Openers and Closers

Twenty two years ago, Roger Zelazney wrote his final book, called A Night In the Lonesome October. The book casts some of the West's most classic monsters as players in a cosmic Game to either open to door for the Elder Gods to pave over our world and construct a new one, or to shut the door and keep the world like it is.

The Game takes place over the month of October, with the players arriving and spending the month getting ready for the ritual at the end of the month. This includes gathering items of power, performing ritual sacrifices, collecting herbs, and of course surreptitiously sabotaging one another. Membership in the two sides--the Openers and the Closers--is kept secret for much of the month. Players find that knowing who the others are inspires sabotage, whereas anonymity breeds cooperation.

Players construct a home base where they perform their ministrations. The book's hero, Snuff, together with his master, Jack, collect monsters to serve as body guards during the final rituals in the game, gather body parts from the cemetery and weirdly specific items from town (a scrap of a green dress stolen from a woman with red hair). These home bases also figure into a complex piece of calculus for the location of the Game's ritual, at the center of which an altar must be placed.

This sounds like a really interesting video game! A team game where, for much of the match, you don't really know who your teammates are. Perhaps each player selects the side they're on. Then they're given tasks and strengths and weaknesses. Your character can't do every task on their own, so you have to collaborate, but someone who can help you out might work for the opposite faction, so you have to keep it secret. 

So I envision a game going like this. You're given a side: openers or closers, and a series of tasks. You awaken on a map, and must select your home base, and set about defending it while completing your tasks. You investigate your neighbors to determine whether or not they're allies, if they can help you with your task or not. You might build trust with people, trading information on third parties. Or you might just try to poison everybody and take all the glory for yourself.

I picture a game that is full of secret monsters, spells and traps. A combination of a Lovecraft fantasy story, Assassin's Creed multiplayer mode, and a team based objective game.

Animal Crossing: Zombie Horde

Recently I watched Yahtzee Croshaw's review for Animal Crossing: New Leaf, wherein he laments that the game is, at its heart, a simulation of a suburban hellscape. You eagerly wait for the fish to respawn so you can go fishing, then you go catch your butterflies and pull your weeds. Eventually your neighbors will complain about something, so you'll take care of it. Animal Crossing is apparently a game about being a British pensioner that got into the good mescaline and has been hallucinating that the drifter outside his apartment is a terrier with a guitar.


Which sounds boring to me. I remember the first Animal Crossing game, back when I had a subscription to Nintendo Power and no Nintendo. It sounded enchanting! Then, after a year or two, I got the game for the DS and was disappointed to find the game came with a prescription for digital Xanax and a pamphlet on surviving postpartum depression. Finding the rare items that required social contact with other Animal Crossing players was impossible since I didn't know any, and I found the game's capitalistic obsession with house decoration to be dreary. I think I'd mistakenly thought that Animal Crossing was like the Sims but with an actually interesting art direction. Or I don't know what I thought.

It's like the logical progression from the Dancing Baby GIF

Looking at the game, I think we could pull a more conventional, conflict-themed game out of Animal Crossing. And that is to take the basic gameplay of Animal Crossing, and add in the zombie apocalypse. Well, not the zombie apocalypse, actually. Zombies are played out as a narrative conceit. In fact, on the off chance that somebody reading this decides to make this game, if you use zombies as the game's antagonists I will poison you with fugu powder then sacrifice you to Papa Ghede. Do I make myself clear?

Anyway, so you're put in charge of a randomly generated town populated by a manageable cast of neighbors. You're free to decorate your home, fish in the deep end of the ol' Swimmin Hole, head out back and dig for treasure, whatever. However, your village is under attack! Periodically, it will be attacked by something and it's your job to repel the invaders as best you can, with the help of your neighbors.




In addition to the decorations you can hang in your house, you also have options for a number of suitable fortifications. Will you build a gym and turn your neighbors into a ragtag team of monster killing experts? Or will you hire carpenters to build a defensive wall with sentries and turrets? Will you appease the monsters with a sacrifice of blood? Each option will have its strengths and weaknesses: the economy would be designed in such a way as to allow you to mix and match options, and change styles fluidly, but prevent you from utilizing every strategy simultaneously or optimizing excessively.

Unlike Animal Crossing, where neighbors pester you to do minor chores for them, in this game you could assign them to do minor chores. Learn your neighbor's personalities, find the job that's best for them, and assign them to it! Do you have a flighty, unreliable neighbor? Put him on guard duty where his panicky nature keeps him on high alert! Hardy, courageous neighbor? Direct combat! Adjust your strategy to play to the strengths and weaknesses of your neighbors.


There would also be ruins on the outskirts of your village. These places might host new neighbors hiding in the squalor, valuable parts for home defense, or just cool decorations!

The antagonists should be diverse and, like Animal Crossing, be partially randomized. Will you be beset by a giant dragon or a swarm of giant beetles? Will enemies attack with brute force, or will they try to infiltrate your neighborhood as new neighbors and sabotage the works?

