Generating Ideas:
Idea 1
Mascot horror style game with chase sequence and jump scares in factory setting. Similar to Poppy Playtime, Five nights at Freddy’s, and indigo park. This idea was rejected due to me already working on a mascot horror game on the side with a few other developers to help develop my coding and 3D skills. I feel like doing 2 Mascot Horror style games at the same time might burn me out on the genre, which would help neither project.
Idea 2
Game similar in style to Welcome to the game 1 & 2, mixing the mechanics of hiding and burying yourself into the internet to progress. I went on with idea a fair bit modelling the base room i would have. The idea was that you would try scour the internet to help find some information that would help in a crime scene. However, since you had to use the dark net intruders would try break into your hotel room and kill you. The idea was scrapped due to the brutal nature of the idea and the censorship i would have to implement to make the dark net usable without any having anything to horrific to look at as a submission.
Idea 3
The idea was to be similar to the games Don’t Escape where you had to try stop yourself from getting out a place or try stop something getting in. The idea is to have a text start explaining that a zombie horde that was started by a parasite is moving toward your small village and will arrive in 6Hours(15Minutes in real time), you have to barricade your self into your home and hope the parasitic zombies move past your home without getting in.
This was the idea i ended up going with. This is a small breakdown on how the game will work and a bit of the story.
I want to be able to rescue people that can either help you stall the zombies or help them survive along side you.
I would like multiple endings, an ending where the zombies break in and there’s not enough defences to stop them getting to you and you and your survivors die. an ending where you survive but you have your survivors stall them as long as possible. Then an ending where you all survive if played perfect.
Ideally this would not have any RNG to make sure the game is fair and predictable, meaning you can try many solutions easily.
You would have a 15 minute timer and every 4 minutes you would be able to let a survivor in. 2 Healthy people, 1 newly infected. with each survivor they help you build things by speeding up the time spent on each task and if your quick enough you can amputate the infected and save them but hinder their ability to speed up your building(33% effective), or put some bandages on the area to allow them to help so they are not slowed down in helping build but cant be saved at the end.
I want to be able to collect resources and then you can interact with static npcs or build with the resources and the NPC’s will just speed up the building time.
The in game time will be 6 Hours but that will go down in 15 Minutes in real time. You can speed up the game time by going to the bed.
Art style?
I want a 3D, semi realistic game that is well lit and features a blur effect on human faces to not take the player out of the immersion. I want the game to be slightly unsaturated with a slight grain effect and slight vignette. I want the House to look normal but slightly destroyed, a few boarded up windows, but the more you do in the house to make it look more gritty.
Items?
I want items to have 2 designations: Current use, after use. I want some things such as guns to only be used after the timer hits 0 and the current use to be items you can use during. The guns will have 1 exception and that is to put the infected person out of their misery before they turn.
Resource collection of things such as bricks, wood, and bandages are used to help build fortifications and to help treat injured people to make them 100% effective.
Some things will be locked out the way meaning you have to look for keys to unlock certain places. meaning you have to search the entire house to make sure you find secrets and unlocks to help.
Replayablity?
The game wont be very repayable after getting all the endings but i plan to add in a bunch of secrets to help incentivise people to keep playing. It is a simple indie game to keep people interested for a couple hours and to make them happy they got the game just like the game it is based off.
Steam future?
If given good reviews by teachers i would plan on making a game page on steam and polish the game and try sell it for £2 as it would have been a year of work put into the game and i don’t want it not to be known to the public.