Outside the box, inside my mind...

#1 This was an opening scene to a horror filled game where you take control of one of the remaining survivors of Burden County, which is being overun by the dead. In this particular scene, the player starts off surrounded by walking corpses with only his pistol and his van. Other players will start off with their own intros and in different locations throughout the county.

As players continue in their quest to find answers to the mysteries of the dead, they will run into other survivors, both other players and NPCs, and be able to team up with them to slaughter the armies of the dead using whatever weapons they can find. Throughout the game, story sequences will happen in realtime, with realtime horror action as all the members of the party get attacked while their situation gets worse.

Eventually, the dead begin to get smarter, using weapons and tactics to get at your flesh. In some areas, even worse abominations will present themselves as bosses. Still, with the help of each person in the group, some ammo, and a vehicle or two, each player's role will progress through the story, helping with what they know and what they can, depending on who they are.

The county itself is huge, presenting tons of choices on which path to take through thuroughly detailed environments, all leading to a mysterious island off the coast. Therein lies the source of the horrors, and when finally defeated, will allow the player access to the few of the survivors they managed to encounter in their adventures, unlocked for play later. Eventually, they can unlock 80 individual roles, each with their own stories and horrors.

This is going to be my first full project, and I need help making it as realistic as I can.

#2 Some years ago, I tried makeing this by modding the Duke 3D engine, didn't get very far. I don't have the time right now to participate in a team. so I'm putting this out there in the hopes someone will find it inspirational. this is mostly the game setup...nothing really about the gameplay (the real meat of the product)

anyway...


How about upping the stakes a little bit...

The opening cutscene:

BAM!

You are jolted awake from a deep slumber. "Get up!" someone yells, as two large figures grab at you. It's loud, dark, and in a maze of confusion the two figures quickly lift and drag you along.

You are deposited in a dark little metal alcove, the constant drumming sounds of engine reverberateing around you. A pair of gruff military personnel step from the darkness to size you up.

"Are you Rickter?" the more stern sargent asks.

Words come slow in your sleep deprived delerium. But you manage to mumble out a sharp "Yes sir!".

"You have quite the record here...30 years was far to leniant." the sargent scoffs while pageing through some paperwork. Slowly you realise that you are still in the standard issue prison orange jumpsuit, complete with cuffs holding your hands behind your back, and through a small dorway you can sense other prisoners sleeping in uncomfortable chairs.

"I'm gonna cut to the chase." the sargent begins in even more serious tones. "The President is offering you a complete pardon in return for completeing a little job for your country."

"What is it?" you mumble. The sargent steps right into your face, you can smell the aftertaste of military rations on his breath.

"We are green for go!" someone says from the darkness. Slightly iritated by the distraction, the sargent takes a breath before continueing.

"We don't have time for pissing matches, kid!" He scratches something off on the paperwork, and turns to the darkness, yelling "Rickter is in, get a move on!" More military personnel enter the little metal room, carrying equipment.

"Look kid, seems there is some sort of nationwide biological infestation. your task is to round up as many survivors as you can." The sargent begins. "Once you do, head for the high ground, then activate this GPS transmitter." A military fugure from the darkness shows you the little black gizmo, then straps it to your side. "The transmitter only has a few hours of battery life, so be sure to use it wisely! Once we pick up the signal, a evac team will fly to your location."

That droneing engine sound, and whirlwind of activity, makes it hard to concentrait. "This ain't going to be easy, kid. So pay attention!" The sargent barks.

"This here is the countdown timer." He continues as another figure steps from the darkness with what looks to be a digital wristwatch. Your hands are uncuffed, and you vaugely think of putting up a fight. But those thoughts are quickly filed away as the sargent steps back into your face. "Keep track of the time, you only have 48 hours!"

"48 hours till what?" you manage to spit out despite gaging on the sargents breath.

#3 The sargent briefly ignores your question. "This here is your weapon, can't say it will do you much good..." Another figure steps forward and straps what looks like a 9mm semi-auto pistol around your ankle. Your hands are free, you now have a weapon, the thoughts of fighting are even more tempting. but the question remains.

"48 hours till what?"

The sargent nods to the men in the darkness. With the sudden deafning howl of wind, and blinding of light, a door is opened behind you.

