and find a horrific beast snacking on the corpse of the damsel you meant to rescue. You charge, vanquish the beast, and check on the girl, to find he sitting up and glaring at you with ragged eye sockets, then leaping for your throat. Zombie? Demonic possession? Just a dream? How do you react? What do you do? If you kill her in the dream, do you lose affinity points? If she kills you, do you lose affinity points?
Is it a good idea to assail the player with doubt? Does your game require character micromanagement, and does this feature lead to a coin-toss to decide whether their perfect "lawful" status gets boned? Costs? Benefits?
It's a great idea, academically, but it has serious implications for game design, and there's no good precedent that I know of, so there's a good chance that the first few guys who try to make it work with ruin their games with it. Who will stand in that vanguard?
