Shrinking Game

[Renodox]

I noticed that no one has ever done a game in which the main plot line is that the protagonist is shrunk.  I thought that this would actually be a very good plot for a game with some interesting visuals and potential for some unique situations.  I havce PART of a story set up for it, but I need some help with the rest of game.  I tried making it myself and the pictures were tacky, I couldn't come up with any puzzles, and trying to figure out the coding was hopless.  I was hoping some of you people would be interested in this concept and would help me make the game.  Let me know...

[Baron]

Hey!  Shrinking was a large part of AL-Quest 1!  But I can forgive you for not going slumming in the course of your research.
     The thing is, without a plot or graphics you're not really bringing much to the table.  I advise you to compile a big list of everyday items that you can find around your home and then try to come up with uses for them if you were only four inches tall.  This should get you a few puzzles, which you can then combine with your half-story to create a basic plot.  With this in hand, and maybe a few concept drawings, your next step would be the Recruit a Team thread for an artist, programmer, etc. 
      Good Luck!

[Charity]

If you need a little inspiration you might try out Nanobots (and I assume Puzzle Bots, as well, but I haven't played it yet).  They aren't about shrinking, but they do deal with solving physical puzzles from the perspective of being very small.

I'm assuming you are at least relatively familiar with the print and video media that deal with this theme.  But if you want to expand your sources, you might look into stories like Thumbalina, The Borrowers, Toy Story, Stuart Little, The Mouse and The Motorcycle (actually anything ever about mice, except Redwall.  Sorry Jaques.)  See how they treat the implications of being very small in a world full of very large people.

What challenges do very small things face?  These may suggest puzzles, action sequences, or other game mechanics.

For instance, the smaller you are, the closer you are to the bottom of the food chain, and you will soon realize the huge number of predators that still exist in an urban environment, from dogs and cats, to birds, and possibly even insects.  In a more rural environment, these will only multiply.  Now you have to learn to escape and avoid such creatures.  This means chase scenes, stealth puzzles, and perhaps trap setting.  You may also be able to play predators against each other or otherwise, manipulate these dangerous opponents into helping you overcome other obstacles.

You must also worry about creatures such as humans that are so big they do not always notice you.  Being stepped on is especially dangerous.

Transportation is another big problem.  You now have to traverse what is to you rather extreme terrain.  The man made objects your shrunken character is accustomed to using are almost always stored on shelves and countertops high above floor level, or in cupboards and drawers that must now be opened.  While useful things are high up, the continuous walkways are all down low.  Traversing steps may also become a nightmare.  What if you need to travel across the city?  You sure as hell ain't walking.

Being scaled down relative to all the items in your environment means that many devices will be more difficult to operate.  The flip side is that there may be unconventional uses for many of them.  

What about the social implications?  Are you stuck small indefinitely, or is your goal to become big again?  If you will be small for the rest of your life, how will this affect your relationships?  Will your friends and family treat you the same?  What about wives or lovers?  The dating pool is probably a lot smaller.  Do people take you as seriously when you are the size of a thumb?  Do they treat you as a child or a curiosity?  Even if the condition is temporary, you have to worry about things like who you should reveal yourself to.  If you have enemies in the human world, they may well take the opportunity to kick you while you are down (anything from nasty pranks to murder).  Some people will want to exploit or study you because of your unique condition.  On the other hand, finding a full-sized ally could be invaluable, as now you can do most of the things you could before, if only vicariously.  (If I was shrunk, the first thing I would do is get to a phone and call someone I trusted.  If you don't want the goal of your game to be "get to a telephone/person," then you had better either come up with a good reason why doing so is impossible or ill-advised, or a good reason why doing so will not solve all of your problems.)

On the other hand, small people do have certain advantages that may affect gameplay.  For one thing, your surface area to mass ratio means that you are much stronger relative to your size.  Ants don't lift huge leaves because they are superhuman, they do it because they are tiny.  If an ant was our size with those spindly legs, it wouldn't be able to walk.  Falling will also become much less of an issue and so will climbing (which is good, since you will probably be doing much more of both).  I don't really know the full implications here, so it would be worth looking into the physics.  Just bare in mind that the athletics will not scale at a 1:1 rate.

You can also survive off of much smaller quantities of food, if you are like this long enough to become hungry.  Transportation gets one boost in that you can now travel through small openings.  You can hide virtually anywhere, and even when you don't hide, people being less inclined to notice you means that you can explore many of the same themes employed in stories about invisibility, such as spying and voyeurism.

Pretty much all of this stuff can be milked for gameplay and story ideas, and this is just what came off the top of my head.

EDIT: Regarding the art: do you have a digital camera?  Try taking picture of stuff lying around, up close.  Then you can trace this stuff and/or use it for inspiration.  Art is a bitch if you aren't good at it, but finding artists around here who want to help you is hard.  The more you can do yourself, the better, even if it is a little sub par, but there are always tricks that can make things a little easier.

Coding just takes practice.  If you have specific problems, post in the tech forums, and otherwise, just read the manual a hundred times, mess around a bit, and keep hacking away at your main problems.  If you can finish everything else and your code is still a problem, then maybe look for someone to do all/some of the code for you.  From my observations, coders are a little more available than artists, but if all you have is part of a story, that probably isn't enough to motivate them to help.  They need to know that your project is as good as its premise and that you are going to follow through, at the minimum.

At any rate, I see a lot of potential for this thread as a thread about game mechanics involved with shrinking, but I'd stay off the help recruiting tact, since there's another thread for that already, and I'd hate to see this one locked.

[straydogstrut]

Lyaer covers some extremely good points, and all condensed into a single, readble post - I could never do that! - so i'd advise you to pay close attention. THere's plenty suggestions there to get the wheels turning.