The sargent, as calm as can be, replies. "Kid, in 48 hours the President hopes to stop the biological threat in the contaminated areas through a nuclear means."

Before you can contemplate what was said, a bag is thrown out the doorway. "Now fetch!" the sargent barks pushing you out after it.

In the whirlwind that follows, the roar of the wind, your eyes becomeing accustomed to the blinding light. You now realise that you are some 20,000 feet up, and falling fast. The sargent, still in that little metal room, containted in the airplane that is quickly flying away. You scream out obsenities at the top of your lungs, no one hears you as you fall to your death.

with your mind raceing, you remember the bag that was thrown out before you. scanning the rapidly approching ground, you see it falling not to far off.

Acting quickly you manuver for it, as best you can. Somehow you reach it, grab it, and strap it on. Without deley, you pull the rip cord, praying the parachute works.

You are violently jerked, as the 'cute flowers out slowing your desent. Moments later you land with a jolt in the middle of a cornfield.

Still a bit shakey, you quickly reach for the gun. Only to find that it isn't loaded, in fact it's missing a clip.

"It Figures." You mutter underbreath. You unstrap the 'cute and proceed to figure out just where in B.F.E. you really are.

Begin game:

Survival horror of the most disturbed kind. Obviously there are multitudes of the undead to contend with. But this isn't your wimpy father's Resident Evil. The undead may still be slow and stupid, but they also can't be killed. Sure, you can blow them to bits, but then the bits keep comeing after you. It also isn't a good sign that this biological threat powering the zombies can also mutate them into larger more deadly combinations.

Worse yet, you have a plethora of surivors to rescue, and some won't take kindly to your orange jumpsuited background. And with all of that on your shoulders, the potential threat of nuclear bombs dropping in 48 hours pretty much seals your fate...or does it?


This was to be a Duke 3D 'build engine' total conversion. But I started it way back in quickbasic with a eye on trying to make dynamic interactive stories. The NPC survivors would play a huge role in the game, weapons would be pretty much useless as the undead can't die. so much more of the gameplay mechanics revolved around slowing them down...another key plot twist is that the nukes might not drop at the 48 hour mark, hinting that even the president has been taken by the biological plauge.

#4 @Christopher

This sounds very good and you should consider having this opening as the intro cut scene.

I would consider the following things though.

1. If this is a multiplayer horror along the lines of RE:Outbreak, then you may wish to have more confined, though detailed environments. It generally isn't too much fun having to look around for hours for the other members of your party simply because the areas you are in are so vast.

2. One of the things I liked about outbreak was the ability to swap items and the fact that weapons such as pipes etc would break after prolonged use.

3. Consider splitting the game into chapters something like

chapter 1: welcome to Burden.
chapter 2: I left my heart in Burden..and my lungs..and......

well you get the picture

#5 @MSW -

Awesome story! It's a shame you didn't get that completed, you have a great concept going with it too. Sounds very similar to XXX (the movie).

On a note of the undead not dying, instead there will be a head count in the game for every dead creature that's, well, not dead yet. As the army of the dead decreases, and there's less to be controlled, the intelligence of all remaining creatures rises with each slaying, making things alot harder as the party advances to the source. The cool thing is, if a party member dies, they become part of that dead army themselves.

Inspirational, hell yeah! ;)


@Peter -

Thank you. :)

1) Actually, this makes it a ton more fun and twice as scary! The mass of space will shrink very rapidly as the population of wandering dead rise. Half the fun, by the way, is finding other survivors and unlocking them and their bonuses.

2) Swapping items will be automaticly an option (one of the survivors is armed only with her purse and some useless pepper spray (did I say useless?)). Considering the fact that weapons will be more common and realistic to a small town, as well as more melee-based than ranged, they will also be quite plentiful and have quite a few different uses.

3) Hey, those are my lungs, give them back! ;) Chapters, not exactly, but the game will determine when the party is ready to handle something worse. A few key areas will be ripe for boss battles only after certain conditions are met, this way a lone player don't accidentally wander into a bloodbath without enough backup.

Thanks for the great feedback, keep it coming! I'll be posting more about some of the planned features later, maybe a quick explanation of the realtime events that take place frequently in the game to scare the hell out of the entire party.

- Ronixus

#6 It not suppost to be like XXX(the movie), rather I got the general idea from Escape from New York (another movie)...hero who is forced against his will to do something ,etc..

