Who’s Reading My Mind, Part I
March 6th, 2008
Today I bring you another new feature, Who’s Reading My Mind, in which I scramble to take credit for an idea I’ve recently learned someone else plans to implement. Word just hit the street that Wayforward Technologies, maker of Contra 4 and Shantae, is developing a Wii Ware game called LIT. According to the press release, it’s a 3D horror puzzler about maneuvering a scary, dark environment by creating safe paths with light. That’s right, you light the way to presumably stave off whatever horrors lurk in the 3D darkness.
Well! Dudes, I had the same idea back in 2003. Here are some hastily-snapped photos from an old sketchbook.
In my version, each stage was a grid-based dungeon, like from the first Zelda game. The starting room was lit, but the surrounding rooms were dark. There was a mechanism for extending the light from one room to another. Rooms had different qualities: some allowed light to travel through them to the next room in a continuous line; other rooms always redirected the light in a particular direction; other rooms had dials that could be turned to send the light in whatever direction you wanted. So, although it was partly an action game where you’d control a man running around through a series of rooms, performing local actions and physically manipulating his surroundings, it was also a puzzle game in which an entire stage was a tile-based puzzle. The local-scale action was about uncovering all the tiles in the puzzle through exploration — bombing walls or what have you. It was about assembling the big picture from piecemeal observation. On the higher level, it was a puzzle about sending a signal through a series of redirecting nodes, and the chain reactions that would result from changing the flow somewhere early in the sequence.
Atmospherically, it was horror. The dark rooms were frightening; you’d feel vulnerable there. You’d do everything possible not to go there. There were things living in the darkness, and they could move around freely, with much greater perception and agility than you had. You’d hear them coming, getting louder, long before they’d appear on screen in the top-down perspective. But figure out how to turn the lights on, and you’d transform terrifying rooms into places of comfort. The light rooms were as soothing as the dark rooms were unnerving. But you could could play it how you liked, to some extent, braving the darkness if you were quick enough to evade the monsters, or spending more time on the puzzle aspect to get the lights on and avoid danger. I wanted it to have a real feeling of vulnerability, so you’d think hard to avoid going into dark rooms.
At the end of each stage you’d go down a floor, bringing the light deeper underground. The rooms you lit formed a tenuous strand of illumination and safety in a vast, pitch black underground maze.
At this point, Wayforward have only released one sketch of a weird hair-like creature, leaving many questions unanswered. Will they use a room-by-room approach like my concept, or will the light puzzle be more local (e.g. using flashlights and candles to create paths within an otherwise dark room)? Will it be as awesome as my game would have been if it existed, or only a shabby pretender next to the immaculate precision of my idleness?
March 6th, 2008 at 2:39 am
Hey David,
Such a series (trilogy) of games has been developed for mobile phones, of all platforms.
It’s called Darkest fear, and while the story is a bit meh, the gameplay is great fun.
it’s by developer Rovio mobile.
March 10th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
cool, i like the global coherency of your idea, how through all dungeons, you’re laying one continuous thread of light; at all moments, you have a visible (even pretty) artifact of your playthrough that, unlike “Percent Complete” counters or unlockables or achievements or whatever, still has a concrete, game-world significance. and i bet there’s tons of neat ways to show this to the player, like maybe each time you go down a floor, the game zooms out to show you the entire floor you just finished, then does a pseudo-3D pull-up to show you the whole path of the light thus far, followed immediately by a quick pseduo-3D drop back into darkness.
did your idea do anything with color and filters and prisms? or maybe light sources that would pulse at different frequencies, the beams of which could be combined to form particular patterns of on-and-off?
March 10th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
oligophagy: The pulsing thing is a cool idea. It could really enhance the feeling of risk and tenuousness as you go deeper and deeper.
Last night the last episode of The Wire aired (no spoilers here), so I am thinking about this season’s theme of “the big lie.” The game’s visual of going deeper and deeper into a surrounding darkness has a certain metaphorical resonance. People can get themselves mired in situations predicated on a shaky premise that proves itself less and less reliable as one ventures further out. That feeling of getting one’s self in a vulnerable position through a series of deliberate and difficult-to-reverse choices could be captured in this game.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Yeah, my enthusiasm for the conceptual neatness of light-as-a-visual-history does undermine the feeling of vulnerability you meant to cultivate. For that, your having the player purposely shut off his only way out is a better design. And it is rich in means: I can imagine mirrors that must be broken to let light through, candles that burn themselves out, spotlights that must be left unguarded against stones or bullets, even a flood of sunlight that obtains through air-shafts only at noon (this could be particularly tense, betting your oil reserves against the clock as you wait for this short window to open. And if your lamp burns out, you’ll have to fight).
I also like what you say about shaky premises. You might even get at that terrible inertia by suggesting, in the later dungeons, that there’s nothing down there at all and that, worse, the deeper you go, the more ancient gears you turn, the better your odds of caving the earth in around you.
March 19th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
I like this idea a lot actually… lately I find myself more drawn to the odd puzzle games, particularly those which carry an actual sense of purpose or emotion.
I also like that the puzzles in this idea somehow feel less forced than many games, because you aren’t solving a puzzle to open a door, you’re doing it to ease your tension.
In terms of development, you might manage a fairly easy implementation of the theme in 3D in a Doom 3 mod. The engine has already proven it can use darkness as an emotional manipulator.
As far as LIT goes, “There’s also a girl…who will use the school’s phones to keep in contact with Jake,” which seems to me like it would detract from the mood. Anyone who played Dead Rising can tell you about NPC communications.