Minigames
- Chat Cleanup -> Incel group buys bots to flood her live chat with coded phrases and doxxing attempts. Players must react to a live chat and must ban/timeout/delete specific worrying patterns, player loses points for ‘over moderating’ if they delete the wrong messages, keeping the ‘stream vibe’ up.. [Medium paced, Medium difficulty minigame]
- Password Hardener -> Incel group tries brute force entry into her system -> Player has to type rapidly increasing complex passwords before the ‘crack meter’. Fake popups occasionally happen to try and trick them and slow the player down. [Fast paced, high stakes minigame]
- Final minigame would be an amalgamation of a few minigames, making it hard, story explanation would be a full group of people attacking at once and not just one obsessed fan.
From our initial Proposal of incel culture we knew we wanted to include minigames to break up the heavy text based gameplay. Adding minigames not only would add more substance to our game and help it stray away from being a visual novel but we have decided it will be the main factor within the hidden point system.
Following our earlier ideas we made our minigame concepts try and fit the technological themes of the game.
The Game
Genre
- Phycological horror
Incel culture will be a narrative driven psychological horror game where your choices shape the outcome. A game with an unconventional way of portraying horror, focusing on text based interactive drama that creates suspense. Navigate escalating tension where the narrative responds to your actions. The result is a journey that explores the darker aspects of human nature that is often ignored.
Target Market
- Frequently Online people
- Women
- Teenagers and young adults
Given the genre and themes of the game it’ll be targeted towards teens and young adults.
It will include threatening and themes with foul language to accurately portray what females in the gaming and social scene experience, without sugar coating it..
Setting
- web browser
- Main characters Bedroom
The core gameplay will be within a web browser that is a flat 2D space, whilst the physical room outside of that browser will be fully 3D. As the pressure starts to build throughout the game this will begin to show in the players environment reflecting the main characters current mental state. Objects will distort, the lighting will change and altogether the room will become increasingly unnerving.
The Protagonist
Female streamer (more impactful 49% gender experience harassment), having the character be more realistic considering the themes of our game concept.
Streams games, receives misogynistic comments on appearance and skills which visually impacts her and her surroundings over the course of the game. Visual of the character will match her streaming niche, currently undecided.
Based on our current limited idea of the player characters appearance we have developed a mood board to guide the overall tone and aesthetic of her design. These mood boards proved to be useful considering her significance within the game. The character inspiration draws heavily from grunge inspired aesthetics to reflect the characters internal headspace. Intentionally avoiding creating an overly bubble visual. Instead we are aiming for a more muted and laid back appearance for the character, fitting her role as a streamer well.
Drawing from these mood boards as inspiration alongside previous conversations between me and Ayse I had created some initial concepts for the characters design. Ayse mentioned how she liked the purple designs the best, it was clear they had their own personal neish and they fit well into the more grunge inspired aesthetic we wanted to keep. Within these designs I did also try to employ some other internet fashion trends, as this is something me and Ayse had discussed before. Being that our streamer character is online very frequently it is important to reference these current trends in order to make a design feel more realistic.
The Aesthetic
The artistic style for the game will be a low poly aesthetic with vaporwave inspiration. Having a balance between technological surrealism and retro minimalism. The environments will feel eerie, but with simplified almost cutesy designs. A mix between nostalgia and uneasiness. It is a physiological horror after all.
The Name
Frankly incel culture was always a placeholder for this concept that somehow stuck; we hate it. The current placeholder name for the concept does a good job at portraying the themes but feels very uninspired and almost methodological. We want the name for our game to be more interesting and relevant, less of just stating facts about the games themes.
Chat Log of creating the name
The name for our game came to us over discord messages, we were exploring different ideas but none seemed to fit the aesthetic or vibe we were looking for. Many of these messages were in a much less professional manner and was just communication amongst friends, but without this laidback means of interaction when it came to the subject we may have never thought of the game name.
We knew we wanted a game name that was quirky, being an indie game it would align with what’s typically expected on the market. Frankly the whole process of making a game name was a much more tedious task then initially expected, every time the subject came up nothing seemed to fit. During this particular time when were were messaging and brainstorming ideas for the name of the game I was also playing Fortnite. In Fortnite you have the option to be ‘anonymous’ and your username wont be shown to other users, in the game chat at the time one of these usernames was shown and that’s what inspired making the title of our game as username.