In my concept the zombies don't die because this largely keeps things moveing, keeps the pressure on (along with the nukes)...originaly the idea was to have a "meta" game...basicly an AI controlled upper layer that is activated when the player leaves a zone...sorta like a unseen game of chess (each zone represented by a chess square..and the player represented by the white king, with other survivors representing the other pieces...and the undead army represented by the black pieces)...the game would start out with this meta game being preset...but when the player moves into a new zone (effectively moveing his "king" to a new square) the "meta" AI will calculate moves and so forth for all the other pieces...then the zone being loaded will be effected by the result of the meta game...if a black pawn is nearby the zone the player is moveing into then that would indicate more zombies are present (if the zone is occupied by a black pawn then that would indicate LOTS of zombies are present, etc.. basicly that is how I was working out the evolveing narrative...

#7 Think of the art asset scope. It's much on the same lines as creating a MMORPG. That's what killed an idea I had that was quite similar to this. Siren is a similar commercial concept as well.

First of all, I'd recommend that you section it off to get pieces of it completed. That way you can work on areas, story arcs, character design, combat system, AI, etc.

Next, I'd recommend playing similar games to figure out what sticks out as right to you. For example, in Extermination you have a single weapon that can be modified in a number of ways. This makes sense for military characters, but not so much for characters that will use found objects as weapons like in Resident Evil: Outbreak. If tone and atmosphere are the major requirement, then looking at titles like Silent Hill or Alone in the Dark. The ability to see "infected" people in Carrier and the air loss of Deep Fear are also rather nice touches in the survival horror genre. Then there are the dark RPG's like Koudelka and Parasite Eve. Or the more action oriented ones like Dino Crisis 2. The Suffering is another excellent take on the genre that you can learn from. With moments like when you first hear the scraping, then see the sparks, and then the bladed hand of a Slayer. The fact that you can control Torque's history through his actions in the present is also an excellent piece to take away. Or you could go in another direction and research first-person horror titles like Echo Night (the reviewer seemed to expect a FPS rather than an adventure game, but that's his problem...the second one and Nebula are much better) and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (assuming it actually comes out) and Undying. Repetative storyline, Cthulhu mythos based inspiration (like AitD), and the sanity effects were Eternal Darkness's contribution.

There are a large number of Survival Horror titles out there, and most all of them have something nifty about them. Even Dino Crisis 3's jetpack was nifty, even if it did cause the fixed camera to go wonky often. Sweet Home, Harvester, Odium, Sanitarium, Kuon and the like are also good places to draw from, though you probably have quite a lot of experience in the SH genre if you're interested in making a game that falls somewhere near it.

(continued)

*edit: Missed a link.

#8 (continued)

Again, let me reiterate that you should start small. Start with one scenario in one part of town and work on the content creation for that section. Then, once you get a huge amount of art assets running, you'll be able to put together a rather impressive town with the pieces you've created for the smaller section. If you don't chunk it up, you'll lose sight of the project's end. Having 80 characters is a huge commitment. I'd like to see a single character that's more solid than Silent Hill 4: The Room's Henry Townsend (enjoyed the game, hated the backtracking and lack of character development). If you can create puzzles that are more engaging than your typical fetch the red key to unlock the red door or line the clock hands up correctly from clues in a diary, then I'll be happy. If I see ten buildings, one character, and two zombies, I'll probably be happy.

*edit*
I had an idea for an AI test that might be fun to use with Phil Carlisle and crew's AI implementation (if I could even figure out the necessary data to process, that is). It was simple. A house. A girl. And x number of zombies. She starts upstairs and knows unsafe exits (second story windows, for example) and safe exits (from door) as well as where real weapons (gun closet) or makeshift weapons (broom closet) are located. From there, she tries to get out. Each time she dies, she takes that "knowledge" and uses it to see what she did "wrong". All she has to do is escape the house. For some reason I thought this would be fun to watch. Kind of like Zombie Simulation.

If I were more adept at AI, I'd have played with the idea realistically. As it is, it's just one of those flutter-by ideas that I have.

I have a lot of them.
*end edit*

After all, I own and have completed all of the above games. And more in the genre.

#9 @MSW - That's the same scenario that's placed on Van's character in XXX (almost all the way up to the parachuting-out-the-back-of-a-plane part ;) The chess strategy you describe sounds different though and it'd probably work for some interesting AI.

