Ian's Video Game Thread

The thing Roman wants to do:

RPG first person puzzler (with maybe some shooter stuff, but not much).

Setting: small city USA, which is dealing with a world-wide pandemic (see the end-times videos that Pastor linked us to).

The year is sometime close, near future (call it Next Sunday AD) or something. The pandemic is running rampant, and there's some war going on in Europe and the Middle East (for you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars), some huge earthquake took out south-eastern USA (and earthquakes and other disasters) and the US is reeling from the wars, the collapse of the economic base, the worldwide pandemic and recovering from this earthquake.

That's the background.

I want people to FEEL like they're in danger. This is pre-rapture, and you and your friends take on random character (you might play a middle-aged female, or a young teenage male. Physical stats will determine what you can or can't do, so there's the RPG element. There's no levels or stuff - so what you start with, is what you're stuck with. Unless you get hurt or injured, that is. Might see some stat loss if that happens. You can re-roll a character if you don't like what you get, but the game shoudl be playable as-is with whatever.

There are two basic ways to end the game. You die before the rapture happens while not saved, die prior to and you have taken an opportunity to get saved, or both options after the rapture has transpired.

The timeline basically is this:

You and your friends (to include some NPC friends) are trying to get to a government aid shelter due to whatever (government orders or something). So, you and your party have to get from point a to point b. Ransom encounters may include having someone nearby ask for help, a random fight between a cop and a civilian, car crash right next to you, or just walking along. The map of the city should be open enough so that you're not restricted to just one path - you could choose to go several ways to get to where you want to go.

Anyway. One of your party NPC's gets really sick or injured for whatever reason - if they get hurt due to falling or getting shot or stabbed, then that's the Life Threatening Injury. Otherwise, they'll get sick. Really sick. Either way, your mission changes to you having to take the whole party to a clinic or hospital some distance away. Might take a few in-game days to get there. No matter what you do, that person is going to die (scripted event). I want the players to feel loss. The end times are not going to be all peaches and cream, we can see bits of this in the world today. I want to drive that point home.

Along the way, you might stop by a gas station for directions (map is going to be big enough to get royally lost in) or to find a place to sleep for the night (you might not want to be outside after night fall due to looters, feral dogs or gang members). As it is very doubtful that your character build to start will begin with a real weapon (starting equipment determined randomly), combat is not recommended unless you want to get yourself killed or really hurt.

Although if you manage to get a hold of a firearm, there's nothing really stopping you from shooting someone with it...

So, after the loss of your NPC party member, you proceed to get kicked out of the hospital, but not before hearing a witness from one of the nurses or something. You will hear this witnes for sure. You are not guranteed to hear it again. Every time the gospel message is introduced after that, each player has the dialog option of praying with the person making the witness. But you might be in a rush, there might not be time, you have to go somewhere, we ain't got time for this, whatever the case is, you can turn that option down, just like in real life.

I'd love it if there was a high degree of realism in the game, but our code-typing-ninja-monkeys might hate me for it.

Moving on: After a few days more of random encounters, story progression and hearing about disturbing end-time-related world events the rapture happens.

At that point, you're given an option, if you have not prayed yet - play on through the beginning days of the post-rapture tribulation, or quit the game, with a somber epilogue text stating that this is coming to pass, and that if they're reading this, then it's not too late for them.

Or, they could keep going, and see planes crashing, people totally freaking out after the Christians left, and all that. Not sure how long to make this part go; I don't want to get to the place where the players are screaming "END ALREADY!" at the screen.

I don't think people should level up as they go. I also think that you should be able to play the game from start to finish with a total junk character roll, if you're a bit smart and play wisely.

Player death is dealt with like this: You have a party size starting off at eight people, you and seven NPC's, or you and three friends and four NPC's, or anything in between. You die, you take over the role of one of the remaining NPC's. Maybe.

More later.

Read this again for the first time in a while. Very exciting.

I'm reading it again, and wondering what I was thinking when I dreamed this all up. Creative writing is odd that way. It all depends on where you're at, life events you were going through at the time, how tasty lunch was, everything.

How tasty Breakfast was...