Interest Check Thread

Hosted Games Works In Progress
4960

I have 3 games I’m currently working, hopefully someone will enjoy the concepts! I’m making this so anyone can also give advice of what to add or make better. I’m in the planning stage story wise and some don’t have concrete names, but here they are:

TW- ADULT THEMES/VIOLENCE/BLOOD/GORE/SUICIDE ETC.

Remember, you will die. -
This game is about life and it’s obstacles. How life is full of sadness and extreme sorrows. You’re a young adult who works as a barista. Living in a crummy apartment, no real friends other than maybe one coworker and disillusioned by the world’s current state. You feel trapped and after years or what feels like centuries, you finally give in. One night, you finally do it. After you do, you’re transported to a different…realm? An entity which can almost not be explained wakes you in their mansion. You and 6 others all had the same idea at that faithful time. All having given up on their fights either physical or psychological. The entity gives you and the group a choice of giving up once more and moving on, or going through all of you’re memories and trying to find your wills and want to live. You all have a few days to figure out exactly who you are and want you want. You can learn to truly live again and love.

House of Horrors (Placeholder)-
You and your friends are college students. All going to the same nearby university, when the party of the year is announced. Everyone is going, even some Alumni! You and your group show up and party for a few hours, drinking and enjoying the night. But, this party is being held on private property. The police are called and everyone has to scram or get a fine or worse actual jail time. You run off into the nearby forest, your friends and another hot on your heels. Deep into the woods, you still see the flash of police flashlights when you spot a somewhat decaying, OBVIOUSLY abandoned house. You find an unlocked back door and hide while the police continue to search past the house. Giddy and still full of adrenaline from the chase, you all decide to stay for a little bit more while the police clear the area and talk about your escape. Soon though, the front door begins to unlock and the owner pops in. Seeing the new group in his home, his excitement shows. But not from the uninvited guest, from the meal he’s now going to make. You’ve stumbled into the home of a cannibalistic killer. One who hasn’t eaten a good meal in a bit. But, due to his endless grace and his need for entertainment, he gives you all a chance of escape. You have a week or so to save yourselves. Figure a way out through the chained doors and blocked off windows. Save yourself or your friends. But, beware even with the killer, others lurk in the house. Souls who are stuck to the rooms and roam around the plane, stuck with no way out. But… maybe, you can save them as well?

Date a god! (Placeholder name)
YOU! Yes, YOU! You mere mortal have been chosen by the gods to accompany them to their home. Every thousand years, they come down and choose a human mortal, to see the wonders of their plane. To keep their beliefs alive and to keep up with human evolution and how far they’ve come. There are 11 gods and goddesses in total. The original Creator, The Fates, Goddess of pleasures, God of agriculture, Goddess of the dead, God of Life, Goddess of the craft, The Protector; the God of Health, and the God of knowledge. After a banquet in your honor, welcoming to your new visit or your eternal stay, you choose which God or Goddess who will take you under their wing. Showing the beautiful forces of nature and space they are. But, what happens if they fall for a human…? What if… they fall for you?

All of these games will have inclusive options. Gay/Lesbian/Asexual and/or Aromantic as options as well as they/them pronouns and hopefully other pronouns as well. Hair will have afrocentric hairstyles like dreads, braids or locs, coily hair etc. In Date a God, I’ll even put in a polyamorous relationship between certain gods and goddesses who are already close individuals.

So… give me your thoughts!

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image

Memento mori, the greatest gift of the Roman Empire and one which we have, regretfully, let fall by the wayside.

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4962

Blurb sounds good but iirc there’s a another WIP with this name.

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4963

Remember, You Will Die sounds amazing. I’m a big horror fan and I love writing horror. If you need any references for this, I’d be glad to help :slight_smile:

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4964

thank you! im trying to dig deep into horror and I think i’m deeeeceeentttt (?) enough at it, but I’d love all the help/advice I could get! <3

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4965

Ah damn, really? So it’s a race to see who completes it lol?

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4966

Have you played Cry of Fear before? It delves very heavily into the same themes you’re working on. There are more recent examples of course, such as Sweet Home.

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4967

Pretty much for Date a god lol, except without them being actual horrible beings like most from greek mythology lmao.

And I agree, so many meaningful but short phrases from the past have been forgotten!

I have not! I don’t play many horror games , but House of Horrors is based heavily inspired by the game Cooking companions! I love the cutesy art starting out and how it lulls you into a false sense of security. The premises are entirely different and there’s no chompettes, but the cannibal killer with the ghosts lurking in a home is taken from there. I’m also basing it off of other indie horror games and some horror mangas i’ve fallen in love with recently!

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4969

In that case, you’ll love Doki Doki Literature Club, and I’ve taken immense risk here in recommending it to you since to even do so would risk spoiling it. This example is very relevant here seeing that it’s a visual novel.

