Ideation (PT 2)
Developing these ideas further from the beginning, if I was to create separate worlds for each emotion I would need a general structure of how I wanted these ideas to transition into one another. What type of story did I want to tell and then it came to me noticing that a lot of general emotions seem negative, perhaps using that as a driving force to create the overall narrative.
Questions
What will make the player have a bad dream and how can happiness be incorporated in that? How will this effect the structure
How can the structure of each emotion transition and how can I show these all effectively?
How to make it feel like it is a dream? Should it reflect the reality of the situation?
If most emotions are negative, what can be a developed experience that makes someone extremely sad?
Some people mix up their emotions, so how can that be used for transitions?
Loss is something that effects us as humans fairly effectively, losing loved ones causes even our subconscious to display strong images in our dreams and using that as base to creating this nightmare for the player. Holding on to these precious emotions would also mean that someone close would need to be lost, for example, a mother who is always so protective of their son.
Later, this is what the main concept would become, being the player will lose the mum character during the game, and commonly people when they get sad it often transitions into anger, but this shouldn’t be the starting point more the reason for something to happen later on in the narrative. The transitions had to feel as though it goes from one place to another, so my idea was the start from beginning being a happy character to something that get corrupted near the end, but the concept from there would be the accept one fate and move to better things, or dwell on these bad experiences as they shape you into a worse place.
Basic Game Mechanical Ideas
From this point on the game, the idea of creating different mechanics to define the type of emotion came to as all these different emotions should be significant and can’t be left out . They are all essential, so how would I make this so.
Happiness: Something blissful, not challenging
Trust: Maybe a type of game mode which means you’ll have to trust other people
Sadness: How to get the character sad, or at least in this case we already had the idea. The mother should pass away from extreme means
Anger: Transitioning from Sadness the character will be angry because of his mother passing away, when you are angry you want to punch things, but what would be the cause?
Disgust: The character will have to discard something that was precious to them during the game
Fear: After discarding something the character will regret discarding that thing and will discover fear by doing everything independently
Refining that concept