A State of Mind

[Sweet Bro]

Premise:
State of Mind (subject to change) is a survival horror game based in an insane asylum/hospital/prison type deal. Our protagonist is one of the patients (story still being worked) and has somehow gotten loose during a black out. During said black out, shit hits the fan, people die, whoopdy doo. It's our protagonist's job to do get out of this situation alive and perhaps finding his sanity along the way.



Essential Ideas:

• Meta-Physicality: The game is meant to be taken in a sort of "House of Leaves" kind of way. Due to your insanity, the environment changes in unpredictable ways, requiring you to think on your feet, and react accordingly, even though everything that's happening around you goes against goes against the most fundamental aspects of common sense. We want to mimic a sort of dreamland feel throughout the game, similar to that of the Scarecrow sequences in Arkham Asylum.
  
  
• Surreality: The horror we are imagining is not simply gore and guts type of thing that has become tried and true, that it's expected of. No. This type of horror abuses your perceptions of safety and fairness to make a game that will hopefully confuse your as much as it terrifies you. Think this. You're walking along some hallways when you encounter an enemy you must bypass in some way. His patrol path is pretty linear and Metal Gear Solid-esque. You begin to cross the intersection in a deft manner, when the guard suddenly turns his head in an Exorcist fashion. The chase ensues.
  
  
• Immersion: This is a staple in many horror games. It's what makes or breaks them. Being able to fall into the game, that small almost insignificant moment where you lean forward a bit or you being to slowly block out sounds outside, that's what we're looking for. This means few breaks, this means loading times, cutscenes, maybe make the pause screen a bit untrustworthy at times. We need this game to be alive. That is where beauty happens, that is where games are made. A proper use of color palettes could be a very effective way to establish this feeling.
  
  

Established Mechanics

• Insanity: To be frank, our protagonist is meant to be crazy. That's his/her thing. That's the point of the game. With the insanity tag, the creativity for this game really can be limitless. The character will be given an sanity meter to gauge how bad he/she's in it. With lower sanity, our character's sense of reality becomes warped and various effects are used to show this. Perhaps tweaks in lighting or mix-ups in color palettes. With high sanity, our character sees the world as how it should be, and reacts accordingly.
  
  
• Memories: Throughout the game, memories are scattered and stored in memorabilia. These items hold some sort of deeper meaning for out protagonist, describing his/her personal life, past and influences. Through these memorabilia, our character explores the memory in a sort of interactive cutscene. He/she views what's going on, and the player can live out the protagonist's memories to some extent. These memories are used to advance plot, employ a sort of character development, and perhaps for more meta-physical results. The thought of fleeing a memory should be discouraged. We can accomplished this by a sort of deterioration when the player chooses to flee a memory. Eventually the setting will start to fade and the character will return to the plot point, where ever that may be through some function.
  
  
• Glitches: The point I want to bring up here is this sort of 'glitch' mechanic that we hope can be employed in the enemies, where they defy the parameters of the game. This brings an entirely new level of insecurity and unpredictability with the game, hopefully resulting in some scares. Of course, this would have to be done very well, lest it be confused with lazy programming. During particularly insane fits, our character would see enemies phasing through walls and becoming nigh impossible to defeat or other such disincentives.
  
  
• Stealth: There will be a sort of stealth mechanic put in place in the game. Direct contact with enemies should be discouraged, and avoided as much as possible. Fights should be out of desperation, not of necessity. Stealth should be based off of the lighting I think. Perhaps during insane sequences, the instances would change.
  
  

Debatable Ideas:

• Health: No ideas have been set on how to recover health, how the health should be displayed, and if health should be separated between the physical and meta-physical.
  
  
• Menu: For the menu, the idea was being thrown around that our character should carry around a spiral bound notebook. It would act as a sort of menu, and he would pull it out of his pocket when the pause button/key was pressed. There would be categories such as "Notes/Map/Save/Options/Inventory/ect." and everything would have a handwritten feel.
  
  
• Perspective: No ideas whether it should be third person or first person.
  
  
• Voice: Debating whether the main character should be voiced or not.
  
