I'm a person that enjoys coming up with stories and concepts for characters and worlds, which put me in a fortunate position. Mostly, the ideas I have relate to the media I've recently consumed, such as books, tv shows, movies or games. Two years ago, during the first term of my second year of NextGen, I had been reading and watching Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neill Gaiman, which had been made into an Amazon Prime series.
One of my favourite parts of each episode, was (spoilers) waiting for each one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to show up. It was always a fun guessing game of trying to figure out when they'd appear and be introduced. Their sections in the books were far more fleshed out, and interesting, and were some of my favourite chapters of Good Omens to read. Whilst the Amazon Prime series has an omniscient narrator giving the viewer information, the book isn't so obvious about the identities of the characters in some of the passages.
These passages are the introductions to the four Horsemen, which unfortunately had to be shortened to singular scenes in show. This, however, made me appreciate their characterizations in both adaptions more, and spurred me on to come up with interesting narratives centered around the premise of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This compiled into me creating a simple narrative in my head of a game wherein the player would play as one of Four Horsemen.
I started adding more and more onto this idea, eventually deciding that the game in my head would star the player as an amnesiac trying to fit in as one of the Horsemen, whilst also trying to regain their memories and understand how they became a Horseman in the first place. To help me solidify some these ideas, I drew a few concepts of several main characters in the narrative.
Here are some scans of the characters I drew two years ago. The style I used was inspired a lot by the dark, fantasy/medieval themes from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. In fact, I went along with the dark/secretive theme hidden behind the cheeriness of 'The Song of Storms' when drawing these, which noticeably made some of the characters pose in more confident positions.
Some of these characters have written-out backstories for their characters, which are in bullet points, but since I had many ideas of the directions that each character could go in, there are only a few things I settled on for certain.
This is the player character, which doesn't formally have a name or gender, and is just referred to as "Them." This was an intentional decision, as people are often put off from games solely because the only playable character doesn't have much/anything in common with themselves. This is something I hope to research myself more thoroughly by asking people about the types of games they like and if the playable character(s) have any affect on this.
'War' is a character I had a lot of fun designing, as I knew I wanted her to be a girl from the beginning. I gave her a stockier build, which is further enhanced by bulky armour. Her hair is also designed to look like flames because fire is associated with destruction and anger; two things that come with war.
My goal was for her backstory to contrast entirely from who she is during the game's narrative, which I've decided would be a theme with the other Horsemen. This will also have some plot relevance, but this will be outlined in another post to avoid this one becoming too long and complicated.
Famine was another character I had fun designing, although I'm not entirely settled on it. I do like that I made him tall and slender, and gave him prominent cheekbones.
Pestilence is another design that I'm not completely happy with, so this one will need to be reworked as well. The original idea was for this character to be chaotic in nature, which ended up with me designing her a lot like a joker in a deck of cards.
The final page of designs are for two characters that are part of the plot. I drew them together to make sure their designs matched and the characters looked as though they belonged in the same setting. This is because these two characters are mother and son, but all the story elements between them will be revealed in a future post.
Here's an incredibly simple version of how the game could've been structured, without any of the story involved. There would be 4 levels/phases to the game, which would have the character exploring a different section of the world. The order of these levels also plays into the story of the game.
Here is a simple map of how the games' world would be laid out. Each area is a different level/phase of the game, which means the player would be moving around the map as the story progresses. I haven't completely imagined most of this world just yet, with the Northern Jungle being the level I've thought about in the most depth, but having all these areas laid out makes it far easier for me to formulate a basic plot for the game.
I also kept in mind how this map would be laid out in-game, putting a small compass in the top right to keep track of everything.
Here's how the game probably would've been structured, going along with my original thoughts and ideas from 2 years ago. This is a very brief summary of events, with many of the details missing. These will all be in a future post, where I hope to have a few snippets of a script written out as an example of the game's tone and pacing.
Each level would be structured the same, but with different story elements intertwined with the player's main goal for the level. The player will also have the freedom to explore on their own as well.
This structure may change in future, but this is the basic premise of each level. Each level will have a different plot and story, which will tie into the player's character regaining their memories. The reason the structure may change is because I've yet to conduct any primary research into the most popular mechanics in games, which may change many aspects of the ideas I've laid out in this post. The game may end up not even having a structured story and instead be a simple app game with similar themes.
This concludes all the planning I've done so far, which has been a big help in clearing up some parts of the brief for myself. This has also given me a direction in which to research. By gathering intel on the types of characters certain people like to play, as well as the genres and mechanics they like, I can edit and alter these ideas accordingly.
This concludes this post on the concept and outline of my game idea for the project. The next posts will contain the story, some scripts/storyboards, and a Gantt chart for the project.
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