Common Goal

My Goal throughout this project is to produce a unique game that showcases my skills, taxes my knowledge and puts emphasis on the area that I want to go into when I enter the industry, I hope to develop a world which shows a keen eye for detail and has characters that feel part of the world not just through their look but through the way they move and interact with the world around them.  From a game standpoint I want to give the player a unique mechanic that gives them a range of possibilities and lets them have fun with it in an open puzzle world where more than one combinations of completing set puzzles exists.

I’m hoping for the adventure to be an adrenaline pumping as the puzzles will require quick thinking and precise movement, there will also usually be something else going on that will quicken your pace during the puzzles which you will have to be on the lookout.  You will also be constantly against the clock because your characters own mortality is at stake when you get thrown into the game world.

Stand Back, It’s time for SCIENCE!

So what’s the big idea? Well my mechanic is based around the world of the very small and what happens to particles when they are being observed, it turns out that a number of strange effects happen that make particles quite interesting, such as being able to exists in more than once place at the same time, being able to cross dimensions freely, teleportation, gaining mass and speed along with exponential increases of energy and size.  All these strange abilities are granted to a particle based on if someone is looking at it or not and for me I found this quite interesting and thought; what if I scale this up took these strange abilities and applied them to a humanoid? How would the player react to a world that could change you at a moment’s notice?

Mechanics

So how does this all work I hear you cry? Well just like in Quantum Theory the power of observation can change how a particle behaves, this in game terms means that when you are seen by a conscious observer such as an NPC they will have an effect on you which will change your appearance and properties within the world, when you are not being observed you will drift into a state of flux, neither here nor there in an either world where nothing is certain, the player will battle with these 2 different states in order to complete a number of challenges and puzzles which will tax their reactions and quick thinking skills to their limits.

There will be a set number of skills that the player will be able to use in each of the states and the player will always be able to bring attention to themselves if they are in a tight spot if it looks like they are stuck without the relevant ability to get them out, although there will always be a way in which you can complete a puzzle or overcome a challenge in both states.

Setting, Style and Story

The setting of the game takes place far off in the future, off on a distant world, in the same galaxy as our own where all but a shell remains of a previous civilisation.  If we were to look down upon this shell we would see small tribes people who have made this shell their home they see skyscrapers, monuments and vast industrial buildings as natural formations, they have no explanation for what makes up the super strong alloys that surround them or why some of the walls talk, or even why the world lights up at night; to them it is magic, its meant to be; but one thing they do know is when you reach the coming of age you body will start to change which means that you must take a test which will send you off on a journey where your body and soul will be changed, transformed into something new, something exciting, something spiritual.  The player will take control of a character that is ready to take these tests, they will journey out from their tribe that they have known all their life and travel deep within the city into the labyrinth where they will vanquish creatures and complete puzzles and after all this they will return a changed and an enlighten being, free from their own mortality and allowed to exist anywhere, anyplace or in any time they so please.

The style of shell which the tribe find themselves in will be a clean futuristic contemporary look with a juxtapose of tech gothic exterior of the buildings with crisp, bold and clean lines for the interiors, on top of this everything will be decaying or look as if it is on the verge shattering if anyone so much as looks at it much like a Faberge Egg.  The tribe themselves will have a botched look where they have taken the technology around them and used it for their own needs, they have a keen eye for colour so most items which they convert for use have painted emblems in bright florescent colours this is done as a warning to other tribes and to allow them to be seen and noticed from far off in the distance.

What am I going to produce?

What I am going to produce depends entirely on what my skill set allows, if I cannot get the mechanic working in a dynamic way e.g. the player can flow seamlessly from one state to another then I will go about creating more static levels with defined areas where the player is forced into either state to complete an objective, as to what these levels will encompass, I’m looking at creating one level from the start of the game which be like a small training level where your character first starts experiencing this new power and one from the middle of the game where the player is knee deep in a puzzle deep within the city.

This isn’t all; for anything that I can’t do due to my lack of ability I will do a mock-up of how the mechanic would work, showing the mechanic in an animation which will be rendered inside of the UDK, I will also do this for mechanic which I managed to get working but couldn’t quite get them the way I wanted.