Friday, December 28, 2012
Dream Game
Wilderness Survival (Placeholder name) is a first-person explorative sandbox crafting game that follows a player's journey to adjust to the sudden disaster of being stranded on an island and survive.
Inspired by stories like The Castaway by Robert Zemeckis, Suicide Island by Mori Kouji, and The Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.
Gameplay-wise it takes inspirations from minecraft for its crafting system, roguelike elements that creates tension and drama to simple decisions, and open world explorative games like Skyrim and Minecraft.
Ideally it would have four seasons that change the type of flora and fauna available and have an effect on your character as well.
Skill-based crafting that doesn't become a quick-time event or a thoughtless mini-game.
Crafting would be less abstract so that killing a rabbit would yield you with more or less what you would get if you actually gut a rabbit. Bones, meats, and hides at least.
Inventory system will be realistic too in the sense that you need to realistically lug around your equipment.
Combat is difficult to do well but the closest thing to what I like and think it is appropriate is monster hunter, but less.. over the top.
Story-wise it is told implicitly through the environment and the players craft their own story by using the game similar to FTL.
Visually I'm thinking along the lines of Dear Esther. Something grounded in reality and never strays far from it. It can have fantastic looking scenery, just don't want it to delve into fantasy or use alien plant-life. I want things to stay within the realm of earth.
Any suggestions and comments would be appreciated. I am also thinking if this could work as an RPG of sorts then the combat would become easier to handle, but I'm still not too convinced that if it becomes too heavily numbers-based, it might make it go in a weird direction.
EDIT: I got another idea where after you reach a certain level of sustenance, you will find a storage of glass bottles, pencils, and papers. You can send messages by writing your message and send it to others and you might get or not get messages from other players (online messaging kinda) but you would have to search the coasts for the bottles.
Or maybe glass can be a craftable item.
EDIT 2: Another idea is that you can sustain injuries on your leg and such but you would need to be able to communicate that to the player without making it a flat-out percentage bar because absolute certainty about where something works or that takes away from the illusion and the confusion that would come with ones well being. You can understand that you are in pain that you might be pushing it but you don't really know the breaking point where something would go wrong. So when you fall from heights, an indicator of the well being of your leg could be from fine, okay, to the spectrum of dangerous. Healthy - Tired/Weathered - Injured - Soreness. Maybe find a better criteria of status.
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Miasmata is a game that is the closest to the game I want to make, but its emphasis is on orienteering and botany. Made by two brothers. Ridiculous
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ionfx.com/product_pc_Miasmata.php
Interesting idea for a survival game Sam. The survival game genre has been gaining popularity recently with such games as Don't Starve, Project Zomboid, and etc. So you would have to add some sort of different element to your survival game or an improvement on an existing idea. In this case, I think you could run with the true realistic survival experience, such as the taking into account, weight of spoils, hunger, water, shelter, injury/disease, and etc.
ReplyDeleteI really think you got something there with glass bottle communication, where you can send messages to other players.
Conceptually I feel that you got the general idea for the game down. To take it to the next level, you can start thinking about the game interface (whether you want it to be 2D/3D or 1st person/3rd person), combat system, crafting system, and etc.
Cool idea, I also had an idea for a competitive online multi-player survival game inspired from the Hunger Games novels. Basically like the survival game you described except it would be multi-player kinda like a death match type game last person surviving wins. You would have all those survival aspects like hunger, illness, etc, but you would also have to consider combat from other players and traps set by them.
ReplyDeleteYour idea for a survival game is a bit different from the one Sam is creating. Create a new blog post and let us know what kind of survival game you want to create. I want some details, the more the better.
DeleteMiasmata has done this, and also Orienteer http://www.kongregate.com/games/edenicholas/orienteer has done this thing where it matters where you step because in most games, you can just walk up steep hills as if its nothing. But in these games, it takes account into how you step which is something that I feel is really important.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like you want to make an extreme hardcore survival game, which sounds great. The only thing I am worried about is how in-depth you want the game to be. There are many elements and factors, which I feel can be very helpful in letting the player become emerged into the game. My only fear is that the idea for your game would become too complex, with so much things to take into account for. It could be overwhelming to the player. However, if pulled off, I think you would have one great survival game. Let us know what kind of game perspective/other ideas you come up with.
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