BA4: Game Design Document #16

Damn That Pesky Camera ;)

So our original game influence was Fatal Frame II in which the “camera obscura” was your best friend. It was your weapon, handy tool and in many ways a much better sister than your actual sister who stupidly wonders off; the camera obscura is with you all. The. Time. 

It was an early decision to keep the camera in our game as the main tool our character uses (oh, btw, we have named our lead female character! Yaaay, more on that to follow!). So far we know there wont be any physical combat, we want out players to feel frightened of the monsters that roam the museum, not welcomed to batter them over the head – they ARE too dangerous for that. It would also be the idea that you are accepting your illness, you are acknowledging it instead of hiding from it. So, how does the camera play a part in this? So far we have linked camera usage to the “very good” ending of our game. 

 

Very Good Ending & Use of Camera

If the player is brave and plays in an almost stealthy manner, they will be able to photograph the “boss” monsters (Mother, Father and dead baby Brother) as they roam around (non scripted) un detected. This is where it gets tricky-ish.  Dotted around the museum will be random opportunities for the player to photograph the boss monster and get a subtle hint. This subtle hint will be in the form of an image appearing in the photograph which the player must find in the museum in order to return to the monsters “lair”.  The boss monster will also appear in their natural state, ie, the Mother monster will appear as X’s Mother in the real world (not in her monster hell museum form). 

The item will be specific to that boss, so for example, with the Mother boss she lost her baby boy before the female protagonist (you) were born. If you take the photograph in the right area you would see a small blue blanket laying on the floor (just an example/idea) in the image, this blue blanket is related to the mothers painful miscarriage as it was meant to be used for her baby boy. If the player is smart/lucky enough (as there will NOT be a prompt to do this in game) they will be able to find this item laying around the museum.

If the player finds the item (there will be a series of images & items needed to unlock the good ending) they will have to return it to the boss monsters room.  There might be hints in the main boss rooms that there are items missing. If the played finds all the special places where the items are hidden and photographs them, they will be able to return all the items to the rooms and get the good ending of the game. 

Its supposed to be metaphorical of X seeing everything clearly through the use of her camera and piecing together just why her life was rubbish, as if she is facing the real side of her life and coming to terms with it  by putting the puzzle together in the form of missing items. 

A key thing to remember is that this ending would be the hardest to obtain as we don’t want the player to end the game positively. Its not about winning, its about the truly terrifying experience of mental health and phobias. The player might not even realise what they have to do with these items or why they see the monster in that form, and better yet there are specific areas in which this must be done in order to spawn the object in the alternate museum for the player to find; all very hard. 

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This idea might be scrapped tomorrow as I am going into uni to have a group discussion over the camera uses within the game. We are trying to allocate certain uses and functions of the camera to different endings and we end up confusing ourselves and each other which is great fun! I have a few ideas that I’m not going to post right now as they might be changed drastically tomorrow, so for now I will leave this here and do a write up tomorrow if we get any further with the camera.

For now I am going to do some research into camera lenses and their uses to see how I can further incorporate them into the gameplay mechanics or our game.