Intimidation as a Gameplay Mechanic

Bioshock Infinite has gotten me thinking about how enemies in videogames respond to the player. In most video games--especially videogames outside of a zombie horror settings--it's often unbelievable how waves of enemies will run at me with no regard for their own safety, determined to tear my face off. It doesn't matter how many of them I kill, nor how brutally I kill them, they never even seem to flinch.It gets especially hilarious when you could rebuild the Sedlec Ossuary with all the bones you've shattered in a single fight, but the one remaining enemy continues to berate you with tired braggadocio.

Bioshock and Bioshock 2 handwave this with splicers. They're addicts, lunatics, and mutants all at the same time: their naked hostility may not be completely sensible but it's totally understandable. Splicers are generally depicted as being profoundly delusional. They get confused about who the protagonist is, about where they are, about what's going on. They're capable of lucidity, and a few even have conversations that you can listen in on if you're sneaky enough, but mostly they're raving lunatics. That's gone in BSI, though. The Founders and the Vox Populi are regular human beings. Sure, they're caught up in the fervor of a civil war, but that's the only thing that could explain anything going on inside their heads. These are regular people who, if they were real, would be terrified of dying. But they don't care if you're carrying a rocket launcher, they'll still try to hit you in the face with a lead pipe if they could just get close enough.

Hey, Terry, you got something in your eye.

In a Bioshock 2 promo video, they implied that splicers would fear you, that they'd drop off, look to get a different angle, or just flee. They even showed a splicer fleeing in terror when the player revved his drill; he didn't even hit them with it, just revved it up, and they fled. This idea enchanted me: enemies that leave the fight not because you murdered them, but because you scared the hell out of them. It began to take shape even more firmly as I realized that executions in BSI don't serve much purpose. They only work on enemies that are badly injured anyway. They provide some extra damage but not enough to be worth it unless you're a melee specialist.

This got me thinking: I don't care how gung-ho you are to kill somebody, when you see that guy incinerate your sergeant with fire he shoots from his fingertips, you lose a little bit of confidence. When that same guy then picks up the lieutenant, chainsaws off his face, and hurls his corpse across the room, you should probably start working on your "innocent, fireproof civilian" look. When you look around and realize that this dude has visited some variation on the theme of grisly murder on everybody in your platoon, and now he is coming for you with a grenade launcher and a purposeful look, I think maybe you just totally rethink your "murder this guy" strategy. If that doesn't work, maybe you just jump off the nearest balloon. After all, what's the worst the ground can do to you?

It sure ain't gonna set you on fire and then steal pineapples from your wallet

So, my idea is that enemies enact smarter behavior. We already have that to a certain degree; enemies will tell each other to flush you out of cover, they'll loudly announce that they're reloading, they'll complain that they're on fire, and they'll loudly telegraph haymakers while threatening to kill you. I just want to take it a step further: when you do something horrifying, I want the enemies to recognize that as some hard core stuff, and be suitably impressed.. To think "If he did that to Frank, imagine what he could do to me!"

During the course of combat, enemies would swing from brave to scared depending on how the player behaved. A brutal melee execution might cause the other units to give up and flee. Setting off traps or seeing particularly powerful special abilities would make enemies scared. On the flip side, badly hurting the player would make enemies brave again, as would killing the player, seeing the player retreat, or receiving reinforcements.

Rain Slick Precipice Flavor Dialog

I'm still on my Rain Slick Precipice kick, and I had a thought while I was driving today, and I had a kind of interesting thought about tailoring the game's dialog to the player choices. This is by no means an original idea, but I had it specifically for OTSRPoD 3, so there.

Team Fortress 2 and all Valve games have something called "response rules"; when the rule is met, the game calls a piece of dialog related to the rule. It's a way of deepening immersion by making AI (or other player characters) seem intelligent and react to both their circumstances and various unique player interactions.   In TF2 specifically, you can change your character's response rules by equipping different weapons; when your Demoman uses his default bottle to kill somebody, he'll use a line that references drinking (Ay, me bottle o' scrumpy!), but when you equip a sword, he'll use a line that references the sword (or makes Highlander jokes). TF2 has a ton of response rules: characters may make comments when taking or dealing damage to particular classes, when using particular weapons, or when they are near enemies while specific events are happening.

This, combined with some free time to think while I was driving, gave me an idea for "flavored dialog". The idea here is that while writing some pieces of dialog, room be left for distinct player-driven circumstances. This may include weapon choices, accessory choices, and class combos.

For example, perhaps Tycho is  saying "I'm going to murder you." This dialog could possibly be punched up by having him reference the class he's using, so he might say "I'm going to transform into a terrifying dinosaur and murder you." With the Gardnar pin, he it could be "Come over here, I have a trowel I wanna show you. Just for, like, a second."

