My Prototypes: The Water Remembers

The second of my ongoing prototypes is something a bit different: a “walking simulator” on a remote island. No, I am not inspired by Dear Esther in the slightest (no weird stories about kidney stones here thanks!), more by a game set in the depths of space: Outer Wilds.

Initially I fell in love with the mechanics of that game: the time-loop story, the translation tool, the loop-based design of the planets, and yes, even the tricky-to-master actual Newtonian physics space flight in your rickety, taped-together ship. But I slowly fell in love with the stories you uncover, the characters you meet, and that ending is something I think about often. If ever there was a ‘perfect’ game…

And of course, being a game/narrative designer I immediately wanted to try and emulate it! But I could never think of a way to do so that would be respectful and not just a blatant ‘copy’. So I left that thought circling my brain, like a stray atom in a supercollider, until one day it smashed into another thought heading in the opposite direction. This one a memory.

I remember vividly that scene in the first Kingsman film, where all the prospective candidates are asleep in their dorm. There is silence and calm, when suddenly the music kicks in as water rises through grates in the floor, up the sides of their beds, waking them up in a panic, and keeps rising until they are trapped in a room completely filled with water, left trying to figure out how to escape before they all drown.

“What if the time loop is rising water?” said my brain.

Various very obvious scenarios immediately popped into my head: a sinking cruise ship, a deep-sea research station slowly flooding, blah, blah. Dull. Dull dull dull. Dull because they are obvious. I sent them packing straight away because they were so boring. And none of them fitted the type of game I wanted to make. I didn’t want this to be an ‘action’ game. As soon as you have that kind of setting, that’s what you get. Outer Wilds was more about exploration and curiosity than trying to survive a disaster. So that’s where the island setting came in. A location surrounded by water, that starts visibly rising, restricting where you can go until there is nothing but sea and you drown -> time loops.

The “why” of all this I’ve been working on since forming the basic idea, but that was the mechanical loop and setting I was looking for. So far I have created a history of this island, the main areas, some of the characters who used to live there (it is empty/abandoned (?) when you are exploring it), and have created a list of scenarios related to rising water and how it impedes your progress, or sometimes opens new paths for you.

Now, it will be a long time before this is anything more than a set of puzzle prototypes in grey checkerboard textured rooms, as I have to plot out where these should all go, distances between them, how they need to be solved or triggered, and how they are linked to the constantly rising water (or not). And there is the narrative design: telling the player what has happened here in the recent and distant past, how it relates to what is happening to you now, what is this time loop, how did the previous residents escape or succumb, and, of course, how do you stop it, if you even can?

But, despite the very early stage, I have an incredibly solid idea of what I want from this game. And from my experience I already know the largest amount of dev time will go on a combination of the water tech and the art of the island itself. So the prototype is neccessarily going to be mostly making sure my puzzle ideas can indeed be realised in a very basic set of test scenes set on a primitive looking island.

More info as it comes!

Tony.