Game Idea Pitch

[The-Big-D]

Ok so this is for my college work, im hoping to get some feedback as primary research so feel free to respond, it will help a lot thanks.

Title: City Of The Damned

The game I am pitching is a RPG/Survival Horror. It takes place in modern day society and doctors are trying to make a medical breakthrough and end up finding a cure to the deadly disease HIV. People with the disease are going to get the cure and the cure seems to be effective. But people with a certain blood type react badly to the cure due to something in the cure and end up going insane and cannibalistic (zombie set up).

The City is soon in turmoil and people are trying to flee. The army intervene and quarantine the city all round the perimeter letting through the uninfected through medical check. Soon the infected reach the army perimeter and they are over powered leaving the army no choice but to blockade the city all around and kill anything that comes through. The army then falls back with no option but to contain the city for the time being as it has been over run.

In the game you get to play as yourself.
Before the game starts you are able to customise yourself or your character into the survival horror game creating your appearance, personality and attributes which are used to come into play to help you through the game. Putting yourself in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.

As you progress through the game you may come across survivors some that you may know, some that you do not. Some have uses, others do not. Some you may trust more than others, all the people you find who are left surviving in the city all have there own input into the game. You can choose to help these survivors or let them be on there own. Each character has a background behind them which could either make you feel positive or negative towards them. You can talk and interact with these characters to gain trust or find information. But be careful some might want to team with you and some might backstab you as its a dog eat dog situation, depending on how you handle it.

Also every step you progress through the game has a knock on effect on what happens and what the outcome might be. If you go do something, you could miss an opportunity to do something else, maybe a plan might not work through or it could go down all to plan.

If one of your team gets infected do you put a bullet through there head? Or do you keep them around for a little bit longer because you need them and risk being infected yourself.

The area will be free roaming set in a huge vast city for you to explore with many locations a real city would have. Such as shops, hospitals, public areas etc. So there are many places you will have to explore.

You are able to interact with the environment and be able to search shops, houses and other places to either seek refuge or find supplies. The more you take refuge and the more supplies you have to help the more likely you are to survive. But don?t just keep them for yourself someone else might need them as much as you. This will help build trust but also increase your chances of survival.

When breaking into places or just exploring you might be ambushed by infected. You may have to barricade yourself in a house and find an alternate route out (such as through a window or back door). Also when breaking in you may have to smash a window or break a lock which will alert the infected to your location because of the noise.

The infected will hunt in packs and be quick, fast and very vicious. Its advisable to face them but remember you have a limited amount of ammo and you wont be able to hold them off forever at some points. They can only die with headshots or a heavy blow to the head. They can also be burnt or decapitating the head. Any other shots will just slow them down but still can be effective.

You can also travel during the day and night. Both with advantages and disadvantages. During the day there will be less infected but you make yourself more visible to being attacked when seen. During the night you are given the dark to hide in and be cautious and can sneak about, but there will be more to deal with.

As every other normal person you will need to rest, eat and heal your injuries. Not doing this will only slow you down and make you less capable of defending yourself and carrying on.

You will find weapons as you go along, you will need to be sparing with ammo for guns unless you have collected a lot. You will b e able to carry one big firearm, one small firearm and a side weapon for melee as holding too many weapons would give you more of an advantage and make you feel safer.

I want to emphasise the feelings of being alone, life or death environment, being afraid and scared, vulnerability, but also being sparing and thinking about your next step in order to survive. I want to also be able to set the feel from the environment and the surroundings to create that zombie apocalypse feel.

you can also work in teams with people who can help each other online in small groups. Groups of 4 or less in one game can do a co-operative campaign where they can work together and increase there chances, safety in numbers. You can work together to increase your survival rate but also working together you must be able to get along, share supplies, give help and be careful what you do in order to survive.