@David - I know exactly the scope of art I'm asking for is going to be a rocky road, but the effect of realism that should be present makes it all worthwhile.

The maps themselves will be split up similar to Postal 2, but with a greater range of direction so that you can practically go from one area to the next at any point in the level. Some levels, like the mansion at the end of the cemetery, will be limited to their entrances. I've pieced together most of the general locations and I'll post them just below this post so you can see what I'm up against. The fact that I hate 'imaginary walls' to contain the play area has led me to some creative ways of providing a border, too (I like to do this with any game ;)!

As for characters, the process of tying in everything to be coherent with the theme and with the gameplay is coming along very nicely, yet it's still some ways from complete. One thing I'm concentrating on is making sure the characters are balanced out enough that players don't flock to a few and refuse playing as other roles because of limitations or power reasons. As a matter of fact, I hope the desire to 'see what this character's story is' helps drive players to take on different roles. That's at least 160 short intros and outros, not including the interactive, realtime FMV's that are planned and the story sequences (again, they'll be interactive as well).

As for horror content? Like MSW stated, it's definitly not for the feint of heart! In fact, just as one scare jumps in, you could turn around and have another staring right back at you! The elements that will make up some of the bosses should be enough to scare anyone (like when you see the dead running from them as well!). Focusing on sound, camera play, and environment effects (lighting, trees, structures, etc.) are going to be a major plus. Then you have the gradual smartening of the AI to figure in as well. Instead of thinking of it as a haunted house at the end of the road, think of it as more like a road full of haunted houses (in terms of horror content).

(Continued...)

#10 13 Cemetery Dr.
-----------------------

List Of Locations (Size) * - Denotes Boss Area:

Cemetery Grounds, including the Mortuary at 13 Cemetery Drive (Med.)
Cemetery Mansion (Sm.) *
Trailerpark and backwoods areas (Med.)
Lighthouse and Beach Center (Sm.)
Beachfront (Sm.)
River outlet and riverside woods (Med.) *
Residential housing and 'Loop' road (Lg.)
Gas Station at Crossroads (Sm.)
Deep woods near mountainside (Sm.) *
Interstate Highway/Throughway crossover and Rest Area (X-Lg.)
Throughway and Truckstop (X-Lg.) *
Farmhouse and farmland (Med.) *
Rural Crossroads (Sm.)
County Fairground Area (Lg.) *
Military Base (Lg.) *
City Area 1, including Police Station (Med.)
City Area 2, including Business Centre (Med.)
City Area 3, including Port Area and Shops (X-Lg.)
Shopping Center/Mall Area (Med.)
Industrial Factory (Lg.) *
Main Port and Dock Areas (Med.)
Ocean, on the way to Redearth Island aboard the Cargo Ship (Med.) *
Redearth Island - Above Ground (Sm.)
Redearth Island Caves - Below Ground (Med.)
Chamber Of The Queen - Main Boss Area (Sm.) *
Inside The Queen - Interior (X-Sm.) *

Yeah, so there's 10 bloodthirsty bosses. Not overdoing it am I? ;)

The 'Inside The Queen' area will probably be the smallest, with the Throughway/Truckstop Area being the largest. Yes, there will be fully operational vehicles as well (One is a boss ;).

No, it's not a huge world to explore, but it should be more than ample space for the game.

:)

#11 Another idea I had...and this gets away from the zombie stuff..still scarey as all get out though. My "flashlight" game...first thought this up while pondering the "Chess" like meta game from above while playing the first Silent Hill game on the PSX.

Basicly the player is trapped in a haunted house, and the only really effective weapon against the ghosts (more then one, but each is unique for a total of ten or so) is the players ability to use a flashlight (and/or other light sources)...some ghosts can only hurt you in the dark..shineing light on them makes them vanish...conversely some ghosts can only harm you in the light, so turning off the flashlight and letting them wonder by would be in your best intrest...you can't actualy hurt the ghosts (but they can hurt you) and the only way to get rid of them is through solveing puzzles concerning why they are haunting the house...

