In my previous post I mentioned that my newly formed group was intent on finding an underlying message from which we could build ideas.
As the narrative lead, we agreed as a team that I could come up with something, craft it, and deliver it back to springboard off of. Looking through my research, as well as focusing on the things that I found interesting about Sid and Kerris' research, was this idea of community, and becoming better by working together. I came up with the moral maxim "We are better when we work together", which I feel definitely encompasses themes from Sid's research as well as mine, with this message constantly evident in the work of authors like Rudyard Kipling. It feels like it ticks the box of being a universal truth (as evidenced by its appearance in writings from the 30's) but also being very current, in terms of politics, the divide between classes, races, generations, and the split view on the climate crisis.
With this message in mind, Sid and I brainstormed some preliminary ideas.
These are the things that came to mind whilst examining this message. From my perspective, a lot of these are themes and motivations that are relevant to characters and narratives I might be producing in the future, but we took care to include things that could also be turned into mechanics, as Phase Three is designed to help us explore the many types of games we could make. I feel that themes such as "adapting to work together" could be a narrative baseline for the sub-section "teamwork and communication" which exists mainly to encase the idea of co-operative gameplay. "Helping each other" and "learning from each other" are connected in a similar way, and shows that a narrative theme can translate quite easily to game mechanics.
Something I was careful to address was this idea of remaining an individual whilst being in a community - the message itself promotes teamwork and working together, but that could, at its extreme, be misconstrued as anti-individualistic, which is very popular in current media. Whatever narrative I craft from these ideas, I want to make sure we have strong leading characters to show the importance of the skills of the individuals and how they can be used to help everyone.
Taking this brainstorm to Kerris, we all worked together to ideate from these core themes. From here we looked at lots of games that we felt were inspiring us, art styles, character designs, etc. to make sure we were all on board with the over all vision that we wanted to achieve for this project. We are all interested in making something narrative based that revolves around the ocean, which has loveable characters with moxie to spare.
But how we would go about achieving this seemed incredibly open-ended. We knew we wanted one of our prototypes to be a co-operative game, but there were a multitude of ways to go about this, from information sharing like in Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, to the split-ability mechanic evident in games like Fireboy and Watergirl or the LEGO franchise.
I had an idea about stories within a story - or a main character who tells stories whilst also having their own, in a What Remains of Edith Finch style. I was interested in exploring the juxtaposition of a world above water and a world below through this lens - perhaps the stories were told by an above water creature about the world beneath them.
Sid had an interesting idea about fishing memories out of the air after the player character had died, and the exchanging of memories with NPCs to help all the characters remember their past lives. He imagined it in the style of A Short Hike, and I liked how it focused on the stories of individual characters but relied on them all working together in order to complete them.
Kerris had come up with the idea of an octopus librarian dealing with chaos in a library - a small but electric idea that captured our imaginations. Whilst it's dangerous to start an idea based solely on a character, we thought the idea of an octopus librarian could really lend itself to some fun mechanics.
We compiled a list of games to explore - Kerris had already started making a slide-deck full of visual and stylistic inspiration from a variety of games, and compiling all of our experience of games that inspired us on our given topic helped to inject depth and variety into our preliminary ideas.
Games:
Fé
Arise
Everything
Way To The Woods
Spiritfarer
Ooblets
Hokko Life
OneShot
A Short Hike
Animal Crossing
Seasons After Fall
Tunic
William and Sly
Preliminary ideas categories:
1. Narrative/Character piece focused on an individual learning to work with others. Story within a story? Hard divide between above water/below water.
2. Co-operative game involving helping each other/exchanging information to reach a common goal.
3. A short, mechanic-heavy game about learning to accept help from others. Most likely featuring an octopus librarian.