Progress Report #2: Everything Changed Again

EVERYTHING CHANGED AGAIN.

Seriously, I just wish things could stay put for five seconds, but...such is not the case. Nor will it ever be with my friends and I it seems. rip wizard detectives 2018-2018

SO what is the new idea? Well it's actually similar to the third option I was considering / the class suggested: WHOLESOME APOCALYPSE GAME!

The premise is very loose so far, but we've essentially boiled it down to: The world's ending. Like, everyone's gonna die. No way around it; can't be helped. The story takes place 30 minutes before the end, and your "goal" is to essentially walk around and talk with people in your town about it. I put "goal" in quotes because you can basically do anything (within the extremely limited gameplay constraints) in this time. Your game ends in 30 minutes, so experience it however you want.

The gameplay as of now consists of mainly walking around, talking with others, and maybe accomplishing small objectives. You can get locked into certain "endings" you share with people, but there are going to be multiple ways to experience the end times, as of now things are just dialogue-focused.

The setting is ambiguous...both literally and figuratively. Literally in that we don't have a solid geography mapped out yet, and figuratively in that we don't want this place to be a real place. It's an imaginary of sorts, a fictional small-town haven (I'm sure you can quote Baudrillard here about simulations and the real. The real's not real, the simulation in this case is the real. Get it?). I want to include a lot of different architectural styles but not have one locale outrank the others. Kind of like the towns in old Pokemon games, they're pretty ambiguous if you ask me.


[Side note, that little bit about not needing credit warms my heart. Take it ShadowLatios, you deserve it]

The game will have two different perspectives: One overworld, top-down perspective (like that of the Pokemon images above), and a more landscape-focused, sidescroller setting for certain areas. I created a mock-up of what I think that would look like below. The dialogue system / layout is still being worked on, no real consensus has been made on that front.



 Another side note: These won't be the final character designs, I just needed to come up with something that kinda works? Pixel art is hard btw never do it

OH right, and as for the apocalypse, that's gonna be ambiguous too. I think we all want the player to experience something unique to them, and saying "BY THE WAY, LOVECRAFTIAN BEINGS ARE GOING TO KILL EVERYONE" may resonate for some...strange people...but not everyone. SO what better way to make the apocalypse ambiguous than have the final 30 minutes be sunset, and once the sun goes out and everything goes dark, so does the world. Also sunsets are just pretty and I love liminal spaces like that. Canonically speaking, though...maybe it's some giant alien thing that destroys the sun and earth and everything around it...because narratively speaking, how does everyone know about the end times if literally nobody knows what it is? ...yeah we're gonna downplay that loophole as much as possible.

MUSIC:
I do not know yet.
I'm having a very hard time coming up with a general theme because I do NOT know how to make music! Chord progressions, emotions, what?? How do I do any of this? Kinda sucks too because my friends / business partners don't know either, and actively stay away from trying it. So it's like "oh yeah just make something kinda happy kinda sad, bittersweet, wholesome, but with a hint of ennui"

yeah
sure
lemme just pull that out my ass
major chord happy, minor chord sad
mix them together?? fuck if i know! So I'm getting my buddy Carl to help on this because he is a musical man. 

Here's a shitty rough draft of something I made which I probably won't use.
  


And warm synth pads are fine and dandy, but I kind of want to go beyond my comfort zone and flesh out an actual bittersweet melody, kind of like this:

Love this soundtrack.

As a final tidbit, just to add a touch more realism to the game, I've been asking people what they would do in this 30 minute circumstance, given that the end is inevitable. Here are some responses:

- Get all my friends together and eat breakfast
- Run
- Try looting for the fun of it
- Try hard drugs
- Sleep
- Eat food
- Phone / Connect w/ family and be with them
- Sit in a forest
- Play piano

Love hearing these responses, especially the sleep one. Definitely gonna implement that into the game.
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THIS CONCLUDES THE UPDATE. Not much to show but a lot to talk about. I hope to get a lot more shit done this week, especially getting a really really really really simple gaming prototype that shows walking in the overworld / scene transitions. 

time to sleep like 5 hours

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