Other than having no visuals, I really struggled to settle on a story or mechanics for my game and so i dedicated some time to considering this. I knew I would need some way to explain the lack of visuals in the universe of the game. I had considered having the world be originally blind, and that sound was their way of navigating around, and then when the sound detaches from the objects, no one in the world can find their way around anymore. This makes it your job, as the local musician to reattach sounds back to their rightful place. I liked this idea but i felt like the puzzle element would be too easy. I then considered a mechanic similar to the mechanic of Choicer Voicer, where you are given a sound effect and have to replicate it, but instead of using a microphone, you have a selection of sounds and you have to layer them in the right way to replicate the full soundscape. I liked this idea but found it difficult to write a story around it or a reason why you as the character are doing it. It felt more like a fun minigame then a full game.
I then considered wandering around and just attaching sounds to particular objects and to bring the 3D platformer mechanic back into it with a reliance on narrative but as I really wasn’t set on a narrative and didn’t know how to make the narrative more than just a fetch quest i decided that this idea wasn’t going to work either
I reconsidered the idea of attaching sounds to objects and how important it was. It would be a novel mechanic but i didn’t know if it was necessarily a fun mechanic. I decided catching sounds would be more interesting as then you would have to follow the sound, just like in the fetch mini game in the demo of ‘Lost and Hound’. Also after playing the blind mode version of ‘The Last Of Us’ I found that the most fun Lisa and I had was trying to find where things were with sound, like trying to find the people we needed to shoot and managing to shoot them (very rarely) was so rewarding. I thought if i could capture that feeling and add it as the main goal of my game, it could be a simple but fun idea.
Also after mulling this idea over, I thought that it would be a lot easier to build up the difficulty (adding sounds that layer over the sound you are trying to find, making the sounds harder to get to) and i thought there could be the equivalent of a boss fight with a cloud of sounds to unpick with your net. Confusingly i have a very strong visual idea for how this game looks in my head and i’m hoping with some research into sound design, i can transfer the scene in my head into other peoples heads when they are playing through my game
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