Last week there was some misunderstanding between the teachers here at Campus Gotland which resulted in us not having any lectures during the entire week. Instead we were given an assignment to make a game concept based on randomly generated narratives. To generate this narrative my group used the website TheyFightCrime, this website generates random narratives about a man and a woman who fights crime. The narrative my group generated was:
- She is a blood-thirsty UN-senator with someone elses memories
- He is a mentally unstable paleontologist with an unlimited supply of ammo
- Together they fight crime
So, how do you make a game out of this?
Our idea was to create a story driven game with some similarities to Halo. The story is that the paleontologist Thomas White and his wife Evelyn is on an excavation site where they find an ancient alien weapon supply. They inspect the container and unfortunately activate some mechanism that starts an explosion. This explosion throws Thomas out of the container and injects him with some alien gene, but his wife gets trapped inside and dies. But one of the machines inside saves her memories. This leads to the UN coming in and confiscating all the weapons and all the machines inside the container. After some time Thomas gets contacted by a woman that tells him she has her wife’s memories and that she remember him taking one of the weapons from the alien container, but that is not why she has contacted him. She has learned that some of the senators of the inner circle inside the UN plans on using the confiscated weapons to gain world domination. Now she needs Thomas help to stop this evil scheme before it even starts.
The game-play would consist of a first-person perspective where the player takes control of the paleontologist Thomas White and use his alien weapon to fight his way through hundreds of enemies in order to get to the senator hiding on the last level of the stage. At the end of each stage the senator would have a power-up that the player would get if he defeats the senator. These power-ups could be used to either upgrade a part of the weapon or give it some new kind of firing mode. It could also be used to give the character some new abilities that will change game-play for the player. It would be to give the player cloak ability or super-speed that could be useful in different scenarios in different stages.
This is the basic idea of the concept that we made during this week and it would be fun to actually make this game sometime in the future.
Håkan Pettersson 