The house like in Resident Evil is broken up into rooms...and when the player moves between rooms the "chess" AI moves the ghosts (depending on where they are in the game world, what thier particular needs are at the moment, etc...) then as the new room is loading the results of the "chess" meta game help deturmine the ghostly encounters the player has in the room...each room would be set up with certain scare features (limited to one time use) and each ghost would have a number of "introductary" scripted events that can take advantage of the rooms scare features...could lead to one creepy "check your shorts" scary game :D /Hmm...I might have to give this a shot as it's small enough in scope it could work pretty well with a small team.

#12 @Christopher

Don't forget the back story. This will be very important if you want to make this into a series of games. Questions like:

What originally created the zombies of Burden?
Is the player in danger of becoming one of them?
Does the government know about this?
Is this a military op gone wrong?
Is magic involved?
Is it a virus?
Is Burden the only town affected?

:o)

#13

Quote:Basicly the player is trapped in a haunted house, and the only really effective weapon against the ghosts (more then one, but each is unique for a total of ten or so) is the players ability to use a flashlight (and/or other light sources)...some ghosts can only hurt you in the dark..shineing light on them makes them vanish...conversely some ghosts can only harm you in the light, so turning off the flashlight and letting them wonder by would be in your best intrest...you can't actualy hurt the ghosts (but they can hurt you) and the only way to get rid of them is through solveing puzzles concerning why they are haunting the house...

Sounds a lot like the Echo Night series with a smattering of Fatal Frame, Illbleed, and Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. Echo Night was an adventure game without any combat system. You had to release distraught spirits from their torment by solving a variety of puzzles that involved their vices in real life. One was a drunk who especially wanted one last drink. Another group, a series of spirits that could only be released if you broke the bank in the house casino. It was a great game that suffered from the first-person mentality that all FP games have to be shooters. There were some irritated spirits that would attack you in dark rooms until you discovered how to light them or find what ills needed to be cured.

Quote:I know exactly the scope of art I'm asking for is going to be a rocky road, but the effect of realism that should be present makes it all worthwhile.

It's only worthwhile if it gets finished, and to make sure that happens, you'll have to chunk it up into realistic bite-sized pieces. The project I had was an amazing piece of work on paper, but would have taken a team of 30 about six years to create the assets needed. Hardly realistic. But it was neat on paper.

Quote:The maps themselves will be split up similar to Postal 2, but with a greater range of direction so that you can practically go from one area to the next at any point in the level. Some levels, like the mansion at the end of the cemetery, will be limited to their entrances. I've pieced together most of the general locations and I'll post them just below this post so you can see what I'm up against. The fact that I hate 'imaginary walls' to contain the play area has led me to some creative ways of providing a border, too (I like to do this with any game ;)!

So it's something like Grand Theft Resident Evil? This complicates matters even more since you have to not only have a huge artbase, but a streaming method to load the assets neatly over a huge "level". The Silent Hill and Soul Reaver games are good examples of huge streaming worlds, and Silent Hill fits quite nicely into the concept since all of the buildings are individual levels.

I'm with you on the imaginary walls thing, which is why I liked Silent Hill 2. The fact that the streets were blocked off made the game feel self-contained...but for a reason. This in direct contrast to games like Onimusha 3 where you can see things happening in the distance AND it looks like you can get there...only to run up against the wall (at least in Paris).

(continued)

#14

Quote:As for characters, the process of tying in everything to be coherent with the theme and with the gameplay is coming along very nicely, yet it's still some ways from complete. One thing I'm concentrating on is making sure the characters are balanced out enough that players don't flock to a few and refuse playing as other roles because of limitations or power reasons. As a matter of fact, I hope the desire to 'see what this character's story is' helps drive players to take on different roles. That's at least 160 short intros and outros, not including the interactive, realtime FMV's that are planned and the story sequences (again, they'll be interactive as well).