As this is a more mature game for an older audience im aiming this toward an older teen/adult range. This is because this game will contain gore and scenes that could be disturbing and contain adult content. This is more suited for mature players due to the game play and story and not for a younger gaming audience. Also being a more serious game the younger audience might not take the game to seriously or be immature online where mature players want to get along, socialise and play the game. I want to reduce the risk of immature players spoiling the experience for others.

Being online there will be downloadable content to expand the story, give you more customisations and give you more add ons in updates.

The game will be multi platform as I don?t want to aim at just one gaming market. Instead of limiting the game to a console such as the Xbox360. I want to be able to give multiple platforms the experience as they might not have one or the other so it will be available on all major platforms and PC. This will increase my chance in sales as having it on one platform will reduce people buying it as they might not be able to.

The goal of the game is to survive, help and rescue others and find a way out of the quarantined city alive without being killed by what?s in the city and also escape to safety once over the barricaded city.

Thank you for reading.
Please put your opinions and what you think of the idea and what you like or would improve or change.

 

[Fenring]

Seems a lot like I am Legend: The Game. Not a bad thing necessarily. Seems like a fun game.

 

[Cortheya]

i am legend..............

 

[Flying-Emu]

Sounds like some amazing love child of Dead Rising, KOTOR, and L4D.

I would recommend adding a deeper story to the game, however. It seems like it's almost thread-bare, and an RPG-style game needs two things; Story, and characters becoming stronger.

Speaking of which, this would need some manner of leveling up. Perhaps increased health, or skill points which can increase effectiveness, perhaps healing abilities, cooking, or maybe add something like the VATS system from Fallout and have weapon skills.

It needs more fleshing out, but it's definitely interesting.

*EDIT*

Also, above posters, thank you for actually answering his question at the end. Your one-liners were very effective in improving his potential product.

 

[Battle Medic]

Seems a lot like I am Legend: The Game. Not a bad thing necessarily. Seems like a fun game.

I always thought that an I am Legend game would, pardon my french, be totally bithcin.

 

[pantsoffdanceoff]

Wait so a medicine cure that could only be antiretrovirals that only has effect due to unmalign chemicals in are different in each persons blood turn into an airborne psychoactive parasite?
Although I do like the idea of character customization, quite frankly sometime Ill but I game just for that, it just adds so much to the immersion.

 

[Ursus Astrorum]

Nice concept. Quick question, though: Did the idea come to you just when you started this assignment, or did you have it as a vague idea for a while now? If the latter, when did you come up with it?

 

[Shadow Law]

I am legend would make a pretty sweet RPG horror surviver game...btw were did you come up with that idea? after watching I am legend while playing L4D?

 

[smithy1234]

So there's a cure for a disease. Cure makes people into zombies. Army traps everyone in city because they're douchebags. Been done ALOT...

 

[Marv21]

Maybe if you catch the diease, the only cure for it is to ge the diesase.

Kinda if it was I am Legend....was it a cure for cancer...to cure yourself....get cancer!

 

[The-Big-D]

I just sort of came up with an idea.

Just sort of wrote down a few ideas that popped into my head.
Thaught it might be a good concept, seemed better in my head at the time before i wrote it down, found it very hard putting my ideas properly onto paper. Writing how i visualise something is quite hard for me to do.

Hadnt really came up with a proper story line for it either, just came up with your normal cliche zombie outbreak.

 

[Ursus Astrorum]

I just sort of came up with an idea.

Just sort of wrote down a few ideas that popped into my head.
Thaught it might be a good concept, seemed better in my head at the time before i wrote it down, found it very hard putting my ideas properly onto paper. Writing how i visualise something is quite hard for me to do.

Hadnt really came up with a proper story line for it either, just came up with your normal cliche zombie outbreak.

Ah. I was asking because I'd mused on a nearly identical idea about a year ago. Storyline and some gameplay elements are a bit different, in that zombies and teammates are a rarer occurrence, and for a better part of the game you're in a Last Man On Earth Scenario. That, and the infected were just infected, it's never quite certain what made them zombies. Other than that, though, it's almost exactly like my idea.

