Overview + Brain Dump

Survivalish walking sim type deal taking place entirely inside a tiny shitty apartment.

• Clean Eternally Replenishing Messes!

• Bludgen Cockroaches To Death!

• Cook food (if the house isn’t too messy!)

• Eat food (if your body is within its very small, randomized daily, EAT WINDOW)!

• ? Sleep ?

• Clocks That Advance At Random Speeds!

  • Sunlight visible out of some windows, moonlight from others!

• Do Not Die!

• There are knocks and voices at the door, but you can’t open it, nor can you see your visitors.

  • “where have you been? everyones worried sick”
  • “please, please let us in, we miss you… I miss you”
  • “I know how you feel… Please”
  • “FUCK YOU”
  • “selfish piece of shit”
  • “giggling”
  • Maybe styled as voicemails the deveoper recieved all meta like?
    • Counter productive. But do get VA for this. All player voice will be through text on the screen + tone vocal, the only human voices you hear are from outside.

• Game starts with “WELCOME HOME”

• Art supplies that yeild dialgoue when interacted with but can never be used to make art

  • Half finished painting => com [local artist]

  • “i really should finish that”

  • “its almost done”

  • “it looks like shit”

  • “i hate it.”

  • “i don’t know why i even started it.”

  • I think it would be good to have maybe one or two complete paintings elsewhere in the house (ask [local artist] about that) but they are very clearly old. dusty. neglected. in a dark corner somewhere.

• Dusty pictures that face the wall.

  • ? some dyspohria picutres of like you from Back Then with squiggled out face?

• Once per day you may interact with a section in the home (black board? maybe just a wall with a knife next to it?) and make a talley mark.

  • The talley mark is the only way to track days elapsed
  • If you forget to place the talley mark you do not get to make it up

• ? Occasionally recieve a QUEST to FIND A THING which is burried in a random trash pile ? ? Get phone notifications / calls occasionally but you cannot answer them ?

  • heart beat increases in volume for 30 seconds after

• It never ends.

Presentation

• 3D, PS2ish (lazy) Graphics, very grey, very drab,
• Squelchtastic
• Music, distorted electric bass, 50bpm, doomy, clacky
• Godot
• 30 Minutes of gameplay, tops

Mechanics Basics

• Health Meter ? Maybe just do hunger
• Hunger Meter
• Some sort of visual count down until your able to eat again (can starve to daeth while waiting)
• Food can be eaten to restore hunger
  • Prepared food will perish after a couple Minutes
  • House starts with some prestocked non-perishables (huel if you will)
• Player may move using mouse & keyboard
• Highlight an interactable and hold E to interact
• Environmental Interactions
  • Lightswitches
  • Doors
  • all sorts of little doohickies
  • Roaches
  • Eat Food (must be consumed before expiration)
• Cleaning Interactiosn
  • Dishes (20 seconds)
  • Pick up small trash item (3 seconds) [to be placed in trash can]
  • Take out The Trash (30 seconds)
  • Prepare Food (30 seconds) creates dishes and trash

Mechanical Overview

• Player boots up the game and enters a menu. Black background, white text. “continue” => resume from the latest day survived, loads # of days survived “give up” => exit game “take a break” => exit game
• When the House Level loads: “ WELCOME HOME “

  • if its the players first day the game will teach them hwo to play nah fuck them players they can learn to survive strong UI design can take the place of explicit guidance

    • interact with trash to clean it
    • prepare meals and eat to survive
    • may only eat during certain times
    • mark days completed

  • player always spawns in the bedroom

    • in the bedroom there is The Day Counter
    • the bedroom also has an Accurate Clock which displays the current time

  • Days

    • Start at a random time between 03:00 and 13:00 and end after 12 hours
    • one minute is one hour
    • some sort of simple UI to indicate when the player needs to return to bed
      • maybe a vignette that starts after 10 hours and grows steadily to cover the screen by hour 12
      • PC starts to yawn, etc
      • The player must be in bed by the end time. If the player is not in bed they take damage and sleep on the floor where they wake the next morning.
    • to pass a day the player must not die
    • the bed is interactable and can be lay in at any time. Exiting the bed takes significant time.
    • every day starts with the player doing a 10 seconds interaction to exit bed this penalty does not apply when waking from the floor
    • certain things change day to day, (intensitiy of door, maybe other things too), but ?these changes are not based on elapsed days but rather the number of days the player has recorded. Without recording the days its possible the player can never advance?

