My Prototypes: Drone-cam supernatural game
The next prototype I’m working on is something completely different! Set in a version of the UK where supernatural encounters and otherworldly entities are kind of known about, if not overtly acknowledged, you play from the vantage point of a drone sent into a London tower block by a team of specialists, after an incident stops all communication from inside.
And by incident, I mean black fog barriers on all the entrances with ghostly hands trying to pull you inside, nobody seen or heard from inside the building for hours, and a six-man specialist firearms unit who were sent in, vanishing without a trace.
The gameplay for this one is intended to be metroidvania-ish, in that you use this specialised drone to open unlocked doors and windows, unscrew access panels and find other routes as you explore the block from inside and out. As you reach further inside, the story of what transpired is slowly revealed by using the drone to access and translate messages on smartphones and other devices of the residents to see what they were chatting about recently, and whether they caught any images or video footage of strange goings-on.
This is very deliberately UK set, and would feature messages in multiple languages to acknowledge the diverse backgrounds of people living in the capital city, with an overarching plot that ties their lives and “current cultural trends” (to put it mildly) into the supernatural events that have occured.
As for progress, all I’ve done so far is some general plotting, a bit of specific writing, and I purchased a drone controller asset pack to play around with the values to find a movement/play speed that feels good. Next steps will be blocking-out some spaces to fly around in and setting up some basic world interaction tests (the “opening doors and access panels” mentioned above).
A game with a message? Certainly. But will it also fuck you up with incredibly spooky and weird goings-on, all viewed from a drone-cam inside a poorly-lit and suddenly non-euclidean space that is at once familiar but now creepily hostile? Oh yes 😉
Tony.