Tormenting players as a running gag?

I have not had a chance to work on my game in forever, but plan on getting back to it soon.

In the mean time, I would like input on an story idea.

So the basis of the game is that you are a prisoner working off time in a capitalist dystopia.

It’s and FPS Metroidvania and the player is silent, ala half-life.

But the game is narrated by your snarky AI correctional officer threatening to blow up a tiny bomb in your brain if you don’t do what it says.

Think Claptrap, with power over you, and it only lives in your head.

Anyway, the game starts off with you waking up from stasis in orbit above a planet.

Your AICO (pronounced “aye-co”) starts giving morning pleasantries and a general rundown of the mission and casually tells you the ship is over run by aliens, as the ship’s windows slowly open showing the surface of the ship swarming with thousands of enemies.

The player puts up their fist and are put in control.

They get to the door and AICO tells you “Woah, what are you doing? You didn’t seriously think we were going to send you off with just your fists, did you? That would be stupid!” And a wall opens up to show a shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher.

You pick up the shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, then approach the rocket launcher and the door slams shut.

AICO mocks you saying “yeah, we are going to trust a felon with a rocket launcher” and laughs at you.

You fight your way through the ship and ultimately fall from orbit and get to the main map.

Then you finally run into enemies with rocket launchers, kill one and they drop one, and you go to pick it up. The rocket launcher blows up in your hands and AICO says “Yeah, it’s 2355. Did you really think you can just pick up weapons off of dead bodies and just use them?”

Anyway, the point is I want a running gag of “almost” giving the player a rocket launcher and having it snatched away at the last second again and again.

Can you suggest any other ideas how to do this gag some more?

Maybe have them find other weapons along the way so they know what it looks like to get a new weapon, then have them find the rocket launcher room and then have a rubble fall between them and the launcher?

Maybe have an enemy run up and grab it before they can get it?

Maybe let them get a defective one?

Also, any ideas about how to really make it epic when they finally get it?

I was thinking having a brutal boss fight and allow them to get it mid fight?

Or maybe go all Link to the past and REALLY make it a solemn moment, then open a massive monster closer to use immediately?

I really want this to be a running drama and torture the player with it.

 

For something like that, you would need an AMAZING writer and an AMAZING voice actor.

Otherwise it can annoy the player literally, in which case they can simply flip the table and drop/uninstall the game.

For example:
“yeah, we are going to trust a felon with a rocket launcher”
Why wouldn't they give a felon a rocket launcher when they can explode the bomb in the felon's brain in a split second should the felon disobey? And if it is the future where you can't pick enemy weapons, wouldn't the rocket launcher come with a protection against unauthorized use (See "Old Man's War" regarding smart rifles)? Meaning the AI in the persons brain could just disable ability to fire the launcher against anything unauthorized..

Either way if you want this, you'd need to test it on living people, as there's a chance that they won't find it amusing.

 

My three thoughts are:
1. The joke can be on the player character, but it can not be on the player themselves. The player needs to be in on the joke. I think it's completely fine if the character specifically wants a rocket launcher, and you establish this clearly, and some other jerk character who the player loves to hate keeps denying it to them. As long as...

2. After the first time, whenever you take away the rocket launcher they were about to get you need to give them something at least as cool, but different. This sets up an expectation for the player that whenever they find a rocket launcher they're still going to get something cool. However...

3. I believe they need to finally get a rocket launcher, and when they do a) it needs to be awesome and b) they need to be able to kick their AICO's backside with it. That closes the arc for the character being bullied and overcoming their bully, and it allows players to knock down a villain whom you've had set themselves up for poetic justice.

In fact, I'd be tempted to give them two rocket launchers - one that's a normal (but powerful) weapon to have a final boss fight with, which feels good but is obviously only a short-term solution, and then a missile-station sized one which you use to take out their HQ to solve it for good, or something like that.

Cheezy? Absolutely. But it was cheezy anyway, so own it or drop it.

As neg already said, you do need it to be written and acted well. Humor done poorly isn't funny, it's grating. That wouldn't stop me trying, but I'd definitely be testing it early and often.

I don't think this is meant to be taken too seriously. Plenty of this kind of stuff doesn't make sense, the audience is willfully along for a silly ride. Why does Duke Nukem's ego protect him from damage? Why do Blood Dragons have eyes that shoot fire instead of, y'know, seeing well? Isn't the new business plan at RuptureFarms just going to make things worse? The audiences of those games don't care, that's not what they're there for.

 

It depends on the setting. If it is meant to be taken seriously, the questions will happen. It kinda reminded me of Breathedge,, to be honest, with their immortal chicken.

At the moment I remember following games where the player is followed by a voice:

1.Amnesia.
2. Portal (Glados)
3. Bastion.

But it happens in many games, for example, there's Satisfactory with their "computer voice"

Bastion had an amazing voice actor for their narrator. Amnesia voice has been quite annoying. Glados had a good actor. Satisfactory is, well... kinda not entertaining although you can see they tried.

