Game Concept: The Hunt
Here I document the ideation of the third of my three game ideas, which ended with the working title 'The Hunt'. This idea underwent the most drastic changes.
Users will inherit memories to explore the concept of personal identity by undergoing personality and capabilities shifts.
Further insight on the essential experience and its ideation can be found here. Whilst developing the idea, I struggled to work with this essential experience, and would quickly end up changing it, as I struggled to even create a gameplay loop around it. I remove the ties to personal identity to make it less restrictive. The new essential experience can be seen below:
Users will explore the importance of remembering history, by inheriting knowledge across different people and facing obstacles overcome through that knowledge.
Initial Core Gameplay Loop Ideation
I wanted to make my third game idea a tabletop game, as I wanted to keep my options open and not feel forced by myself into making a video game when I consider myself an adept at programming at best, and lack any 3D modelling skills. I also wanted to use it as an opportunity to improve my tabletop mechanics design skills.
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I struggled to ideate any real gameplay loops for this concept, even after changing the essential experience. For some time, I settled on:
Loop 1
Activity & Risk:
Obtaining knowledge that will be inherited by future generations, with the risk that you may lose more than you gain.
Reward:
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Mechanical: Power in the form of either versatility and/or strength.
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Emotional: A sense of progress and improvement.
Opportunity:
Knowledge can be obtained after dealing with adversaries and exploring.
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Loop 2
Activity & Risk:
Fighting adversaries/monsters, with the risk they may kill player hunters.
Reward:
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Mechanical: Power in the form of either versatility and/or strength.
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Emotional: A sense of progress and improvement.
Opportunity:
Adversaries can be hunted down or approach players. Their difficulty can increase with time if the players are not careful.
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I abandoned these gameplay loops later, as a talk from Dave Neale on investigation tabletop narrative games inspired me to change direction significantly, which was just as well, since I was struggling greatly to develop the idea further with these proposed loops.
Gameworld and Narrative Ideation
Discontinued Concept - Hunter's Legacy
"Monsters are not something easily beaten. They are naturally stronger than humans, they are often crafty, and they are widespread, but there are the mortals who try anyway, for the sake of their children, and their children’s children. These mortals, these hunters, will make this their goal across generations, accumulating knowledge and holding onto it throughout the years as best they can, having it resurface. However, as time passes, the world’s memory of these hunters and their methods slowly becomes lost.
Players will take the roles of hunters. The monsters will seek to avoid their destruction and slay the hunters until all knowledge of monsters is lost. The hunters will fight to gain more knowledge across generations to aid in the crusade against monsters, pooling their abilities together until the last generation (whenever it may be) has eliminated all monsters, and the knowledge on them has no use, left to be forgotten."
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I discontinued this concept due to the fact that I would later change the core gameplay loop of the game, and this narrative in its exact form no longer would fit.
Initial Prototyping
Storyboard
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Obtain knowledge on hunting monsters from texts.
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Hunt monsters with more ease thanks to your information.
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Surviving will grow your knowledge
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When one generation of hunters dies, their knowledge dies with them.
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Information can be shared among all hunters at some points, benefitting all and being harder to lose.
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Do not let knowledge totally die out, or else the hunt will end, and the monsters will go un-killed.
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Final Core Gameplay Loop
After Dave Neale's talk, this was the new core gameplay loop I came up with to replace the ones I previously came up with:
Loop
Activity & Risk:
Investigate leads in search of clues that may help uncover who the criminal is, but it becomes more likely that said criminal will kill your current investigator, resulting in loss of clues, meaning players must try their best to recall the information on the card.
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Reward:
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Mechanical: Addition leads open the opportunity for more clues and make it harder to lose, whilst clues bring you directly closer to uncovering the identity of the criminal and hunting them down.
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Emotional: A building sense of curiosity and satisfaction from discoveries made.
Opportunity:
Successfully using information from clues can unlock further leads to investigate for clues.
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By making the game an investigation narrative, I could play into my skills at writing narrative more, and build the mechanics around that. I also began to have clearer ideas for how game mechanics could satisfy this loop. Additionally, it allowed me to lower the scope of the game to going after a single creature.
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Gameworld and Narrative Final Idea - The Hunt
"Monsters are not something easily beaten. They are naturally stronger than humans and are often crafty. But there are hunters who try anyway, investigating the causes of supernatural deaths. However, across just a single investigation, multiple hunters can be killed in their search for the supernatural, and another hunter must try their best to continue the investigation where the last ended theirs, despite not fully sharing information."
I decided to simplify the broader narrative to accommodate the smaller scope of the game. I did not have time before the phase 3 presentation to further develop a specific scenario, as a result of the many changes the idea underwent and my struggles to develop it for most of phase 3.
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Moodboards
I did not have a fixed style in mind, as another result from the large amount of changes to the concept towards the end. I feel like it is quite flexible in regards to what the world's setting could be, as long as monsters exist within it. I made sure to mention this in my presentation to see what my peers were drawn to.
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Potential Settings
One-Page Pitch
The last thing I made for this idea before the phase 3 presentation was a 'One-Page Pitch' to summarise all of the core aspects of the game's theme and gameplay to attract people to finding out more.
