I have to agree. I really like this setting, but on a gut level it gives me similar vibes to when I played Machinarium, and that would make it difficult to connect with personal experience / outside life.
Yeah, upon consideration, it’s probably not that suitable for this.
Playing around with various ideas for the setting and aesthetics, here’s a rather different approach.
The game’s set in our world, with elements of magical realism: the main character is a fairy-like figure of ambiguous sex and age (goes to school, but that school could conceivably be elementary school, high school or even college, letting the player project their favored interpretation, though this might be a little tricky to pull off). This approach takes the fundamental question considerably more literally: the main character knows things, but does not know why (s)he knows them. At all times, we are shown a set of maybe three beliefs that (s)he has, but cannot remember why. A large part of the game is about finding out what led her/him to come to believe those facts (what was their ultimate causal origin), and whether they should actually be believed. When ever (s)he manages to answer this question for a particular fact, it is replaced with something else.
Possible opening sequence: the game opens to a black screen with some white text.
“What is your name?”
The player enters a name. The text on the screen then disappears, to be replaced by the following:
“My name is [name]. There are many things that I know. For example, I know that X, Y, Z. But I do not know why I know these things.”
(alternative, if we can find a voice actor with a clear, somewhat child-like and androgynous voice, the opening narration could be spoken: “My name is [some gender-neutral name]. There are many things that I know. For example, I know that X, Y, Z. But I do not know why I know these things.”)
The text then vanishes and the blackness is replaced by a bright light which initially fills the screen with whiteness: it then fades to reveal the character being in their home, the brightness being the sunrise in the window. Icons for the three beliefs that are being investigated flash for a moment at the top of the interface, then stop flashing. Peaceful, ambient music plays in the background. A brief investigation of the house quickly reveals some of the causal history of each belief: maybe a table holds a letter from a friend, in which the friend spoke to the character of the belief. Upon reading it, the character says something like:
“Oh yes, [the name of my friend] told me this: that is why I believe it. But should I believe it?”
At the top of the screen, the icon highlighting the relevant belief flashes again: it shows a line extending back from the icon, to the icon of the friend. For a moment, the interface displays both (and they take up twice as much space as the representations of the other beliefs, which are only one icon each); then the representation of this belief shrinks back to mostly just the icon of the belief, but also showing in miniature the network behind the belief, which at this point only holds one node but will eventually expand. The icon is highlighted with a small bright glow, to indicate that it can be clicked on in order to bring up the whole history graph.
It’s time to go see that friend.
A lot of the game would be about rather ordinary events, like going to school and making friends; but the question of “why does [some character] believe what they believe” comes up a lot, and considering it helps the various characters solve a lot of problems. Perhaps, after the early game, it’s the player who gets to choose which would be interesting beliefs (hypotheses?) to investigate, instead of the game choosing the active beliefs for them.
This seems like a much better starting point. The first half feels like it risks evoking some unmentionable tropes not suitable at all for the target audience, but the target audience is extremely unlikely to know these tropes unless they’re, like me, also the kind of audience that would find this a plus rather than a downside (the two type-of-audience traits correlate—and they’re usually referred to with only one common category label).
As for the second half (i.e. once the three belief-icons pop up)… wow. I’m once again positively impressed by the thought you’re putting into both the game design and player experience.
Based on this so far, if I had this game in front of me I would be very intrigued and would quite want to play it, though I can’t tell how much the aforementioned trope pattern-matching (and past experience relating to those) accounts for that ;)
I have to agree. I really like this setting, but on a gut level it gives me similar vibes to when I played Machinarium, and that would make it difficult to connect with personal experience / outside life.
Yeah, upon consideration, it’s probably not that suitable for this.
Playing around with various ideas for the setting and aesthetics, here’s a rather different approach.
The game’s set in our world, with elements of magical realism: the main character is a fairy-like figure of ambiguous sex and age (goes to school, but that school could conceivably be elementary school, high school or even college, letting the player project their favored interpretation, though this might be a little tricky to pull off). This approach takes the fundamental question considerably more literally: the main character knows things, but does not know why (s)he knows them. At all times, we are shown a set of maybe three beliefs that (s)he has, but cannot remember why. A large part of the game is about finding out what led her/him to come to believe those facts (what was their ultimate causal origin), and whether they should actually be believed. When ever (s)he manages to answer this question for a particular fact, it is replaced with something else.
Possible opening sequence: the game opens to a black screen with some white text.
“What is your name?”
The player enters a name. The text on the screen then disappears, to be replaced by the following:
“My name is [name]. There are many things that I know. For example, I know that X, Y, Z. But I do not know why I know these things.”
(alternative, if we can find a voice actor with a clear, somewhat child-like and androgynous voice, the opening narration could be spoken: “My name is [some gender-neutral name]. There are many things that I know. For example, I know that X, Y, Z. But I do not know why I know these things.”)
The text then vanishes and the blackness is replaced by a bright light which initially fills the screen with whiteness: it then fades to reveal the character being in their home, the brightness being the sunrise in the window. Icons for the three beliefs that are being investigated flash for a moment at the top of the interface, then stop flashing. Peaceful, ambient music plays in the background. A brief investigation of the house quickly reveals some of the causal history of each belief: maybe a table holds a letter from a friend, in which the friend spoke to the character of the belief. Upon reading it, the character says something like:
“Oh yes, [the name of my friend] told me this: that is why I believe it. But should I believe it?”
At the top of the screen, the icon highlighting the relevant belief flashes again: it shows a line extending back from the icon, to the icon of the friend. For a moment, the interface displays both (and they take up twice as much space as the representations of the other beliefs, which are only one icon each); then the representation of this belief shrinks back to mostly just the icon of the belief, but also showing in miniature the network behind the belief, which at this point only holds one node but will eventually expand. The icon is highlighted with a small bright glow, to indicate that it can be clicked on in order to bring up the whole history graph.
It’s time to go see that friend.
A lot of the game would be about rather ordinary events, like going to school and making friends; but the question of “why does [some character] believe what they believe” comes up a lot, and considering it helps the various characters solve a lot of problems. Perhaps, after the early game, it’s the player who gets to choose which would be interesting beliefs (hypotheses?) to investigate, instead of the game choosing the active beliefs for them.
This seems like a much better starting point. The first half feels like it risks evoking some unmentionable tropes not suitable at all for the target audience, but the target audience is extremely unlikely to know these tropes unless they’re, like me, also the kind of audience that would find this a plus rather than a downside (the two type-of-audience traits correlate—and they’re usually referred to with only one common category label).
As for the second half (i.e. once the three belief-icons pop up)… wow. I’m once again positively impressed by the thought you’re putting into both the game design and player experience.
Based on this so far, if I had this game in front of me I would be very intrigued and would quite want to play it, though I can’t tell how much the aforementioned trope pattern-matching (and past experience relating to those) accounts for that ;)