  
• Choose Your Destiny: Debating whether being able to change your story based on your actions in your memories.
  
  
• Enemies: I have no idea what we can use for 'enemies' in any conventional sense of the word. Having a House of Leaves kind of deal, combined with enemies seems to clash a bit. More will have to be established before we can ascertain what we'll have for enemies.
  
  
• Pills: Perhaps a power-up system based on pills. More on this in idea section.
  
  
• NPC Interaction: How should we interact with NPCs? Should it be some sort of Mass Effect/Fallout sort of interface, or should it just be smooth scripted events like Half-Life with Yes or No responses mapped to Left and Right Mouse/Tigger buttons.
  

Various Ideas

• Pills: Some pills, the ones you'll use most often, are uppers and help you return to sanity. You'll find these all over the place. Doses will be around 2-3 per bottle, (If you chug the whole bottle, wouldn't that lead to, you know, death?) perhaps with more key pills, infinite. Maybe they could give you powers to surmount your meta-physical demons? There could be pills to make you larger, make you invisible, make you faster, make you see through walls, but if you use these pills too much the effects begin to become less prominent, and if you OD on the pills, your sanity hits zero (where you'd be at about mid sanity once you start using the effect pills, because at full sanity you can't use the pill because you're in reality) and there becomes some backfire relating to a phobia, and the effect of the pill. Like if you OD on the big pill, enemies become HUEG, Megalophobia. Or if you OD on the invisibility pill, you stand out more, maybe you become shiny or some shit, and eyes begin to appear and watch you out of nowhere, paranoia. Perhaps these can even affect the plot in some way. If you become paranoid, you might become unable to talk to Plot Point X or Side Quest Y, making you monitor your pill use. Though there should still be instances where you MUST use them, just not everywhere.
  
  
• Crazy Guy: During some part of the last 50% of the game, you find a boss that you can only reach during low sanity, and it's necessary to the plot. As you begin to enter his lair, you see some grungy shit, contradictory to the surrealism you've seen throughout the game. It looks downright Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Organs are strewn all over the place, as gruesome a scene as you can paint, and your sanity is still like 0 at this point. Then you go on with the boss fight. After the fight, you find some uppers on the guy and take them, and your sanity goes to 100%, and your bar even increases a little, but the setting doesn't change. There are still giblets and organs everywhere, and it's all real, not a figment of your imagination. Turns out the guy really went to town during the black out. The second you step out of the room into somewhere normal, you throw up.
  
  
• MC Escher: We GOT to have an MC Escher kind of room going on. Come on, it's a must. Maybe in one of the Cuckoo's Nest guy's rooms, he has an Escher painting or some shit. We just HAVE to stick something in there.
  
  
• Deteriorating Memories: I also like the idea of memories being a bit deteriorated or if your character doesn't remember some of the details those things would be replaced with surreal oddness. Like if you were in a public area with a friend and you were remembering a conversation. The passerby could look extremely strange or if for some reason. Or if you cut the conversation short and run for it... at a certain distance the scenery would start deteriorating. Or your friend, now a monster, would chase after you, drag you back to where you once were, change back to normal and things would continue how they were like nothing happened.
  Or maybe you can visit some memories more than once but certain aspects of it would be radically different.
  
  
• Environment & You: Viewing particularly gruesome scenes or fighting enemies should lower your sanity. However, scenes that directly affect your senses should raise you back to reality; such as showers, eating food, comfortable beds, and alarm clocks.
  
  
• Color Palettes: Another thing about horror game settings is color... it's usually either all muddy reds and browns or dull blue / grey. Once the power comes on again I'm imagining that the normal building interior being bright, white starched looking area. (Entering a dark area or the lights suddenly shutting off again would be even more dramatic.) Any areas of saturated color would be jarring which might not be a bad thing if done properly. I'm not saying rainbows everywhere but if you walked into a bad early-childhood memory that's really garish-looking when the past half-hour was pretty bland...
  

Discussion Points

• Weapons
  
• Enemies
  
• Story
  
• Voice
  
• NPC interaction
  
• Protagonist
  
• Location of facility
  
• Stealth mechanics
  

That's all I got for now. Very much subject to change.

