Musings on a game idea (sympathetic re-usable red-shirts)

[Raemon777]

Lately there's been an idea tossing around in my head for a computer game based (very) loosely on the incredible hulk - someone who becomes more powerful the more damage it takes, fueling their power with their rage. The risk does not come from the fact that your character could die, rather the risk comes from the fact that your character might utterly lose control and hurt people they care about.

For that to translate into an effective mechanic, there need to be character(s) hanging out around you that you care about, that you will feel really bad if you kill by accident. They also have to somehow be "re-usable." Otherwise if you hulk out and kill everyone in the first boss fight, you'll feel sad for a bit and then go on and play the rest of the game with effectively no penalty.

So I'm looking for a non-combat character who is nonetheless essential to your goals (perhaps with magic abilities necessary for puzzle solving). Who somehow can come back from the dead repeatedly, without it getting tiresome or lame.

Right now I'm assuming your characters rage-powers come from a demonic entity who can bring your friend back to life, but each time you do so you friend loses a bit of his/her soul, turning more hollow and sinister. (A variation on that might be that resurrecting them requires you find another soul of equivalent value i.e. you must sacrifice another innocent life). If they die more than X times, you get the "bad" ending for the game. If you make it through without them dying once you get the "perfect" ending. Everywhere in between you get some in-between ending.

The question I'm pondering at the moment is the demographic makeup of the group. The easiest (one might say laziest) way to make a character insta-sympathetic is to make them really young. The default also seems to be make them female, although I try in all my stories to choose demographics than run against the typical grain unless it's important for some reason.

So I'm wary of just using a small girl with magic powers because not only is that kinda a cliché, there's a certain wrongness to having a child character who's primary purpose is to be allowed to die over and over again.

There's other issues at work, but this is already approaching Wall O' Text length so I think I'll stop for now. Any thoughts?

Edit: Also if this game has already been made let me know now before I get too excited about it.

 

[Rob King]

Perhaps the companion is some sort of spirit entity, that must possess humans in order to interact with the physical plane. Anyhow, killing the host might not harm them, but their host will be dead.. That way, you could have a whole range of sympathetic characters, from the little girl with a teddy bear, to the CEO that happened to be walking by at just the wrong moment.

You could even tie that in to the hulk-strength plot device, by making the spirit entity responsible for the strength. Or, an even more interesting direction, perhaps the spirit's mission on earth is to make sure the demon that possesses/powers you gets sent back to hell. That would necessitate that the protagonist thinks that his fantastical power is a bad thing. Maybe in the first mission or so, there is no companion character, and the people at risk are the protagonist's family or friends.

Interesting idea for a mechanic, though.

 

[Raemon777]

I definitely like the idea of a priest or spirit who accompanies you to try and keep the demon controlled/banished, but I'm not sure that they'd have the emotional impact necessary to make the mechanic feel like a real penalty. In particular, with the possessing thing, you might technically be leaving behind a string of innocent bodies, but you wouldn't necessarily care about any of the people you're possessing - with enough choices in NPCs I could see a lot of players picking people they particularly WANT to kill off, and the whole thing would become more of a joke than an effective penalty for failure.

I actually think the spirit idea would make a good additional character, but there should still be a primary character who you can develop a real relationship with over the course of the game, whom you would feel bad for not only killing but gradually eating away at the soul of.

For a while I was assuming it needed by a child (recently I realized love interest could also work, but that could turn out more sappy and stupid than actually compelling unless handled perfectly). At first I was going with a younger sibling. The idea I had earlier today was for it to be a grandmother-grandson relationship. (I generally try to use a-typical demographics in my protagonists, and I think it could be interesting to have the main character be an older witch who suddenly finds herself the only one left to care for her daughter's son, when whatever BIG BAD THING THAT'S COMING TO KILL EVERYBODY comes and destroy their village).