  • Player Survival

    • Players have a pool of 100 Health
    • Players have a pool of 100 Hunger
    • Hunger depletes at a rate of 5 every 20 seconds
    • Hunger depletes by 5 everyime an action is completed (cooking ocleaning)
    • When Hunger is below a certain threshold (say 30?) the player takes hunger damage (1 damage every 10 seconds?)
    • When hunger hits 0 the player takes Big Hunger Damage (9 damage every 10 seconds)
    • Eat Zones

      • I ike the idea of the player only being able to eat during certain times. Sometimes the body is hungry but cannot eat.

      • These could be defined at the start of the day and told to the player?

      • I think they should be randomized in some way, like how can we communicate to the player when eat zones are without letting them plan too far ahead? e.g. the player shouldn’t konw its eating time until its eating time

      • MAYBE WE JUST DONT TELL THE PLAYER?

        • when they go to eat a food when its not Food Time: “I can’t eat right now” / “i don’t know why i just can’t” / “please don’t make me”
          • if the player skips through these 3 warnings they will vomit the food up (creaing new messes)

      • Lets start with keeping this unknown the player

        • If we don’t like this (it might not be very pleasent) can have the player character say something like “oh boy howdy i could sure go for some chow” when its Food Time
        • neon flashing hunger text that clouds the corners of the players vision, slowely filling their screen until they are unable to do anything but sit and rot.

      • But internally, 3 eat times a day, 2 - 3.5 hours apart, eat time lasts 1 hour

  • Cleaning

    • The home is populated with Trash
    • Trash is cleaned by a duration (30 seconds) interaction, this reduces the trashes level or deletes the trash from the world if level now == 0
    • Trash will physically block player motion
    • Trash can be leveled up! Thats right baby level 3 trash
      • An interaction is requried to remove each level

  • Cleaning (Trash Spawning)

    • Predefined trash spawn points are spattered across the house
    • While the player isn’t looking &| is a certain distance away from a spawn point, a peice of trash may spawn
      • If trash is already present at this spawn point, the trash is Upgraded - I want trash to be able to get TALL!

  • Cooking

    • In order to cook, the kitchen area must be completely clean ‘its too messy to cook here’
    • Cooking is an interaction that takes 30 seconds, when it completes:
      • A single food item is spawned
      • 3 peices of trash are spawned in the kitchen

  • Food

    • Eating a peice of food is an interaction that takes 30 seconds
    • see hunger for more informaiton on when eating is allowed
    • If food is succesfully consumed, gain 60 - 80 hunger

  • Player Dialogue

    • The player character speaks and speaks only to themselves

    • Speech is shown on screen as text, typewrittered out with sfx

    • Taunts

      • Randomly once a day (or maybe just at the end of the day for clarity) the player will lie to themselves
        • “just one more day living like this”
        • “tomorrow everything will be better”
        • “this time will be different”
        • “i’ll get my shit together…. tomarrow”
        • “i can change i know i can change i have to change i —”
        • “tomorrow i will go outside … i promise”

      etc

  • Player Self Care

    • Player may engage in Self Care Activities that don’t affect anything mechanically outside of their time cost.
      • brushing teeth
      • shower
      • etc
    • something something ludonarrative something

  • The Door

    • The house has a single door
    • Randomly (lets say 50% of days but never the first day) there will be a knock at the door
      • i want this to frighten the player at first
      • i want them to look forward to it
    • Interally we’ll just have a bank of different audio effects for this kind of thing. The range of possible sfx picks expands as days progress for example:
      • short knock
      • longer knock
      • short knock with spoken dialogue
    • oooo actaully better idea, just layer a random knock with ranom dialogue and increase the intensitiy of both over days

Technical breakdown

• Features
  • Player
    • movement
    • health
    • hunger
    • voice?
  • Trash
    • upgradable
    • cleanable
    • interactable
  • Days

    • time of day

    • switching bettween days

    • eat time generation is cook time()

      • What is a day
        • start time
        • end time
        • timescale [0.6-1.4]
        • eat intervals { … } x 3
  • Persistence
    • recall health, hunger, and player recorded day count
  • Day Counter
    • player may interact with once per day
    • shows talley marks on the wall, one per recorded day
  • Cook Area
    • Interactable zone on kitchen surfaces
    • facilitates cooking
  • Food
    • interactable
    • restores food