My friends and I are going to develop a game soon, and we plan on selling it through Steam, or our website. We are trying to gauge the popularity of ideas with different groups on the internet. Each of us are posting the game ideas in our respective communities, and I wanted to share our best concept so far with you guys. So here it goes. I will update this thread as our concepts change and we have a better feel of what ideas people like. This was not written by myself, and wasn't even written by the person who was supposed to be in charge of story. To me I visualize it as a Braid/Limbo style game with the level design of Metroid. The story is like a cross between Psychonauts, Lost, and Inception.
"I was thinking a 2d Platformer like Metroid or Castlevania that revolves around traveling through the multi verse while the main character tries to find their way back home to the normal world. This broad idea of the multi verse would allow us to make a ton of different platforming worlds and environments. Later universes could become more personal to the main character's subconscious until the game ended in limbo, things could also become more fantastical as the game progressed deeper into the main character's mind. Game play would include physics puzzles, exploration challenges and upgrades.
The game would include a lot of style and atmosphere and we would try to give it a fairly deep story. The story would not necessarily be linear, and the path you take through the game would depend on the way you handle situations. For example, some puzzles would have more than one solution, and there may be moral decisions that also have an effect on the game.
Here was the story idea I had.
The main character starts off in the real world as a middle age man with paralysis who gets into a coma, and he starts dreaming deeper and deeper. In his dreams life starts normal and he is still crippled, but later as he goes deeper into the multiverse subconscious he begins to walk again, and later starts to gain abilities beyond normal human ability.
When he reaches limbo in the end, he is at his strongest but he has to escape back to the normal world to come out of his coma. Reaching limbo is about 2/3rds of the way into the game, because the last 1/3rd is him escaping from the levels he's already played, only the levels are twisted and disturbed and are starting to fall apart.
An idea for a level:
You go through your childhood starting as an infant at an orphanage and growing up from there. There was a portion of your life where you were mortified of your shadow to a point where you needed hospitalization (just one of those weird phobias I guess). There is a part where you are walking through the hospital you were institutionalized at as a child, and the lighting casts your shadows in different directions. If you turn back to view your shadow, it comes alive and eats you or something resulting in your death. The thing is, is that lighting from different directions casts your shadows in different directions as well. Since you are unable to face your shadow without dying, light direction also limits which direction you can walk. When you are in darkness however you can walk in any direction you choose."
This a rough idea for the story, and so far we only have a basic sidescrolling platformer engine with placeholder graphics. We want the game to be very story centric, so we are waiting until we decide on a story concept before continuing too much.