A less relevant example would be Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion. But it has the same tone as the one you described.

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4970

ive heard of both and i ADORE DDLC! It’s been a while since I’ve heard anyone talk about Spooky’s jumpscare mansion! I almost forgot about that game lol. I love the monsters and the detail to making it horrifying without having like one coherent plot with a deeper meaning. I mean, the monsters have lore, but you’d have to actively search for it. I’m going to make you able to learn the backstories of the ghosts living in the mansion, but I just don’t know how you’d get it. I’m leaning towards talking to them or the killer having souvenirs as most do irl.

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4971

In that case, I’d say we’re in for an amazing IF then. Can’t wait to see what you come up with. I don’t think horror is common in Choice of Games, but I’d love to see it fill a niche. There’s a chance I might help out with that.

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4972

Ahhh, I know! Horror is so underrated in this platform, I’d love to see more stories like those!

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4973

One more thing. House of Horrors interest me as well. I think that has a lot potential. :grin:

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4974

Thank you! I’m glad someone likes the concept!
:sob:

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4975

Hi all! Long-time lurker – but I’m trying to turn a new leaf over and am considering really pouring my heart and soul into drafting out a game this November. I have a couple of narrative projects going that weren’t originally interactive story-choice games, but I feel that they would make interesting threads worthwhile fleshing out. Getting any kind of positive feedback regarding interest in seeing one of these in-the-game-flesh would mean a lot to me.

CW: Some of these ideas touch on apocalyptic violence, depression, psychosis, suicide, and addiction issues. Immediately below in the summaries, nothing is talked about explicitly. In the MORE DETAILS section, there is a veils-style (in the Ron Edwards Lines and Veils meaning) engagement with some (if not most) of the aforementioned themes.

  1. PLAY-PAUSE-REWIND; a rogue-like repetition of a day that needs to be dusted off, searched for meaning, and taken apart in order for the player to be free from its curse – because every other pathway apart from the right one leads to the same thing: the end of your life.
  2. Red String; time-traveling detective obliged to try and track down a disappeared informant by searching a sleepy road-side gas station across the ages, and in doing so, receives clues that reveal the mystery of the informant’s vanishing.
  3. Ill Humour; you took a year off college to get your life together, but as is becoming more and more apparent, there’s something different about you. You have a living, manifested connection with your bodies humors – blood, phlegm, black & yellow bile. Your body speaks to you – and not metaphorically. It is both a gift and a curse.

MORE DETAIL:

  1. PLAY-PAUSE-REWIND is a really exciting idea to me; it’s also the most action-driven, a lot more like an old-school choose-your-own-adventure than the rest of these because it’s meant to illustrate the problem or the nature of its puzzle through incorrect player choices (in fact, since the player remembers each life, wrong choices afford them knowledge points that open up choices that wouldn’t have otherwise existed for them in ignorance, so failing is still progress). It’s also the thinnest plot-wise. I want to say you’re a delivery driver in a big city, on your e-bike, and it’s the last dispatch of the night via UnderEats, you accept the job, and you go through it mindlessly, most of the dialog talking about your frustrations over money, what you’re studying, hopes and dreams, and the way that working 16, 17 hours a day just to make $120 a day (before taxes) is zapping your body slowly and surly of all the energy it needs to keep hope for better times alive. You realize as you pick up the order, based on the order and the name, that you’ve had this customer before. This premonition is confirmed when you arrive at the building, and you begin to wonder why she stuck in your mind. You can’t remember, really – and the exhausted side of you hopes to hell it’s not because she’s a shitty tipper. You get upstairs, hand off the pizza, and she gives you a smile; it’s surprisingly genuine, and it comes with a cash tip. A good one. It’s a nice change to the pace of the evening, and you realize you probably remember because she’s kind. It helps, a little, against the frustration that’s been seeding itself in the pasture of your day. You’re back on your bike before you realize that there’s a slip of paper in with the cash tip – quick glance at it, you think it’s a receipt. Maybe from whatever purchase the cash was used for before it became your tip. You shove it in your pocket. You go home, your partner’s in bed already, you go to the kitchen. There’s leftover tamales in the fridge, and you pluck one out, debating whether or not to microwave it before eating it cold. Half-way through you realize the AC’s broken again – or at least not running; there’s sweat running down your back that’s foreign to you inside your own home. You get up to turn it on when there’s a knock at the door. Three slow, sharp knocks. You glance back in the kitchen to look at the time – it’s 01:13 AM. Before you can do much more than frown, a voice comes from behind the door. Hello? Mr. Oquendo? It’s Liliana from across the hall – did your power go out? I can’t get anything in the kitchen to turn on! The words are in Spanish, the voice is familiar enough, you think, and it offers an explanation – maybe the breaker that runs your AC connects to your neighbor’s apartment. It shouldn’t, you tell yourself, walking towards the door, but the electricians your landlord hires cut corners. You open the door, and there is a woman – young, in her late twenties – standing there. You’ve never seen her before. In her hand, she has a gun, and it’s pointed at your head. Before you can finish your next thought, she pulls the trigger and you’re surprised no pain comes with the sudden, deafening rush of black. You blink. You blink again. You’re back on your bike, summer night thick on your skin. Your phone goes off as a delivery order comes in via UnderEats. You decide this will be the last order of the night, especially if you’re falling asleep while waiting for work. Weird dream, you think, as you look up directions to where you’re going. The customer’s name rings a bell. A shiver works its way down your spine as you dismiss the half-remembered memory away as deja vu. You think you remember her because she’s a good tipper, actually, so there’s a plus to end your night.