Now, the main reason I bring this up is because of something that happened in the first two Penny Arcade games: characters would often explicitly reference the combat they participated in and the game was functionally aware that Gabe, Tycho and the player were essentially murderers. This was intriguing, because it touched on a duality in many video games: combat is often seen as an abstract mechanism, rather than a functional portion of the story. Pokemon was like this: you might force your sentient cloud of toxic gas to poison a preschooler's pet dog, then order your half-ton narcoleptic bear-thing to beat it into unconsciousness--and afterwards, this five-year-old would ask for your phone number so she could call you to do it again later. I liked the idea that combat was treated as a continuous part of the story, and the horrifying violence was often lampshaded in the game's dialog.

So the incongruity of the combat system is a ripe process for this kind of joke, and it bridges the divide between the abstract of combat and the stract of the story. Don't do it too often, of course, but bring that shit up sometimes.

Lumberjack

A bit grizzled and lonely, the Lumberjack clears forests to convert to farmland, pulls stumps, and produces valuable wood for fuel and shelter. The lumberjack is an anti-plant tank unit, fighting with axes and saws. Useful for chainsawing down stubborn defenses.

Beastmaster II

The Beastmaster is back, now in full color. Let me know what you think of the old lady.

Beastmaster

The rough design for my Beast Master class. Although I want the old lady capable of controlling beasts in the way that is fashionable for Beastmasters, she (like all my classes, I guess) is multitalented, using summoning spells, buffs, and debuffs. In a proper game her abilities would be focused to give her a particular role, but I'm more interested in puns and such.

Active Abilities:

Mouser Tom
Summons a cat minion.
Tortoiseshell
Raises the Beastmaster's defense
Stabby Cat
Improves attack power
Felis Ebonus
Improves magic stat
Snowball
Ranged Healing Spell  
Allergen
Poisons opponents
Thief of Breath
 Slows Opponents
Nine Lives
Auto-raises allies
Nine Tails
Deals damage based on cat buffs

Something Borrowed
Allows the Beastmaster to control a pest for a set number of turns, in the proud tradition of beastmaster classes across the RPG specturm. This is a single spell because I consider monster-specific spells to be unbelievably tedious and not particularly useful.

Passive Abilities:

Mother's Eyes
Allows the Beastmaster to perform other actions while borrowing enemies.

Clowdermarm
Cat spells become more effective the more are cast

Catfall
The beastmaster won't take fall damage


Maneki
Improves XP return 

Another, Different Intern

The Intern is a learning class (really a subclass), basically designed to augment leveling for a character. Plus, it seemed like a good alternative to the token Squire / Recruit class. If I were to really get waist deep in the "farmer" aspect of the game I suppose I would call him a farmhand or greenhorn or something, but too many farm puns and I might start burning things for entertainment. There's not really a lot of mechanical nuance to the class, so right now I'm just burning through ideas and attaching whatever mechanic fits the name. Because that's how game design works, obviously.

Anyway, the Intern.

Techs:
Jobshadow
--Boosts XP gathering

Coffee Run
--Buff

Time Management
--Speed Increase

Organizational Binder
--Greater critical hit chance

Busywork

The Bleak

The Bleak is kind of an idea for a video game. Well, not a complete idea, as so often my ideas are, but a kind of overarching aesthetic and mood. I got the idea from myself, coopting ideas from Portal 2, but bear with me here.

So, the idea is that a maleficent force--GladOs, I guess--has access to a large population of humans and some sort of hazard to chuck them at.  Representing that population are a series of player characters, each a randomized human character. A number of traits are selected at random, including skin tone, outfit, vocalizations, the whole deal. Once randomized, this human is active until it dies, and when it dies its body is included in the local landscape, permanently.

You roll a white male in a blue jumpsuit, then die trying to make the lion pit? At the bottom of the pit is a skeleton wearing a tattered blue jumpsuit, and your player character is suddenly a black guy in footy pajamas... until you don't see the spike trap.

Now, there are of course obvious problems with this idea. For one, players are morbid and depressing. One man's game meant to reflect on the sacredness of life and weirdly hollow deaths in video games is another man's opportunity to create a fully customized room full of corpses, and if the game was sufficiently hard your players would ideally die frequently enough to get the point--and see some dead bodies--but not so frequently that puzzles need be solved with heaps of human corpses. In fact, in order to avoid training players to kill a heap of player characters to solve every obstacle, you'd have to avoid using anything similar for a puzzle solution at any point.

In other words, you could never encourage the player to use the corpses of his victims/former pawns as puzzle tools, with the understanding that they will no matter what you do and giving them the tools they need to take advantage of it if the mood strikes them. Hopefully, giving a player license to arrange their bodies into a pile that spells "balls" will cause them to do it,  then gasp in horror as they realize how callous and bizarre that is, even on a simulated person.

Anyway, the whole point is to reflect on the sacredness and brevity of life, which is a fine way to get a video game shown at MoMA but probably not a great way to get score hits on Youtube.