 

[IceStar100]

I'd play it.

 

[The-Big-D]

I just sort of came up with an idea.

Just sort of wrote down a few ideas that popped into my head.
Thaught it might be a good concept, seemed better in my head at the time before i wrote it down, found it very hard putting my ideas properly onto paper. Writing how i visualise something is quite hard for me to do.

Hadnt really came up with a proper story line for it either, just came up with your normal cliche zombie outbreak.

Ah. I was asking because I'd mused on a nearly identical idea about a year ago. Storyline and some gameplay elements are a bit different, in that zombies and teammates are a rarer occurrence, and for a better part of the game you're in a Last Man On Earth Scenario. That, and the infected were just infected, it's never quite certain what made them zombies. Other than that, though, it's almost exactly like my idea.

Nah mine was completly off the top of my head i done for college work probably mid January. Just threw a load of ideas together to create a game i thaught would be good. Obviously needs more work.

Just came up with a game that I thaught myself and others would enjoy and just came up with the idea in an afternoon during lesson.

 

[Sh4dowSpec]

Seems a lot like I am Legend: The Game. Not a bad thing necessarily. Seems like a fun game.

I always thought that an I am Legend game would, pardon my french, be totally bithcin.

"I wanna grow up to cure cancer, Daddy!"

"I saw that movie, son. It didn't work out too well."

Jokes aside, this seems like a fairly good game premise. A few things, though:

1.) Make sure that you don't fall into the whole pistol-SMG-shotgun-rifle-RPG trap. Try to mix it up a little.
2.) Think about giving some of the zombies near-human intelligence, so that they can coordinate attacks against the player.

Also, how are you going to create "the feelings of being alone" with a crowd of NPCs around the main character?

 

[The-Big-D]

Seems a lot like I am Legend: The Game. Not a bad thing necessarily. Seems like a fun game.

I always thought that an I am Legend game would, pardon my french, be totally bithcin.

"I wanna grow up to cure cancer, Daddy!"

"I saw that movie, son. It didn't work out too well."

Jokes aside, this seems like a fairly good game premise. A few things, though:

1.) Make sure that you don't fall into the whole pistol-SMG-shotgun-rifle-RPG trap. Try to mix it up a little.
2.) Think about giving some of the zombies near-human intelligence, so that they can coordinate attacks against the player.

Also, how are you going to create "the feelings of being alone" with a crowd of NPCs around the main character?

Yea i want the weapons to be fairly varied anywho, also using the environment as a improvised weapon maybe.

I wanted to zombies to be some what intelectual instead of just your basic zombies. Wanted them if they cant get in another way to find another. Maybe groups of zombies flanking you so they come from all sides and not just charge front on at you.

Also the feeling of being alone, for the majority of the game you will be doing things by yourself, once you save people and such you will need them occasionally, some might not even want your help. Apart from taht you go out pretty much by yourself.
But survivors will die, maybe not like you if not interacted right.

Or you could just work on your own, never been a fan of having AI charcters in teams anyway it always almost never works and they get themselves killed. So that will be taking a bit of a back seat. Unless you play online but there will be mutiple tasks to be done so you all may have to go to certain areas, maybe go off in groups or even go in alone.

 

[Resin213]

Please read the Walking Dead graphic novels. A really well written group vs. Zombie story. One of the best things they did, besides having protagonists barricade themselves inside a prison is making other organized groups of uninfected - who were a mixed bag under the leadership of a psychotic whose toddler daughter had become infected and he kept locked up in his room, but that the other humans were a greater threat and yet you can never underestimate the zombies.

Leave HIV out of the background story, everyone knows the zombie story the less said about how the outbreak occurs the better, there are zombies, the city is quarantined, you don't need any narration or set up, let your character discover what has happened through experiencing it.

The part that sounds most interesting to me is the companions, figuring them out getting their stories, managing moral, watching for betrayals, watching for those little scratches and signs of infection.

