Friday 22 February 2008

someone to watch over you

While watching an episode of a TV show the other day, it occurred to me that the plot setup could be potentially useful for adventure game design.

One character was infiltrating some sort of organisation, while her friends were monitoring her from a distance and trying to give her help. For handwaving reasons they could only communicate with her by text which would be displayed on her contact lenses so she would see it floating in front of her... I say handwaving, but at the same time it's somewhat reasonable that you wouldn't want to use audio signal for an infiltrator, it could noticeably distract them if you suddenly speak to them while someone's watching them (and if they're talking to someone in the organisation they may not be able to hear you).

So I envisioned an adventure game in which your Distant Helpers are watching you via camera link and will try to give you hints, since they can research things and you can't. There would probably need to be some sort of Stealth/Suspicion mechanic to compensate for the reduced difficulty provided by having people giving you hints - since they're actually trying to HELP instead of trying to challenge you in some bizarre experiment, they should and will actually give you the answer to things once they figure the answer out. So there would need to be some kind of tension to make you not want to just hang around waiting until they come up with the solution... if you're infiltrating something, the more you hang around near puzzles the more suspicious you may look and eventually they'll be onto you...

Of course, your distant friends don't know everything. If you're searching a room for a hidden key they may suggest places to look that you haven't tried yet, but unless they have some reason to know the answer, they're just guessing. And they may make mistakes, or intentionally mislead you for plot reasons...

1 comment:

kaiwen_dreams said...

Wow! that's alot of blog regarding games! very shocked on that...feel free to see my blog too! don't know if you are bored over mine...but i certainly enjoy looking yours...reminds me of those days where im so engross of game playing