Halloween night
199X, in the small mid-western town of
[REDACTED].
Kids
with bikes riding
around town solving mysteries and fighting
monsters in a Groundhog Day time loop. Manage
your treehouse club, examine evidence,
recruit kids, explore the county, and
defend the world from mad scientists, aliens, monsters,
kidnappers, spirits, demons, and a growing sense
of doom.
Eat some candy
and solve some mysteries. Just
remember: be in bed before midnight.
inspired by Zelda: Majora's Mask .
Earthbound . Maniac Mansion . Zelda:
Breath of the Wild . Stranger Things . It
. Monster Squad . The
Goonies . Gregory Horror Show . The People Under
the Stairs . Ultima VI . Goosebumps
books
This is my game at night-time, and here's a
mood/vibe trailer I recently made with some AI
tools.
This is a wider view during the day (the
lighting is temporary).
Begun in earnest in June 2018 (right after
Resident Evil 2 Remake's reveal trailer was
shown at E3), this game originally started as a
simple overhead 3D version of my previous RPG
Maker game (now called NotSS DX), which evolved
into creating a survival horror framework, and has
now evolved into an open-world Majora's Mask meets
Earthbound adventure with a big story and lots
of characters. Whereas tRS is a big
experiment containing many gameplay genres to
help me hone on on the types of games that most
keep my attention and excite me for future
development, NotSS is the product of that
exploration. It combines everything I love
about adventure, spookiness, exploration,
mystery-solving, and more into a unified and
awesome and epic adventure.
Using a
Zelda-like adventure-style framework, I want to
re-invent the way NPC and world interaction and
mystery-solving works in games, creating a
casual but deep and intuitive way to exist,
immerse, interact, and explore the world as you
uncover the truth beyond what's going wrong in
town this Halloween night.
The game
world is 5kmx5km and contains 30 connected
neighborhood regions, each with a unique
aesthetic and "clockwork schedule system"
similar to how Clock Town works in Majora's
Mask. The town contains hundreds of houses, all
of which will be enterable (and lootable), and the
town will contain hundreds of unique NPCs, each
with a personality, interests and expertise
levels, a schedule, a home, etc. At least
that's the plan. I'm currently building systems
to allow in-game adding and modifying of this
content to make it as easy as directing a movie
scene, and I'm working to create out-of-game
tools to make it as easy as writing a novel. Currently
there are no loading screens anywhere, but this
may change as I populate the world with content
if necessary.
The main story involves
several "capital arcs," each of which would in
a normal game feel like a complete story. The
game also contains numerous side quests and a
special effort to avoid copy-pasted filler. if
a quest is not unique in some way that adds
depth to the story of the world, it doesn't
need to be here.
Everything you interact
with derives from basic properties and plugs in
new traits to allow higher-level interaction.
Objects have primary materials that are
affected as you'd expect (wood burns, metal
melts but makes sparks in a microwave). NPCs,
for example, are just animate objects that can
schedule, move, speak, etc. Same for monsters.
Monsters are just characters that are hostile.
Because the game involves magic, you can
manipulate the world by, for example,
enchanting a tree to make it alive and to have
the ability to speak. Same for a broom. And
because any character can join your treehouse
team, so could an enchanted broom. So could a
monster. That's the goal, anyway.
The
goal is also to store all the game variables,
characters items, etc. in SQL databases, which
would allow players to easily edit the town,
schedules, characters, their verbal responses,
etc. to create their own sharable adventures
and quests.
This is an ambitious game, which could be a terrible
mistake. I keep having the feeling it
will take 6 years to develop to a polished
state (starting in June 2018). If I can pull
this off, it will be unlike any game I've ever
played, so I'm super excited to make it a
reality.
This game is being developed in
Unity using Playmaker and Blender. The plan is
to release it on all storefronts (steam,
itchio) for PC, and while it's currently not
using
VR, I very much intend to make it playable in
VR, and that informs a lot of design decisions
ranging from how cut scenes will be managed to
how detailed ground textures need to be to how
big the cartoony character heads can be without
being obnoxious in VR. It's currently single-player, and while I'd
love to incorporate online co-op, that is very
far down the line if it happens.