Some ideas for gameplay:

Don't make it a shooter, have guns, but limited ammo, with situational weapons like wrenches, chairs, fireextinguishers, more common.
You can also make guns attract more roamers, thus making swords a better choice (also stolen from Walking Dead).

Use vehicles - make roamers go after any running vehicle, the vehicle, able to plow through zombies, but that hitting zombies slows you down and damages vehicles, making them better to avoid - make an open big city world, perhaps even base it around a particular real city (choose a non-obvious city).

Make a rest requirement for yourself and companions for both health and energy. Then make being able to defend an area, or hide in one and use sentries to sound an alarm. Players would need to assess for themselves the defensibility of a given area, as well as planning an escape route out of the city.

Work with pacing. If you pull a typical, protagonist wakes up in an empty hospital in a patient gown. The first area could be a big exploratory environment in which to collect clothes and useful items, with no zombies at all until you start making noise or wander into the wrong environment. Just evidence of abandonment and panic, tvs with emergency test patterns on them. Extend this part out and use long camera shots of flickering flouresent lit hallways. Have the zombies respond to sound and maybe 'smell' so that you could play slow and steady using stealth and avoidance or you could just run full charge guns blazing, but one bite could mean infection.

Companions could be interesting. Some could be good shots or have medical abilities others might be strong, a child might fit through narrow air vents, some could freak out and 'not be able to take it anymore'.

 

[The-Big-D]

Please read the Walking Dead graphic novels. A really well written group vs. Zombie story. One of the best things they did, besides having protagonists barricade themselves inside a prison is making other organized groups of uninfected - who were a mixed bag under the leadership of a psychotic whose toddler daughter had become infected and he kept locked up in his room, but that the other humans were a greater threat and yet you can never underestimate the zombies.

Leave HIV out of the background story, everyone knows the zombie story the less said about how the outbreak occurs the better, there are zombies, the city is quarantined, you don't need any narration or set up, let your character discover what has happened through experiencing it.

The part that sounds most interesting to me is the companions, figuring them out getting their stories, managing moral, watching for betrayals, watching for those little scratches and signs of infection.

Some ideas for gameplay:

Don't make it a shooter, have guns, but limited ammo, with situational weapons like wrenches, chairs, fireextinguishers, more common.
You can also make guns attract more roamers, thus making swords a better choice (also stolen from Walking Dead).

Use vehicles - make roamers go after any running vehicle, the vehicle, able to plow through zombies, but that hitting zombies slows you down and damages vehicles, making them better to avoid - make an open big city world, perhaps even base it around a particular real city (choose a non-obvious city).

Make a rest requirement for yourself and companions for both health and energy. Then make being able to defend an area, or hide in one and use sentries to sound an alarm. Players would need to assess for themselves the defensibility of a given area, as well as planning an escape route out of the city.

Work with pacing. If you pull a typical, protagonist wakes up in an empty hospital in a patient gown. The first area could be a big exploratory environment in which to collect clothes and useful items, with no zombies at all until you start making noise or wander into the wrong environment. Just evidence of abandonment and panic, tvs with emergency test patterns on them. Extend this part out and use long camera shots of flickering flouresent lit hallways. Have the zombies respond to sound and maybe 'smell' so that you could play slow and steady using stealth and avoidance or you could just run full charge guns blazing, but one bite could mean infection.

Companions could be interesting. Some could be good shots or have medical abilities others might be strong, a child might fit through narrow air vents, some could freak out and 'not be able to take it anymore'.

I was thinkign about weapons, i wanted guns to be there, but as a last resort if you get me? Use them if need be but i wanted people to use melle combat and improvise as well as guns.

I did think about the car part, i did run it through in my head but thinking if people are evacuating a city there going to be using cars so there may be a few traffic jams. I did have an idea that because you dont have the keys to everyones car you may have to smash the window and hotwire it. This would then attract the attention so you have to be fast about it.