Personal project Idea
This week we were tasked to present a possible game idea where we mix 2 systems, one social system and another system of my choosing. This game will be presented to the class. The class will run a creative market, where people will choose which project to work on and develop for the next sprint. For my social system, I have chosen to explore the element of the Parasite/host relationship. The reason why I have chosen this system is that it explores a level of agency on another being that I have yet to see in video games. The other system I have chosen was management. I thought the best way to create a game where you are a parasite that controls a host would be to make it a management game like the Sims or 2Point hospital.
My game idea is that you are a sentient Parasite that has infested a host during the medieval era. You aim to survive for the longest time possible and reach the propagation stage (aka give birth to offspring of yourself). To survive, you must do your best to maintain the health, happiness, and satisfaction of your host, while being as covert as possible.
There are 2 main ways to die in this game: When your host dies, or when your host finds about your existence. Another interesting mechanic I thought of is called “Spectrum of infestation”. This spectrum will decide if you are a parasite or a symbiote. There are benefits of being at an extreme, but it can cause some ailments if not prepared. For example, if you are a parasite, you reach full control over the body of your host, which allows you to control the events the host is going to encounter in the game, but, you are more noticeable, which might cause the host to detect you and try to have you removed, or because you are taking so many resources from your host, you will end up killing him quickly. If you are a symbiote, you can maintain the health of your host the best and can help your host fulfil certain wishes that they have, but you have way less control over their actions, and it might end up being killed from causes outside of the body (like war, getting attacked…). I think this interplay between these 2 states is interesting, because it introduces risk and reward to the player, and motivates the player to possibly have multiple runs of the game while trying each spectrum.
The way you can affect this spectrum is by making narrative choices that will happen every week. These narrative choices will affect both the spectrum and any of the host stats, but you will not know if it will be a negative or positive improvement. I chose to not show how the stats will be affected before a choice because I think it would motivate the player to experiment with each choice, and possibly challenge their critical thinking on their choice of approach.
Another mechanic I thought of as well is “Host Objectives”. The host, being another sentient living being, will have its objectives and desires. Which, if helped, would increase their happiness, and possibly aid in their overall survival. If the parasite prevents or takes too much time to help the host with a certain wish, the host will become sadder, which will decrease the overall quality of life for both themselves and the parasites. I felt this idea was interesting because it forces the player to tackle the idea of caring about their host and to have more critical gameplay objectives than the main “survive the longest as possible”. I also feel this will challenge the player to strategize more about their choices, adding another level of complexity to the narrative responses they will make during gameplay.
The look of the game was going to be a simple 2D management game, comprised of multiple UIs containing the player Health, Endurance, Strength, Happiness, sociality, and Stealth. While most of the stats are the attribute of the host, the last one, Stealth, is how covert is the parasite, high stealth means that the Host has no chance to know that you exist, while lower has higher chances of you being spotted.
The environment of the game will be mostly represented as the actual body of the host, so you would see the bones and the organs of the host. I have chosen this environment because I thought, that if I was a parasitic being inside a human body, I would see a world of organs and bones. Another world development choice I have made is to put the timeline to medieval times. I thought, because of how low the standard of living and the number of confrontations that happened during that era, it would have made it easier for the host to die without our parasite’s intervention.
The feedback I received that day was very positive. Everyone said the idea was very cool, but to be very careful of the scope. I felt very proud, as it was the first time that I used my creativity to create a game concept, and I put the effort to develop the idea into something possible. This made me more motivated to carry on in the future and develop this idea to an actual game, and to experiment more in the future to develop my design skills.