[brandedahall]

there could be no weapons in the whole game, or, if there is, they would be really rare, stealth mechanics would be based off the enviroment... like of there's a pipe or something that makes a sound on the floor and the player walks into it, it'll make a sound that "could" alert npcs, also there should be non-scripted chase scenes as they make it more tense because it could change each time.

[Kerplunk]

Loving it so far.

I think there should be at least some NPC interaction, but when there is, the NPC's seem a little off, like they're not seeing the same things you are. As stated before, the whole insanity thing really has a lot of potential uses and can be amazingly awesome if done right.

[Sweet Bro]

That's the feeling I'm hoping this game to permit. A sense of confusion, paranoia and isolation. During sane phases the world would seem as it should and you should be able to converse with other sane patients/facility workers, but those should be few and far between and should require work to build back up to.

[Kino]

Please forgive me for the long absence.

And Sweet Bro, since you made a nice list of things to discuss next I guess we all could tackle them one at a time. I'm not sure whether or not to start with "story" or deal with it last however... I guess last since the other items on the list would greater shape the the story (rather than vice versa) and story always takes a while to finalize.

Other people should participate too! Seriously!


Anyways, let's do this. First on the list is...

Weapons anyone?

I remember in the original /v/ thread people mentioned that a great horror game should have very few weapons. Once you're permanently able to kill something the fear is lost. When you're playing a video game and you yourself feel vulnerable, that's when a horror game really succeeds at being terrifying. So if a bunch of enemies are walking around and all you can do is run and hide, then that would be better for this kind of game. (Plus we're going for a stealth mechanic.)
Killing something something should be rare.

Thus, weapons should be hard to come by? Maybe a spare crowbar or plank of wood broken off from something but I doubt people are housing flamethrowers and shotguns in an insane asylum. Plus our main character shouldn't be some ripped, martial artist or some Nathan-Drake-type character... so fists wouldn't be much of a weapon either (lol).

As an idea though, I think that your sanity should also play a part in having or not having weapons.
Since playing the game while having a low or extremely low sanity is going to be very difficult, hiding from your own hallucinations in a traditional way might not be effective. In low sanity, you might envision guards which you can hide from but at your lowest sanity and reliving the worst parts of your character's life on an acid trip, it's possible that enemies could still see you even if you're in the shadows. Or maybe the color palette would be so bright that there wouldn't be any shadows to begin with... and maybe enemies could be faster than your character is able to run... anyways, there should be something to help a player out during a really tough turn-of-events.
Plus, if you are confronting imaginary enemies... why not have imaginary weapons? It would be interesting if you picked up some kind of crazy weapon (a sword? Something else that's oddly out of place?) And you could use it, but it would only be effective for a minute or two... once you regain sanity you realize it was actually a plank of wood or something even more harmless. I guess something like this should only happen once during a game.
But something that could happen slightly more often are surreal weapons or things that don't really resemble a traditional weapon at all. This could be caused by pills, like that idea you mentioned earlier Sweet Bro. Your arm shooting objects, Megaman-cannon style or just being able to manipulate reality for a short period of time. Flying? Being able to phase through certain walls? I guess if the main character is insane enough, anything is possible. Though I'm starting to get reminded of Bioshock.... (replace shots with pills)

Lastly, I'm not saying that this character should have paranormal abilities (as weapons) all the time. Just when things are getting difficult, plus if done correctly it could elevate the feeling of madness or surreality of whatever is going on.



tl;dr

There should be a small, limited amount of weapons. An asylum wouldn't have a lot of them lying around anyways. (Absolutely no shotguns / flamethrowers /etc.)
Less weapons = less feeling of security for the player (which is what we want)

Maybe when the character is hallucinating terribly there could be an imaginary weapon or two that the character could pick up. These would only last until the main character gains a bit more sanity.
Pills could activate these types of hallucinations or make the character trip balls even worse and allow you to fight in unconventional ways.
However, things like this should only happen in rare circumstance or during dire need. Maybe on a lower difficulty setting?

Plus I like brandedahall's idea of the possibility of triggering an event by picking up a weapon.