As was said, just look around you for inspiration, there's a ton of every day objects that come across differently when you look at them in a new way. Puzzle Bots is worth a look, it definitely had The Borrowers feel for me and I lovedf that series. You might also want to look at the Honey I Shrunk the Kids movies. Really silly, preposterous entertainment but they might give you some ideas.

I'd be very keen to see a game centred around little people, but I don't have the experience with AGS to offer any help at the moment (or the hardware, heh, since my main pc died), but you should take Lyaer's and Baron's advice and make a start on it yourself, then ask questions in the relevant forums/recruit some help when you have something to work with.

Sounds good, I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

[m0ds]

Heh..


Well it's interesting to see a thread like this. There is no real honey I shrunk the kids of the game world, no, but plenty feature it to an extent. As Lyaer says, you can usually count on Erin to include shrinking or small people in her games somewhere/everywhere! An outright game of the theme would be epic, if the designer really brings the world alive. Point & clicks obviously can't supply a totally casual run and jump game but similar mechanics can exist for such a theme in a point & click adventure. It would need to be a very "coming at you" game!

Daren't say it really but there's a biG market for games of this nature, but most companies won't explore it. Except perhaps some of our own! The Puzzlebots are possibly the smallest creatures on the market right now! Personally, I've started two shrinking game "test" games, one had potential and the other one I gave up on. I have art and video of the better one but that's on a PC I can't access right now until I bring it home from doing discos - which annoys me, cos the background I did was one of my best But I'd like to edit this later and show you. EDIT, a video below.

Lyaer is right about having to think of whole new obstacles and solutions from just scenery alone and that is why I gave the second one up. But don't let that discourage you, I'm just agreeing a game with that theme needs proper design going into it. For a first game though, you're going to be tossing around some advanced coding for a fast paced game, but a slow story driven one (ditching action sequences) isn't hard at all. There was an AGS game called Dr. Dot that didn't hit casual circles but it was more story driven around a shrunk theme and it worked.

The one I tried to make that worked for me was more about crossing long backgrounds through action obstacles - and now you've got me thinking about it I remember I had the whole story & gameplay mapped out would've been good. You started in a matchbox and your first obstacle was some pesky student trying to grab you then just beyond the grass was an allotment with a foot to avoid, so you had to time your clicks right.

Wait, I've just found the only clips of it I've got on this PC here.  (00:04 and 00:17)

It could definitely work and could definitely be successful, as always though it's the scale of the project & design to boot and the artistry that are really going to make it a winner. But yes, certainly go for it. I would give it a play!

Oh and note to self, now TellTale Games are making Jurassic Park and Back to the Future games, you've probably just caused their research department to get in touch with Disney and make Honey I Shrunk The Kids episodic series.


Good luck

[tzachs]

I'm not sure, but if I remember correctly, goblins 3 has a big puzzle where you get tiny (I definitely remember one when you get huge), so you might want to take a look there also....

[Igor Hardy]

There's also Bad Mojo were the hero not only gets shrunken, but also turns into a cockroach.

[straydogstrut]

Ha, that video looks great Mods=) Personally i'd like to see a more story driven game, more exploration and puzzles, as opposed to action-based, but the little snippets in your video look awesome.

[Charity]

Here's a more specific puzzle idea:

Say you have to get across town but don't have anyone who can carry you (or want to do it without anyone knowing).  So you have to look at a map (possibly cross referencing a phonebook) to find a delivery service (say a pizza place) that is within a block or so of where you are trying to go.  Find a phone and make an order to the delivery service.  You now have a time limit to reach the street before they arrive.  This may be too short, if the distance is far enough, in which case perhaps you have to call them again and make another order (maybe with another phone?  Say a cell and a landline; having both in one house is hardly uncommon), this one to a random place that is out of their way enough to slow down the delivery guy.  Or maybe phone in an anonymous tip to the police about a bomb threat or something, that makes them close down a major street.  Then board the delivery vehicle (climbing puzzle; you may have to rig something in advance to get you to the right height, depending) and then ride it back to its source.  Then navigate the much shorter distance from the delivery place to your destination.

If you are a fan of convoluted, semi-realistic, multi-step puzzles, that might give you some ideas for the types of things a tiny adventure game character might have to do to accomplish her or his goals.  Or of course I offered it up, so if someone wants to use it word for word, that's fine, too.  It looks like a coding nightmare, but depending how you do it, it shouldn't be that much more complicated than anything else you would have to do to make the premise work.

EDIT: Scratch the cell phone thing unless you are too small to carry it, because with a cell you could just call from the street.
EDIT 2:  But then you risk dropping it to the floor and breaking it--A reasonable excuse not to drag it long distances, or a puzzle in itself.
EDIT 3: If it looks contrived, that's because it is.  Wouldn't fit the tone of every game.

[Creed Malay]

I thought of doing something like this for a One Room One Week contest ages ago, inspired by the old movie "THe Incredible Shrinking Man". The whole game would take place in one room, a basement, but the player would experience it very differently as they shrunk, it'd go from being a familiar safe space to one that was awkward and difficult, and took effort to navigate just to reach cupboards and things, and eventually a whole world in which it was difficult to survive - battling mice over a crumb of cake that you need to eat to survive, on a table you used to work at.
I think you could get a nice sense of creep out with something like this, making what was once familiar become a hostile, dangerous and alien enviroment. There's a point in the movie where the dude gets so small that his pet cat stops seeing him as a human, and percives him as prey... brrr.

Personally, I think it'd be better if, after a certain point, it became clear that there was no way back to normality - you just have to do your best just to survive. Adapting to a horrible traumatic change is more satisfying to me than reverting to a status quo.

The movie is well worth checking out - it stands up amazingly well, special effects and all, and has some stuff that might be easily adapted to a puzzle.