I also remember Painkiller. In the first game, the protagonist was silent outside of the cutscenes. In Overdose, they gave the new protagonist a voice and tried to make it react situationally, however it didn't feel quite right.

Then there was more niche stuff like "The Suffering: Ties that Bind".

 

One thing you need to do is make it clear that the player never could have gotten the rocket launcher. It has to be obvious that it is being denied to them (especially the first time it happens) instead of setting up a situation where the player thinks they could have gotten it by doing something differently.

Nothing is more frustrating than reloading a save to do some action sequence over and over and over and over again, trying so many times because you got "sooo close" last time, only to eventually find out that you never were meant to have actually completed it. So make sure the player really *knows* that they wouldn't have gotten the rocket launcher just by being a little bit faster, jumping a little bit sooner, etc.

 

Or... just throwin' the idea out there: let them get it (temporarily) as a reward for great play? But that does mean that the joke is on the player whenever they don't get it, and will make many players feel that it's the bar for success, rather than a deliberately hard to get bonus. So I tend to agree with you.

 

One idea I thought of is having the voice react when the player refuses to approach the rocket launcher. And growing more and more desperate the more often the player does that. In the end the voice can become fixated on the player getting a fake launcher or firing the real one, and growing more and more hysterical when the player refuses to comply. That would give t he player some agency.

Basically, the running gag as it is envisioned now is "railroading" the player into sequence where they have no control over. That sequence will not be very interesting in a second playthrough. If you have the voice react, however, that will give the player satisfaction of outsmarting the voice, refusing to go along with its plan and g enerally messing with it. This could be turned into a fun element.

Also, if the voice says "we wouldn't allow you to go outside with just fists", that's clearly a challenge. And the idea would be to find a way to bypass the launcher, ignore the starting weapons, break the intended sequence, and go outside with just fists and then complete the level. Then you can add an achievement for that.

By the way, for this sort of interaction with the voice see The Stainley Parable.

 

Nah, that’s way more than I want to commit to.

I’m looking to do voice triggers and that’s about it.

 

If you introduce tension in to the narrative, there needs to be some sort of pay-off down the line.

Portal is a good example. You play along with GLaDOS's game for a while, but about 2/3 in to the game you finally have the opportunity to subvert her/it's plans and escape the bounds of the test facility. The taunts and the insults are fun at this point because you know that GLaDOS is just bluffing and ultimately has no way of stopping you.

 

I think I need to replay portal one and two.

i’m not trying to make this the whole experience, I’ve got some broad strokes in mind, but ultimately I’m probably gonna hand the script off to a comedy writer and hire an actor.

I really don’t want to make a story driven game.

At most I want to make a Build Engine esq narrative. Throw away lines, reaction dialog to emphasize moments, pop culture references, just empty calorie filler.

 

Even without the rocket launcher, the intro you describe seems to me to be a clear setup that your ultimate goal is to defeat your AICO. You've got the Hunger Games hook in there (fight or we'll kill you) which basically has to be a double-layered setup. Short term, survive the fight, long term, beat the system.

Without that long term part what you're actually asking players to do is submit to a bully. Can you imagine Hunger Games being this successful if Katniss decided that she was totally cool with murdering people for her freedom? It worked because there was tension between surviving and resisting.

Your gag seems to tie into that nicely. You'll run around having fun blowing people up, but you don't get to make choices because you're being coerced. The gag foreshadows a possible weakness / method of resistance, which ads a bit of flavour to the justice you'll finally get in the end.

From vague memory of your talking about this game elsewhere, I wouldn't worry about killing the AICO stopping you from making future expansions or whatever. Just do a Star Wars - the Empire always has a bigger, even more hidden, badder base somewhere, and so can you! "Since you're the one who defeated the AICO system, of course you make the perfect test subject for AICO2!" Or "Thanks for taking our biggest competitor out of the market. Since you took them down, now you'll be our biggest asset!" Etc. etc.

To clarify, that's really not what people seem to be talking about. Story != character, and the ideas raised aren't having it drive overall gameplay.

 

If it's not tiddies, people only put up with a tease once or twice before it becomes annoying. If there is a tease, I need to know right away that there is gonna be pay off - big time.

I don't see any pay off if the tease is scripted and then the pay off is also scripted. That's like a dog getting jerked around on short leash.

If the tease isn't a tease but rather a challenge, and player best the challenge and gets payoff - then it's a proper gameplay adventure.

 

That's not a story driven game, though.

Portal is linear and there are next to no choices.

The stuff I described with the voice becoming obsessed with the gun when the player refuses to take it also does not have any impact on level sequence. You simply switch between several sets of voice lines. Now, if you implement the scenario I described where the player can escape with the fists and refuse any weapon, that means adding one extra exit path from the starting location, but it is still the same level, same enemies (extra difficulty will occur, because the player refused to pick up a proper weapon). It is like missing a gun in Quake - which is something that could absolutely happen.