Let's do a little math. Let's say that it takes you 10 hours to create the scenes for your intros and outros. That's 1600 hours, or around 133 12-hour days for simple scene creation. Some may take longer, some shorter. Let's say that it takes you 5 hours to create the 80 character models and rig them. That's another 33 12-hour days. So, if you work 12 hours a day on just modelling and creating these scenes, you have almost 6 months tied into this project. Let's say that it takes you a week to create each of the environments you're talking about 26 weeks. That's around 50 weeks, and it's probably closer to 2 or 3 times that much for model creation, texture generation, particle effects, and general tweaking. I'm actually being extremely generous and unrealistically short with the time-frame (unless you're some level design or character rigging God or have access to one). And then you have the engine modifications to make these scenes flow into and out of each other. You have 10 huge bosses, which will take (using the 5 hour estimate which is extremely generous) 50 hours for generation and probably three times that for tweaking. And that's not even thinking about things like FMV rendering, prop creation (mail boxes, fences, pitchforks, rakes, street signs, streetlights, planters, abandoned vehicles, etc). If you have more cut scenes, then it will grow exponentially. And this is simply for art flow. This isn't considering engine development or modification, storyboarding, story flow-control, etc. My math may be off, but I think it's actually off on the short side rather than the long side.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from this project. I'm just trying to show you why you need to chunk it up to work on it in a realistic manner before it becomes a good idea that will never see the light of day.

(continued)

#15

Quote:As for horror content? Like MSW stated, it's definitly not for the feint of heart! In fact, just as one scare jumps in, you could turn around and have another staring right back at you! The elements that will make up some of the bosses should be enough to scare anyone (like when you see the dead running from them as well!). Focusing on sound, camera play, and environment effects (lighting, trees, structures, etc.) are going to be a major plus. Then you have the gradual smartening of the AI to figure in as well. Instead of thinking of it as a haunted house at the end of the road, think of it as more like a road full of haunted houses (in terms of horror content).

The problem that you'll run into is the old "how much is too much" problem. Not in terms of content as much as how much is the audience willing to take before it becomes trite. The Guinea Pig movies are a good example. The first one was created as an experiment to see just how much the audience would take before becoming sick. In it, a samurai tortures and mutilates a woman, chopping her to pieces. It's done in a snuff-film style that even had some people in the States thinking that it was a real Japanese snuff film. The first five minutes is horrible to sit through, but after that you start being desensitized. By the time she is completely dismembered and disemboweled, you're numb to it. Horrible to think, but true. Tension and scares in games and movies need to be finely balanced. Resident Evil is a good example. After the first few things come crashing through windows at you, you start moving through the house with your gun drawn and don't actually care much about "jump scares". Whereas in Silent Hill, one of the most effective sections was in the locker room where there's a banging locker. You open it, it's empty. You enter the alternate school and it's extremely bloody inside. Was there anything nasty in it other than "something creepy that you just don't know what it was?" No. But it was extremely effective. The Suffering did a good job of mixing action and environment to keep the game moving. Seeing the twins running around the garden was an extremely nice touch, as were the overlay flashback sequences. You could even have a flashback while fighting and not feel interrupted as you would in most cut-scenes in a survival horror title.

From what you've said about the zombie threat getting smarter as you eliminate them, it seems difficult to find a "fright balance" in the mix. Sure, adding cut-scenes or certain elements like zombies running from the bosses will help it along, but I think it would be extremely difficult and time consuming to come up with a believable AI structure that would invoke fear. Invoking fear is worthy of a rather huge topic in and of itself.

I'm interested in hearing the direction you're planning on taking it, but I can only say "please, please chunk it up and right-size the project for your development team". And if that team is just you, REALLY, RAELLY right-size it. Perhaps start with the trailer park. That would just be a lot fun to design and model. Modeling city streets and all of the "set decoration" that goes with them is significantly less fun.

#16

Quote:
Sounds a lot like the Echo Night series with a smattering of Fatal Frame, Illbleed, and Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. Echo Night was an adventure game without any combat system. You had to release distraught spirits from their torment by solving a variety of puzzles that involved their vices in real life. One was a drunk who especially wanted one last drink. Another group, a series of spirits that could only be released if you broke the bank in the house casino. It was a great game that suffered from the first-person mentality that all FP games have to be shooters. There were some irritated spirits that would attack you in dark rooms until you discovered how to light them or find what ills needed to be cured.

I'll have to check those games out :D

The way I've figured my "flashlight" game, it's much more of an adventure then action title...3rd person view controlled entirely by the mouse...done in a cinimatic "widescreen" aspect ratio with little black bars on the top/bottom of the screen...put the mouse on the top black bar and it allows axcess to the main game options (load/save, etc..)...mouse on the bottom black bar allows axcess to the characters inventory (course there will be hot keys for these actions as well)...when the mouse is "on screen" in the middle portion, the mouse indicates where the character is looking, and with the flashlight on, the character points it at the onscreen mouse location...when the mouse is near the left/right on-screen edges the camera rotates around the character...near the top/bottom...the camera pivots up/down...left click onscreen and the character moves to that location (uses envirmental items, whatever is clicked on), double click and the character runs to same location...while the mouse is on-screen the bottom black bar doubles as a text box to identify objects/rooms, subtitle conversations, etc..

