[GAME IDEA/CONCEPT ART] 3rd-Person Action-Survival Shooter

[Alpha Six]

(this is pretty much a copypasta from PT)

I've had an idea for a third-person shooter for a while, but I'd want to make a deeper engine than just running and shooting, so I came up with this.
And no, it's not a zombie survival game

The basic idea for the storyline;

The main character (male) is out on a drive with his girlfriend, just the two of them together on a peak looking at the stars. His girlfriend points at a huge shooting star and the two make a wish. When they open their eyes, the stars are getting bigger, and there's more of them. They hear a few crashes from the distance, and worry, so they get back in their car and drive away to look at what crashed. All of a sudden, something crashes into their car, causing a huge accident. The two are knocked unconscious.

When the main character wakes up, he's bounded to a torture bed. His vision is blurry and he can't make out the people next to him. They have greenish-brownish skin tones. They don't look human. His vision clears, they're aliens that abducted him and took him and his girlfriend captive. He's tortured for fun (the outcome of this part determines how you start the game), until he passes out from the pain again.

He wakes up again in a cell. His cell mate has already killed himself, and he's scared shitless. He doesn't know what to do, he thinks this is the end for him. He picks up the suicide weapon (it's a sharp object carved from a piece of a wooden bedspread) and points it towards himself. A clang is heard, and his cell door opens. The alien comes towards him with a strange object. He freaks out and uses the shiv to kill the alien. The alien lies there, dead and the main character still doesn't know what to do. He looks and notices that the door's wide open and the only guard is dead, so he decides to make an escape, but not before stealing the alien's armor. He feels a nasty slime in the outfit, but tries to ignore it. The alien was only armed with a laser pistol. He decides to use this to his advantage and escape the alien spacecraft.

And thus, the game begins.

The main, and most important mechanic of this game that I wanted to put a large emphasis on, is a Stress and Morale System.

You're stuck in a near-death situation, on an alien spacecraft, when you didn't even know that aliens existed, and you don't know who anybody is, where anybody is, if anyone is even still alive, and you just killed an alien soldier. Obviously, when you start the game, you're going to have a high stress level and a pretty low morale.

The Stress System will affect your gameplay. If you have low stress, your focus will be improved, you can see farther, and when you use weapons your arms will be calmer, which makes for higher accuracy. Stress progressively moves up as you walk, run, are shot, spotted, and other things. If you have low stress, you can also run faster and even use sprinting. High stress will slow you down, make your aiming much less accurate, lower your strength and even cause more damage and stuttering to your body when you are struck.

The Morale System is tightly packed with the Stress System, but will mainly affect cutscenes. If you have a positive morale, then your stress will decrease faster and increase slower, and your character will react slightly more positive to cutscenes. If you have a negative morale, your stress will increase much faster and will not decrease at all. Negative morale will negatively affect cutscenes, and if your morale is too negative and you have high stress, your character could react incorrectly to a cutscene and cause a big fight with the other aliens, or draw their attention towards him.

In order to survive, you need to keep yourself calm under pressure. Your stress and morale can be affected by the environment. If you see a human alive and in fairly good condition, it could positively affect your morale; if you see either other dead humans or can hear the sound or see other humans getting tortured, it could negatively affect your morale and even up your stress. If you run into friends, or find data files proving the existence of more humans, as well as locations of major enemies, it could greatly affect your morale and drop your stress. Killing entire packs of aliens in one room until it's cleared out and succeeding in keeping yourself (and sometimes others) alive will also give your morale a fairly big boost and progressively drop your stress levels.

The health system would be a basic "avoid damage to recover" system used in most shooters nowadays.

You can find many weapons lying around the alien spaceship, and there are a few armories located around if you need to boost up your arsenal. You can also take weapons from dead aliens and exchange them in case the juice in your current weapon is low. You can hold up to two large weapons (rifles, blades, etc), two small weapons (pistols, knives, etc), and one support weapon, such as flashbangs and heat-signature beacons. There are also shops in the overworld where you can pick up real-life weapons, if you need to pick up a new weapon because your current one is low or out of juice completely, or if you're just aiming for a different style.

Your objectives will all be alternated depending on your Morale and Stress, and the things you examine in the alien spacecraft.

There are many objectives to do outside of the spacecraft when you find your way out. However, you will have to occasionally return to the spacecraft to find more objectives if you don't find them all on your first run through the spacecraft.

As you progress farther in the game, your Morale and Stress level up so they are harder to negatively affect. The way you play the game within your first objective can affect how the rest of the game will go.

There would be multiple endings considering the different ways your player could end up due to his morale.


The main problem that I'd have with pulling this off is that it would be a very deep engine and would definitely take a while to program, especially considering it's 3D. There's no way in hell I'd be able to do this by myself


Anyway, if you have any more ideas, suggestions, etc., you can throw them at me.

