Design: Awakenings

This week I'm going to be featuring a game that I wrote up a relatively basic design for last semester.



Title: Awakenings

Premise: You play as a necromancer spirit of some variety, raised and granted power by a horror trapped within the earth. Your initial goal is to free him, but you can choose to disobey.

Gameplay Style:

General style is a third-person action game, with you controlling one person directly, a few people indirectly, and more allies that you can summon but cannot control.

Undead controlling system:

You can possess a single undead at a time. As you do, that undead gains additional health, speed, and power, and you would also have access to certain special abilities that that type of undead can’t usually use.

You summon undead from your reserves of resources (corpses, souls, and other things). When you kill someone and they aren’t auto-raised by whatever you killed them with, you get a certain amount of corpses and souls.

While you do directly control one undead at a time, you also have a party of undead that you can indirectly control by giving them orders, a la Spore or Kingdom Hearts. This posse can only be so big, however, and any more undead that you make are under their own control – a basic ai that kills every enemy in sight. Also, the ones that are directly in your party gain a bit of power, speed, and maybe an extra ability compared to the ai ones, to make being in your party feel meaningful.

Some undead have abilities that instantly raise slain enemies as undead. For example, Vampires that kill enemies with their bite attack raise the enemy as a vampire. These would automatically become basic ai-controlled undead that help you out, but you can’t control.

You can also be outside an undead, but you don’t have a whole lot of powers in that form.


Undead Stuff:

As you progress, perhaps you can upgrade your undeads’ abilities, or grant them new ones, as well as unlock more types of undead. I was thinking that you could start with 2 types of undead for each corporeal and incorporeal, for a total of 4 total. Zombie, Skeleton, Ghost, and Wraith seem good to start with, and unlockables could include (corporeal) Vampire, Patchwork Monster, and Lich, and (incorporeal) Banshee, Shade, and Poultergeist. You can spend experience (gained from, at least, completing quests and beating people up) to upgrade existing undead’s abilities, and to get new types of undead if you’ve upgraded previous ones enough, though the previous ones will still be useful. You could also have more undead in your party as you level up.

Two Main Resources: Corpses and Souls. Corpses are mostly used for corporeal undead (skeletons, zombies) and souls mostly used for incorporeal undead (ghosts, wraiths). These can be harvested from people, obviously, but can also be taken from graveyards. There’s also some specialty resources that can be taken from other places to get special creatures – Magical stone for Gargoyles, certain plants to make into shambling mounds, that sort of thing – perhaps obtainable by side quest. (Rough Example: As you explore a pyramid in Egypt as part of a plot-driven mission, you could also go further down a different, more dangerous part of the pyramid (or a different pyramid entirely), and at the end find the ritual to raise a new type of monster.)

There’s also a final resource, magic, that is needed for everything. Perhaps it slowly recharges over time?

Setting:

Modern. You’d be running around in largely metropolitan areas, GTA style – killing, raising, and completing missions. You’d probably have a home base of some sort.



I'll post the plot Thursday. And yes, I realized that I missed Thursday last week, and that my one post wasn't about genres at all. I'll get there.