For the most part the ghosts are much more like dark and twisted demons then the ghost of old "drunken uncle Joe"...they, due in no small part to the light basied gameplay mechanics, will barely be seen...but definetely be heard :)

#17 The Echo Night games were often confused with the fixed-path games ala Myst and 7th Guest because they didn't fit the FPS mold. Really, it didn't matter much. They were just typical adventure games with a horror theme and a first-person view.

I love the idea of the flashlight game. I could actually see it using an isometric tiling engine (like, say Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment), only also having a lighting ratio for how light/dark the environment and visibility around the character's light. AitD did something similar, only with pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D models (ala Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII). It was actually a prerendered bump-mapping like algorithm. Quite nice, and loaded into texture memory on the PSX and DC very nicely. One thing that I'd worry about would be tilting the camera when you're trying to access the top/bottom menus, but that's easily enough fixed by implementing sensitivity zones and allowing the player to adjust them (that way they're only annoyed by their own craptastic settings).

If you have a chance, you should definitely pick up Sanitarium as well. It's a pure 2D adventure game with beautiful graphics and a very twisted storyline. It's one of my favorite adventure games, actually.

I'm just throwing ideas out since I've seen a number of indie projects that have wanted to make a survival horror game, but haven't really seen one come out. With the Movie-like Camera system and Advanced Camera resources, I'd expect someone to at least come up with a basic one. I haven't even seen one from Conitec users, and the camera resource for doing it has been available for a long, long time.

Oh well, I keep hoping.

#18 I've been playing around with Blitz3D and think it could work quite well for the "flashlight" game...there are some limits and such, but most of them can be worked around (and being basied around DX7 certainly helps on the hardware requirement end of things)...well that and C++ is very intimidateing to me :P

One of the neat things I've come up with in my experiments is a potentialy rather creepy scare...kinda subtle...basied on a simple Blitz3D feature that allows you to check if an entity is onscreen... for example:

You wonder into a rather large room in disrepair, with various bits of furnature laying about...some chairs...a old rotting table...nothing really remarkable...so you wonder around a bit looking at other details in the room...and for one brief moment under your guidance the camera swings around and you completely loose sight of the table and the chairs...as you turn back to face them you suddenly see that they are neatly arranged with table place settings as if awaiting dinner to be served...no sounds were made, all of it a pure visual shock...

course there are countless things that can be done with such tricks...suits of armor that automaticly turn to face you only when that arn't on screen...maybe even little disinigrateing statues of little gnomes that come to life noiseily following you around, but when you turn to face the sounds, they are frozen solid, only to have obviously been moveing when not onscreen...doors that open and close, things disapearing, rooms that re-arrange themselves...lots of possabilities :D

#19 @Christopher

Not sure when everyone suddenly thought your game vision was too grand.

Start grand and whittle down as you get a better idea of what will and will not be possible (in the time frame you have allocated yourself).

As for the Intro and Outro. I find that movie making methods work best when doing these. Make a storyboard of all the key scenes and then create them like a film shoot i.e. one key scene at a time. If you don't yet have the assets for the art, then use correctly named place holders. This way you can have the entire intro and outro created (in the can as it were) before your production assets are ready.

Too many games creators fail, not because their visions were too large but, because they forget how impotant pre and post production is for a game. So they allocate zero time for these make and break tasks.

Pre-production tasks are things like:

1.Writing the scripts.
2.Lining up your actors (creating the main characters for the game).
3.Choosing your locations (what environments you want to set the game in)
4.Fleshing out the major story advancement scenes
5. Build the sets.
6. Anything else that can be organised before game script coding starts

Production Tasks:

1. Bring it all together (import the models, buildings, props etc)
2. Direct the cast (write the AI)

Post Production Tasks:

1. Balance the gameplay.
2. Add the special effects (particles, re-lighting etc).
3. Re-shoots ( polish that cut scene or re-create it from scratch )
4. Add a soundtrack and sound effects.
5. .....