BA4: Game Design Document #02

Bittersweet Research

Why is it bittersweet? Well, because I want nothing more than to dive head first into the  research for my groups design document project but I’am stuck as to where to start! Its not that I am falling short of research ideas, it’s simply the horrible feeling of not knowing where to start!

Hmm, okay, I will start with our idea. My last post regarding the group design document project covered the brief we were given. This week my group and I have been concentrating heavily on our idea and we are definitely onto something. I guess I should start there? 

Working Title: “Museum”

Introduction

The game we chose to base our game design document on is Fatal Frame II as I stated previously on my blog. My group chose this because we all LOVE survival horror games and the genre of horror. 

 

I don’t actually own Fatal Frame II, nor have I ever played it but I know a lot about it. For this project I have been watching gameplay videos for ideas and research as well as making notes on my specific area of focus which I plan to post as soon as possible. 

What is my area of specification I hear you ask, well let me give you the run down. Stacey is going to be character concept artist, Olive is environment artist (as well as taking on the main protagonist character design) and I am designing gameplay, combat and weaponry.

This means I am focusing on how the game will look technically, so environment camera, player camera, perspectives and views of the player and character. I will also be looking into the combat of our game, what style of combat it will have and how it affects the gameplay. Finally I will also be designing the weaponry used throughout the game and my plan is to utilise these into 3D models along side concept art, but we will see how it goes. 

As we are a week into our project, we have had tons of inspiration and ideas flying around which we have managed to fit together into a concept we all feel is strong and will enjoy working towards. I have devised some questions which will give a better understanding of our game but first I think I should give Fatal Frame II an introduction so that you can see just what it is we are referencing and studying hard to create our own game design. 

•  No “Call of Duty” esque shoot ups just simple survival horror weapon revival. We want the player to fear everything, giving them a gun shed full of shotguns, rifles and pistols with enough ammo to fill Buckingham palace just will not do. At all. Ever.

• Think Dead Space but you just don’t have all those cool gadgets to take down those necromorphs, what you gonna do huh!?

•  Old school inventory system but reinvented.

•  Female protagonist character who is a photographic journalist sent to the museum on a mundane job to shoot the newest exhibition.

• To keep with the theme of Fatal Frame we will be using a camera as some sort of weaponry or major gameplay feature. We have a few ideas but it is too soon to discuss them yet.

• As our game will be set in the present (we think so far) we want gameplay to reflect this so when referring to the camera we want to make it modern and use technology to our advantage but in a DIFFERENT and UNIQUE way so I will be looking into modern/up to date camera features and seeing how I can incorporate them into the gameplay. For example, flash guns, tripod weaponry, camera backpack inventory. Ideas are just rolling right now.

• Along similar lines to the Silent Hill franchise we are flirting with the idea that our game is one huge metaphor for the mentality of our main character. In Silent Hill 2 you play as James who finds himself in Silent Hill searching for his dead wife (I know right!?) and is forced to fight weird monsters who are supposed to represent his sins, mental health, murderous feelings, sexual fantasies and his guilty conscience over his dead wife who he believes he can find?
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Images taken from the Silent Hill 2 monsters Wikipedia page: http://silenthill.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Silent_Hill_2_Monsters

• Readable notebooks, messages etc (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Curse: eye of Isis etc).

• Collectible items used to solve puzzles?

• Puzzles will be a key part of gameplay, similar to Resident Evil and Silent Hill. We will welcome back and fourth gameplay with open arms. I was recently at Eurogamer and I attended a developer session. They were talking about gameplay styles and how they tend to look to modern audiences. It was done in the style of a map. On the left was an intricately detailed floor map plan to a level of a game with lots of room for exploration and areas to find items etc. This map had 1 or 2 arrows pointing away labelled “cut scene”. This map was also labelled “1997”. To the right was another map, much more simple in design, only a small amount of areas to explore but basically a floor plan of a simple area with 1 way to proceed. This map had several arrows pointing away, probably 7 or 8, and these were labelled “cut scene” indicating that this level was full to the brim with cut scenes and cinema tics. This map was labelled “2010”…the sad part is that this is very true.

• We want gritty realism in this game but set in a fictional environment. Dead Space feels real and scary but the Ishimura ship Dead Space 1 is set on is a totally fictional space ship. We want our graphics to be top notch and genuinely terrifying. 

• Colour scheme will be dark low tone colours, not monochrome but flashes of cleverly highlighted colour due to moody lighting.

• Lighting, as mentioned above, will be atmospherically dark. I think my fellow group member and friend Olive will be looking into lighting effects within the environments she designs based from research she does on films and games so I will leave this one to her.

• At the Eurogamer expo I went to recently I was able to play the newest Tomb Raider demo. Something that has just come to me whilst thinking about how to incorporate character emotion and feeling into the gameplay and how it ties into survival horror (i.e. reading bits of paper and clicking a button to see if an object has any significance) is that whilst playing as Lara, she seems to speak to the player as she runs around. No button prompt, no significant object per say, just Lara expressing her emotion as the player pushes through the level. This could be perceived as a modern twist on all those times you ran through the Resident Evil mansion as Jill Valentine, walked up to a shelving unit, hit the X button and a piece of text popped up on the screen telling you that there “wasn’t anything important” there.

There are more ideas but I fear this blog post is getting too wordy and long now. I have created some questions that I am going to apply to both Fatal Frame II and our game concept to get a better understanding of the idea which I will post soon. I then plan on diving into more specific  research relating to my area of concentration. I also want to post the photographs/write up of the trip we made as a group for initial research. Lots of stuff to come :D