Ideas?

[Atheran]

I'm making my first game and I need ideas...
Without getting into much detail here are some basic ideas that I have.

I'm a 3d artist in general and I'm about to start making the game I always wanted to but I need some ideas first.

In order to find the help I need I'll post here my general thoughts and some questions.

First of all to get rid of the technical aspects, I'm using Maya/PS/Zbrush/Substance/Unreal for the most part and when I need them I also use Quixel products/Marvelous Designer/Speedtree and World Machine (that are probably not going to be used in this project except maybe MD). I still need to learn Unreal but that's also a reason why I decided to start working on this. While I can make some photorealistic renders in Maya I still have to find out how to make a photorealistic game enviroment that doesn't use a billion of polygons (I know how to make low poly's and transfer maps but I still can't get the low poly stuff to look photorealisticin Unreal).

This is not a game that I plan to release (but I'm not against it either). I'm making it for myself mostly to get familiar with UE4 and the whole process of developing a game from start to finish.

So, you want a horror game... And?

Well... This is not the usual horror game. First of all I want NO jumpscares or creepy music (unless really needed).

Quoting Stephen King:
“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

The terror is what I'm going after. I see no games made in this way (probably there's a reason about it). The main plot is that you're a guy with a perfectly normal familly that for some reason suffers from the first stages of paranoid schizophrenia (not the cute or funny way they show it in movies). As the game progresses you as well progress in stages until in the end you can't really distinguish reality from what's on your mind and you end up commiting a horrible act like let's say killing your children or something. Once that's done you get a black screen saying "That's who you are" or something. Mainly based on "Humans are bastards tv trope" the main horror of the game is showing what people are capable of, especially people with serious derangements with or without their knowledge. Done wrong this can be a failure or a cute attempt at horror that ends up simply gross or gory or funny (in the wrong way), but none of these is what I'm aiming for. Done right it could be terrifying more than anything. I got a big number of medical books on schizophrenia and currently reading through them to see how it really evolves from something that can't even be detectable to a driving force of mass murdering people and what factors can help it evolve on someone or not.

Graphically I'm aiming for a small photorealistic apartment or house (something like Sillent Hills PT) and characters.
Sounds will be realistic as well (putting down a glass of wine or opening the fridge or walking on floor etc) except when the schizophrenia manifests in which case I'll still go for realistic sounds that will be randomly played without an event ( putting down the glass of wine) actually happening to dissorient the player.
The focus on realism is to immerse the player and give him a sense of security using reality as the medium. In the start of the game everything will be normal and throughout the game player will learn the characters (his family for example) because let's face it, who gives a **** if you kill your children in a game when you do not care about them, just because the game told you it's your children?

Thing is that because while I'm pretty capable on making photorealistic objects/enviroments etc, I can't make a human character look good. They always seem weird and that's probably due to my lack of anatomy knowledge. For that reason the character of the game will be alone in his house and he'll know the family members through indirect contact (phonecalls/letters etc).

There will be ample use of camera effects and random sounds when the character snaps at start and randomly as the game progresses so the player doesn't discern when he plays in the game's reality or the character's mind games.

As for gameplay mechanics it'll be a first person game with no hud or anything, stuff will move around according to the character's state (for example you might go to sleep in your room in a house you know like your palm and you wake up in your room (the one you slept) but as you walk out it has changed places with the bathroom), or you even wake up in another place in the house. This will be done sparingly and progressively (might be a bottle changing place in the start of the game and a room changing place much later). There will be NO metaphysical or otherwordly entities or sounds (everything will be from our world) and I plan on having a hidden sanity meter that'll be working similar to Eternal Darkness series. I'm also playing with the thought of putting an eyes-closing mechanic like in SCP game. You will be able to interact with anything in the game and the only visible hud will be the dialogue options (because NLP and AI are not advanced enough) and through them you'll get a massive amount of options (from telling a fairy tale to your children to maybe even have phone sex with your wife). In the end the camera effects and the disturbing visions of the character will lead the player to kill the children for example. Or even better choose which one of the two he'll kill. I really like the last option because it's a concious choice so the player won't be able to hide behind "But I saw demons. I killed demons not the kids"

So here I am asking for ideas (the main idea I want to keep it. The killing your children ending was simply an example and it can be changed if I get any better ideas).

If you got so far than you and if you have any questions i'm happy to clarify things.

What I want here is ideas and suggestions on the story and maybe even ideas on similar indie games I maybe should try for ideas. But keep in mind no gore for the sake of gore, no jumpscares, no alien-zombie-post apocalyptic mutant-cyborg-tentacled hybrids. I want a pure real world psychological horror or... Terror.

While my main focus is suggestions on story and maybe even character development (I DO want to play with the player's feelings a lot) I'm open to mechanics as well (I want to play with his mind too).

Thanks in advance!

[Anchen]

This sounds really interesting, I'd like to start with a couple of questions if that's okay.

1. Do you want the setting restricted to the house/ apartment and maybe surrounding area? (Which might of course alter over time, either for real or in the mind of the character.) Or will there be external locations to travel to?

2. You mention having a lot of options, will any choices have direct impact on the story and take it in different directions or is it a more linear structure where the options don't have real consequences?

3. Have you thought about what kind of dramaturgy you're going for, how you'll structure the story for maximum effect?

I love hearing about people's writing processes, so it's exciting to me how this turns out :) .

And the subgenre you've chosen sounds promising.

[Jake.Ashworth]

That's a pretty awesome idea. Sounds like it could be a blast. Is it going to be a point and click sort of thing or will the movement be continuous? I always thought it would be terrifying to wake up every day and have my furniture rearranged. Nothing menacing just in completely different places, pictures and all. Also I have always had kind of a fear that I would look at the pictures of my family and I wouldn't recognize them, like overnight my family was taken and replaced by actors.

[Anchen]

I agree with Jake, who's basically describing a kind of Freudian uncanniness, yeah? The scare-factor of when the familiar suddenly becomes strange?
Under which Freud also categorized the eerieness of mental illness - the face of the person you think you know suddenly seems to hide something unknown and uncontrollable beneath the surface.

Maybe the more subtle, the more creepy, to begin with. I played that indie game 5 Days a Stranger Once and remember how a certain painting changed ever so slightly from day to day. That stuff really gets to me.

Anyway, I just thought of something and wanted to write it real quick: I think I once read about schizofrenics can have a time perception that's not really causal and I've been thinking: Could you try a dramaturgy that's not based an causality? And, as a result of a screwed-up perception of time, non-linear?

I think there's supposedly a link between the schizofrenic time perception and their delusions, but I'm clearly not an expert. Perhaps you came across this in your research?

Okay, less interfering with other people's projects, back to own work.