Game Design: Innocence

Hypothetical Game Design: Innocence

Here is a hypothetical bit of game design I came up with. This is only the very basic seed of an idea, not anything too in depth. I don’t think I’ll ever likely be actually involved with making games, so this is really just a fun exercise. Here goes:

Working Title: Innocence
Box Art: (Sigh, if only I casually happened to have epic art skills I could just whip something up real fast. As a writer, I’ll have to stick with text.) A twelve year old girl, standing with an exhausted slouch, looking straight towards the viewer with haunted, tired eyes. She is dirty, disheveled, with torn clothes and a bloody scratch on one arm. There is a handgun held loosely in her hand. Behind her is a dark and debris strewn room. I do have a basic character design for her but it's not really important to mention it right now.

Genre: 1st Person Shooter, but with considerable less focus on shooting than most such games. Basically a shooter, stealth, puzzle hybrid, consisting of frequent shifts between styles of gameplay to avoid boredom (in other words… like Half Life). Combat consists more of frantic running and dodging rather than firing from cover as in most modern shooters. Actually, it would probably be pretty close to 1st Person Survival Horror.

Goal: To place the player into the role of Hope, a twelve year old girl who is suddenly having to survive a terrible series of dangers. Basically, to shift from the typical Ultra Manly Unstoppable Killing Machine Space Marine 9001 to a ragged survivor type. The point is to make the player feel like they’ve managed to survive an impossible situation through ingenuity and sheer determinism.

Story: The player takes on the role of a twelve year old girl completely unprepared for having to fight for her life, mostly alone, and heavily outmatched. The story (which is purely in original inspiration mode right now, it would certainly be improved were this going to be truly worked on) is that Hope is the daughter of an important scientist at a secretive and highly funded research facility, isolated far from society in the mountains of Colorado.
During a weekend, her father brings her to the base to spend some time with him. On the way in she is introduced to several co-workers and has the opportunity to note that the facilities security force is quite large and very well-armed. Shortly after arriving, an experiment takes place attempting to allow the scientists to see into an alternate dimension. Something (of course) goes horribly wrong, and creatures from the other dimension cross over and begin to emit some kind of psychic wave. The wave causes all of the humans in the facility to become extremely violent and enraged. The only ones not effected by the waves are Hope and another young boy named David. This is because they’re brains are not yet fully developed, causing them to be unaffected by the creatures psychic powers. With all of the adults gone insane and the facility being invaded by monsters from another dimension, Hope must escape alive.

Game Design: Aside from simply being fun, the main goal of this game’s design would be too make the player feel they are playing as a young girl instead of a gun-toting-refrigerator-on-wheels. There are a number of ways I would try to achieve this.

Perspective- As a twelve-year old girl, Hope is rather short. Most FPS protagonists tend to be more than 6 feet tall, so the change in perspective would give Innocence a more unique look as well as being immersive. With the perspective set at a little over 4 foot, the player would only come up to most men’s chests, making the enemies seem to tower over the player and therefore making them more fearsome.

Combat Style- As a young girl with no combat experience, Hope is not suited to guns. Shooting causes significant recoil, making guns difficult to fire accurately and impossible to use at rapid fire. To balance this, I would make guns in this game considerably more effective than in most games. A normal enemy would typically die in 1 or 2 shots, making combat a frantic and quick affair. I would also take the opportunity to shake up the typical weapon sorting order found in most games. The first weapons to come available would be a shotgun and sub-machine gun, but the recoil on them would make them extremely difficult to use. Getting a small pistol later on would be a much more effective and easy to use weapon, completely reversing the way guns work in most games.

Weapon Carrying- In most Shooters, you can carry a ridiculous number of weapons and ammo around with no affect on your movement. This would be averted in Innocence. Guns are heavy for a kid, so the player would be restricted to carrying a single loaded gun at a time, a la Mirror’s Edge, and the larger the gun the more it would slow down movement. Hope would be able to run very quickly while unarmed, slightly slower when armed with a pistol, and much slower when carrying a rifle or shotgun. The player would be encouraged to remain unarmed (but for a melee knife) when not in direct combat. This would be handled by the fact that there will be a lot of dead security officers, and each one of them would be armed. This would lead to a gameplay style of sneaking and running, only picking up a nearby gun when you were spotted and under attack.

Maneuverability- Hope should be a lot more maneuverable than your average shooter hero. With the use of a catch all Action Button, you should be able to hop up on tables, slide beneath desks, scramble over debris, etc. Conversely, the enemies would be somewhat clumsy chasing after and single-mindedly attacking. Since guns would be a difficult to use weapon, a lot of gameplay would focus on avoiding enemies or defeating them through some use of the terrain (so long as its not exploding barrels. No FPS should ever have explosive barrels ever again). Imagine a boss battle in a cafeteria full, frantically ducking under tables while being pursued by a massive monster, running from body to body snatching up guns and firing off the remaining ammo until each one goes empty.

I’ll probably re-visit these ideas later on, as I have some more ideas (including one unique weapon that would really shake up the gameplay), but that’s all I really have to say about it for now. Let me know if it sounds like a fun game. Oh yeah, and let me know if you want to hire me to make it :). Especially if your from Valve.