 

As others have pointed out, Portal (both games and the coop) is your best go to for this mechanic done well. GLaDOS is still one of my favourite all time video game antagonists. The main thing you need to do is establish that the AI is an unreliable narrator. As gamers we are incredibly used to simply following the instructions from the voice in our head. So you need to break this expectation fairly early on.

The end of the first run of portal chambers is a good example of this. The level places you on an elevator that drives straight into a furnace. The puzzle is obviously unsolvable, and the only way to survive is to cheat. This clearly establishes that "the cake is a lie" and that GLaDOS is not a reliable narrator.

From this point forward, the player is expecting GLaDOS to lie. And the writers have a lot of fun with the idea. You can do anything you like.

 

By the way, if I’m being completely honest my delusional idea of the series is that you get a new AICO for every game, and every game is a new crisis.

Sort of like a player is on nonstop treadmill of missions.

and I was originally thinking the conclusion of the game would be going back in the cryo-stasis, then waking up in a AAA graphic version of the ship, get a celebrity to voice one line as the new AICO, then have a new monster break into the room and have the screen go black.

I imagine I could probably get someone like Patton Oswalt or Bobcat Goldthwait to do one line for 5 to 10k.

again, I know that is delusional.

 

No point worrying about the sequel until the first game is out and successful...

 

Sure, but there needs to be a payoff before that.

Remember the end of Half Life? It's pretty much exactly the "put into stasis" thing, but it works because it's multi-layered. The player just defeated the Nihilanth (climactic moment), needs to somehow get back to Earth (tension), is extracted by the G-Man (resolution..?) but is then "offered" a job (mystery and threat!). It's not as clear cut as "mission complete, get back in your bottle" and if it was then it'd be boring. Also, see again: submitting to a bully.

There's nothing wrong with the back-into-stasis formula, but you've got to find a way to spice it up. Even when players recognise the formula you've got to get them guessing "how will our hero be sucked back in this time?" It's ok for the outcome to be predictable if the journey is not. But if the whole thing is predictable, it's just boring.

There are loads of ways to have players legitimately win, and get the emotional / story payoff for that, and then have them brought back in. And if that's a hook to your sequel then you'd better make it as good as it can be.

Well, look, you've got to get stuff finished first. But assuming that you can get it finished, you won't succeed if you don't try.

 

It is worth mentioning that at the end of half-life you can reject G-man's offer.

Which was a nice twist.

 

You can, yes, but it's pretty clear that the other choice is death, just as in Not-Sure's game. It goes to a Doom 2 ending style room full of enemies, only the G-Man already relieved you of your weapons.

 

• Drops to pieces, when picked up.
• Blows up when picked up.
• Ditto when fired.
• Missile just drops out the front when fired.
• Does not fire.
• Missile locks onto player.
• Low power warning + Power runs out when fired.
• Cartoon Flag with POP on it appears instead of missile.
• DIY Missile Kit with missing piece (if you have a gunsmith screen).
• Fires training round that shower's fireworks doing zero damage.
• Fires wonky round that misses target.
• Glitchy target UX that cannot lock on and refuses to fire without a lock.
• Ditto but will not lock onto enemies only scenery.
• Coloured missile launchers that need matching ammo.
• Launcher with weapon trigger lock (no key)

 

Looks a bit like a rocket launcher without a rocket but is actually an orbital strike platform targeting laser.

Similar but rocket barrage swarm rocket launcher, player fires a rocket at the target and every linked rocket turret also launches a rocket barrage at the same target.

 

The Riddick game actually did something like this really well with the assault rifle. It was really hard to get a hold of one due to the genetic lock on the guns. When you finally did get one you had about thirty seconds of being an absolute god gunning down everybody and anyone in your path. Then the genetic lock got reprogrammed and you were back to your fists again.

Those few moments with the gun made you feel very powerful and invincible. It was a massive pay off for the player. And losing it so soon made the memory sweeter.

 

And it encourages change in player behaviour. Someone who plays cautiously and is always behind cover might be tempted out into the middle of an open area to grab an assault rifle and go nuts in the brief time before it locks, especially if it's strong enough to turn the tide of a drawn out battle.

And then they go back to hiding behind cover, because that's their style and that's cool. But for a few moments there that flow was enthusiastically broken, which makes things feel fresh and non-repetitive.

 

That’s not a bad idea, but it just does fit what I’m going for.

 

@Not_Sure
Eternal Darkness on the gamecube, is a game that randomly trolls it's players, throughout the game. They call it the sanity effect. Sometimes you would unexpectedly suddenly die, only after a while, to realise it's a hoax that the game plays on you.

Or you'll get an annoying "your control has disconnected" message, and you literally can't control your character, for like a minute. Lol!

Apparently, Shigeru Miyamoto personally had some bit of influence, on the whole sanity effect troll thing. That game though scary, is such a troll. Lol!