(And so on, and so on.)

  1. Red String started out as a podcast idea, actually. I like the idea that a temporally mobile detective has very little to go off except a place and a time. Not a date, mind you, just a time. And keeps looking over and over again at the place listed at different times, hoping that the clue she’s received will one day turn up some kind of thread on an informant (maybe a lover, or a sibling) that’s gone missing. The day that she realizes she’s picked up on a clue, she doesn’t even realize what she’s seeing at first. The place is a gas station – the kind with a general store attached to it; and before it was a gas station, it was a small market place, a gathering, a nexus of transient human activity. It always has been, except for when humans weren’t around, and even then, the place has some kind of pull on the animals. The natural well of the gas when the station gets built is housed in the bones of a watering hole that flourished well through the Bronze Age. She arrives one rainy February day in 1911 and there’s a red string on the ground where there’s never been one before. She follows it, compelled oddly, and finds it attached to something buried in the ground. She digs it up, much to the chagrin of the owner, and it’s tied to a cell phone from 2002, a Hiptop Sidekick of all things. That’s when she knows the hunt is really on.

  2. Ill Humour is a really compelling story to me, and it’s very much inspired by games (the ones that come to mind are Disco Elysium, The Stanly Parable, Night in The Woods) where the relationship the player has with its narrator is one that can grow and change and develop in positive and uplifting, stabilizing ways, or in more pessimistic or outright delusional ways, and often the way in which the player develops a relationship with their in-game self is the tool through which they’re able to accomplish the solving of the mystery. It’s tricky to do: I think anytime you gamify symptoms of psychosis, you have to be careful with what you’re trying to get across here, and I think it’s important to say, the Four Humours are, in effect, a type of curse or gift given to the player through family blood. Balancing them is billed as the the best way forwards, rather than make choices that strengthen one or two over the rest, but balancing them to figure out the mystery plaguing the protagonist’s family requires that they do some heavy lifting in being honest and vulnerable in interpersonal relationships. Giving in to the pull of one particular humor allows them to skate by and retain a far more alluring sense of fatalism. The mystery concerns an estranged best friend. Your best friend through-out high school stopped talking to you out of the blue at the beginning of your last semester at school. It was difficult, because they were still pretty much your best friend – a talisman of familiarity and comfort as things got progressively more out of hand at college. Then – nothing. One day to the next, ghosted. It contributed heavily to a sudden depression, which it turn lead to the decision to take a year at home. The advice you’ve been given by your therapist is to leave it alone, but you’re not satisfied with that. A return home is enough to awaken the Voices of your Humours as well, and they give your nagging dissatisfaction a power and energy it otherwise might not have.

And that’s the three I have! Thoughts welcome.

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4976

I like the second one the best: Red String. I like the idea of being able to explore a single location from multiple time periods. However, I feel that the idea would work best if this extends to more than one location, and is used more as a gameplay mechanic that’s accessible throughout.

I find that I’m making this decision based on limited info though. For the first idea, I’m given what looks like an excerpt of the story and for the third, it looks like just one of many gameplay mechanics within a game I know not the plot of.

Based on the info you gave me though, the Repeat idea looks like it could get stale if handled poorly. I still have no idea about Ill Humour…

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4977

Thanks so much for the feedback.

I apologize that it didn’t feel like I didn’t give enough info regarding Ill Humour. I was torn between trying to give a concise blurb about everything and being unsure whether mechanics or plot would be of more interest to people in terms of expressing potential engagement with the idea.

I’m glad Red String spoke to you though, and I appreciate knowing that having one location would feel too restrictive.

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4978

I guess it depends on how long the story itself is going to be. If its going to be a short story at maybe 40k words (short for Hosted Games), then one location works the same way the cabin in Evil Dead works. If it’s going to be a full-blown criminal case that could span a series if it’s a series, to the tune of maybe 400k words, then multiple locations work best.

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4979

Interest check in an Attack on Titan esque dark story game that is very choice and branch based

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4980

House of horror or Date a God sound the most interesting to me