I drew up some character concepts as well;
http://www.sheezyart.com/view/1957285/ - The Aliens
http://www.sheezyart.com/view/1959531/ - The Main Character

[Omegakyogre]

I really like the concept of the engine. I do want to say that you might want to avoid the alien thing that by now has become cliche, but if they can be designed uniquely enough it might work.

The two links at the bottom are the same.

I do really like that system you proposed, for sure.

Unfortunately, my programming ability caps at C. Ring me up if you ever need to calculate Pi or something. XD

[Alpha Six]

Ack, good catch. Fixed the links.

As for the aliens, I wanted to do something "otherworldly" without using something completely overdone nowadays, like how indie zombie games are all the rage now. There's definitely gonna be multiple species of aliens without a doubt, don't wanna keep it plain.

[Omegakyogre]

Ack, good catch. Fixed the links.

As for the aliens, I wanted to do something "otherworldly" without using something completely overdone nowadays, like how indie zombie games are all the rage now. There's definitely gonna be multiple species of aliens without a doubt, don't wanna keep it plain.

Cool. I'd definitely like to see some of the other species as well.
So yeah, other than that, it sounds like an awesome idea.

The whole thing on 'Stress and Morale' reminds me of how in MGS: The Twin Snakes, when you're sniping, you have to take some sort of medicine or something to stop your hands from shaking and messing with your aim. Of course, stopping and taking a smoke has the same effect... Good times there. I can imagine some sort of drug that would greatly decrease your stress and boost your morale for a short period of time when you're in a pinch, but that will drop you below your previous levels later on...

[Alpha Six]

Actually, I discussed a sort of drug/drink just like that. Like an energy drink, it would boost your stats fo ra short while, but then you'd crash and your stats would be negatively affected for a while, in order to prevent abuse.

If you took too many at one time, they'd slowly become less affective, and if you overdo it you'd have a permanent stress condition where your stress would not be able to fall to a certain level due to the unhealthy substances, which would make your player feel bad and thus negatively affect his Morale.

Or you'd just die.

[Omegakyogre]

Or you'd just die.

No, no-- In the realm of video games, 'dieing' isn't punishment enough. It'd be better if they were lasting effects. Perhaps one or two uses wouldn't have any lasting effects, but any more than that and it would, like, permanently make it harder to reduce stress or something.

[Out of Order]

the entire system for stress, although seeming strangely familiar, sounds really interesting and i could definitely see it moving forward
i'd really like to see this kind of thing combined with a metal gear solid/splinter cell stealth system, perhaps more stress makes it harder to keep down your noise etc

sweet idea bro

[LilGrim1991]

It sounds pretty cool, but thinking ahead, in practice, is the stress real-time? If so, is the player literally going to make their character stand still for awhile to get their stress down? (Which obviously a bad thing), and if so, how would you counteract this? No-safe zones? Enemies showing up in sets of time, regardless of location? Just wonderin'

[Omegakyogre]

It sounds pretty cool, but thinking ahead, in practice, is the stress real-time? If so, is the player literally going to make their character stand still for awhile to get their stress down? (Which obviously a bad thing), and if so, how would you counteract this? No-safe zones? Enemies showing up in sets of time, regardless of location? Just wonderin'

It would depend on how quickly stress goes down from standing still. Thinking realistically, just stand still and doing nothing doesn't help with stress so much as just calm you down. I can see it slowly reducing a fixed amount of stress over time, but eventually you're going to have to make progress to make any major changes, in my opinion.

Time-activated enemies sounds like a neat idea, but I'd think there would have to be at least a couple areas where you don't have to worry about enemies. Stress-wise, to counteract the 'safeness' of the area, there could be something in the story that the hero has to do; someone to save, or something, that prevents the hero from losing all of his stress.

But, hey-- I'm not Tyvon.

[Vipershark]

how about like
the drugs can make you hallucinate if you OD

your stress level will rocket past max level
resulting in randomly spawning monsters that keep reappearing and maybe something like you can't hurt them (since they don't exist) but they can hurt you (since you're imagining that they're real, your brain thinks it's real and physically injures you when they attack you)
and you can't see what's around you since you're hallucinating things are/aren't actually there

[Omegakyogre]

how about like
the drugs can make you hallucinate if you OD

your stress level will rocket past max level
resulting in randomly spawning monsters that keep reappearing and maybe something like you can't hurt them (since they don't exist) but they can hurt you (since you're imagining that they're real, your brain thinks it's real and physically injures you when they attack you)
and you can't see what's around you since you're hallucinating things are/aren't actually there

I think that would be really hard to incorporate well for use at any time in the game, but it sounds like it would be an AWESOME part of the story.

Ooh, I just thought of something: What if the environment itself changed based on your morale? Like, everything seems less saturated and freakish things stand out more when your morale is low, but when it's higher up the environment is a little brighter, and the interesting details of a foreign architectural style stand out more. It shouldn't take more than texture editing, one would think.

[Alpha Six]

These are all really great ideas