robot!productions

SO KENNIDY HAS BEEN PLAYING YUMMY NIKKIS/YUMMY 2KKIS/.FLOW AND HAS BEEN INSPIRED TO MAKE A GAME SIMILAR TO THOSE. OH, AND SHE HAD A DREAM A FEW WEEKS AGO THAT ALSO INSPIRED HER. ANYWAY HERE ARE THE IDEAS THAT SHE AND HER BOYFRIEND, DON, CAME UP WITH (BUT MOSTLY DON.)

Oh, by the way--the general idea (girl saving suicidal people through her dreams) is mine. LilGunmanX typed up most of this, so all the credit goes to him really. Though, we both think up the same ideas. Any input you have would be lovely!

Also: I'm going to need artists and music composers. I might just pay for this project, so keep a look out for that, too!

Basic Plot Summary: "You play as a girl (Kenniducky, for now) who lives an average, boring school life. Reality is futile. Your town is depressingly small and school goes on for hours and hours each day. You can interact with people in the real world and do things like go to karaoke and play games at the arcade, but none of it really serves much purpose in the gameplay. Your imagination is your greatest asset, and you experience fantastic dreams each night. However, once students begin committing suicide from the top of the school building, your dreams become disturbing, and you must collect certain items in the dream world that will help you reach their hiding place, which will save them from their untimely fate."

Gameplay: I was thinking that she starts off in the dream world. It might be cliche, but in this dream, she fights off scary monsters (i.e., has her first nightmare) and ultimately begins her journey of figuring out what is wrong with the town. However, since it's the first attack, it ultimately has no effect. This is what gives her her integrity meter (described below.)

A "nightmare" is what happens when she's attacked, or when she enters into a movie sequence that forcibly awakes her. She'll wake up wide-eyed, emitting a startlingly loud gasp (heh, punish those players!) and then say something like "A nightmare..." and shake her head.

Some movie sequences will forcibly wake her up, like in Yume Nikki (ie: FACE sequence), but not all of the ones that wake her up will actually take away health. In fact, the ones that actually take away health will be rare compared to just regular movie sequences that don't. This will help distinguish which sequences actually relate to really bad things and which are just bizarre.

Being attacked by a scary monster will cause her to wake up in the middle of the night and also for her to lose "integrity", which is her life points. If she loses them all, you get a game over. You can find them in the dream world, and also gain them from doing certain interactions.

Not every nightmare will take away integrity. Scary monsters will, and some particularly bad movie sequences will, but you can also be attacked by strange... friendly monsters, and they might wake you up. But you wouldn't lose integrity. There will also be monsters which are really, really frightening, and seeing them will immediately kill you.

When you're attacked by the monsters (successfully), you lose integrity and once you've lost enough of it, depending on what you've done, your game will end in one of many ways. The most obvious end would be to kill yourself, having succumbed to the same curse as your school. You were unable to separate yourself from everyone else and were completely unsuccessful at being anything but average. You are just another victim in this end.

Losing integrity is equivalent to depression. Weird things can start happening when you're on the brink of death, too. You might see an angel amongst the nameless faces in your classroom that you don't usually pay attention to. Little things like that. Maybe scary things too. Or maybe you start seeing black auras around the cursed people.

Waking up by pressing "9" will put you in school if you have spent a certain amount of time in the dream world. Waking up before then can cause... strange things to happen.

Kenniducky is vulnerable to sleep paralysis hallucinations, and there is also a chance that she might see a scary ghost if she wakes up at night. It is not only the dream world which is frightening at night. You can also explore the real world at night, and if you don't sleep enough then the effects of sleep-deprivation will cause you to hallucinate.
Hallucinations will not occur automatically. They will happen over time (i.e., after being deprived of sleep for long periods of time.)

Hallucinations cannot kill you; however, they can cause you to hurt yourself. On the other hand, depriving yourself of sleep for a long period of time CAN.

We'll be vaguely basing each general landscape on a certain theme, which is connected to the soul. The connection increases as you progress. However, there is no set order in which you need to progress through the stages, and you might need an effect from one stage to get through another stage which gives you an effect to finish progressing through the first stage.

You effectively win the game if you can manage to save everyone, but collecting souls and effects will be mutually exclusive. Ideas we (by that, I mean Don) currently have are...

• If you can collect the effects, but not save everyone, you might get a melancholic ending where she is able to stop the curse from taking her, but she's ultimately powerless.
• If you can save everybody, you get an ending where your character is just sort of raising her arms in victory on top of the school as the sun sets. What lies beyond that is unkonwn, but the curse persists.
• If you save everyone and get the effects, you can stop the curse entirely and actually save everyone.

Events: You can probably sometimes gain integrity by singing karaoke or talking with friends. It also makes for interesting scare sequences. Like, you go to sing karaoke one night on little sleep, and then you go only to find that you are singing karaoke with scary monsters. Then you wake up and it was a dream. Maybe in a hospital bed, because you were hit by a bus or something while absent-mindedly crossing the road. Or maybe that happens a few times in, and you get game over. Not because you have lost your lives or too many people died or anything (since by gameplay standards, they won't die since you're saving them,) but because you just give up after realizing how all this nonsense is affecting your real life. Oh, if you lose your integrity under certain circumstances, you commit suicide from the top of the school building.

If you go into the woods near your town at night, on little sleep, you can also encounter a dog-monster who will immediately kill you. When the dog kills you, he jumps on you, blood splatters, and the screen abruptly turns black with the words "You were mauled by a large animal. You have died." appear on your screen in pixellated white text like you'd see in a video game.

Since school is basically a futile, repetitive thing, you could have your character "study all night" to improve an almost useless stat. And after doing this enough in a row, you experience a special hallucination/ dream where you walk amongst numbers and letters and shit. There can be an instant-death character in there, too.