Need Help with Plot for a Possible Project

[deadsuperhero]

I came up with this idea the other day, so here goes:

Plot: A boy named Jack gets in a tragic accident of some sort, and he's put in a coma for 10 years. Trapped inside his own mind, Jack must make his way through his dreams if he wants to recover. He must fight to wake up again. He has to go through everything from the most beautiful dreams to the most horrific nightmares. If he fails in the dream world, his heart rate flatlines in the real one, and he dies.
Later in the story, he meets a girl in his dreams, and falls in love with her. However, he has to face the possibility that she's not real.
However, she is. In the end of the story, Jack wakes up. He was in the accident at age 15, and he always pictured himself at that age. He is now 25.
He stumbles into another room in the hostpital, and finds the girl. She's in a coma, just like him. He has to find a way to wake her up, so he gets back in bed, and aids her in her dreams.

The gameplay would somewhat resemble Quest for Glory. You would complete tasks in your dreams to gain points. You could then pull out a medical file for Robert, and see what new skills you have. Eventually, you'll learn how to manipulate your dreams using powers (flying, levitation, telekinesis, chronokinesis, invisibility, etc)

This idea is still very rough, but what do you guys think of it? How can it be improved? (I really need some C+C on this, I think it could definately become something great)

[ManicMatt]

The gameplay mechanics with the story sound interesting, but the actual dream about girl thing.. well let's just say a mate of mine told me two weeks ago that he'd come up with a story VERY similiar to your own, which makes me wonder if it's a coincidence or an overdone story? (He wants to do a film with the story)

[[Cameron]]

The going into minds and aiding in dreams things reminds me of The Cell. Vince Vaughn, J Lo, Vincent D'Nofrio (sp?) good story idea, okish implementation. And it had J Lo, that just sucked.
Moral of the story: Dont let your game have anything to do with J Lo. I think thats the moral.

[ildu]

Hehe, you should never think you're alone when you think you've come up with something original. I came up with almost exactly the same story like 6 months ago, and I actually started working on it then. But, as usual, I lost interest...

[Nikolas]

So, idlu, wait...

With your art capabilities, WHAT would help you keep interest? Even for a small game...? A team? Money? Brilliant story? WHAT?

As far as the story goes, I think that I have come with a simmilar story myself, but while reading your plot, I had no troulbe picturing it as a game, or even better as a film. So it is not bad at all... The details are what matter I think...

[ildu]

My story was different in that the boy got in a car accident on halloween night in his halloween costume (a skeleton costume with a plastic pumpkin pot for collecting candy in), so he was sent to the midspace of death, kinda like Grim Fandango. So all the people in the city of dead people are skeletons and corpses and such (like in Corpse Bride), and the boy is still human. Apparently there was some mix up and the boy wasn't supposed to die yet. So he has to do all kinds of stuff to return to life and rise from the coma that he was put under in the car accident.

And the basic idea behind it would be that all people who go into a coma generally get into a similar situation and those that come out of it are the ones who pass the puzzles. I had some storyboarding as well as background linework done for it. I also had some chars planned, like for example a psychiatrist who introduces all the incoming dead people into the city of dead people, kinda like a travel agent (like in Grim Fandango). I abandoned the project when it expanded into something too large to handle and when I realized at the time I wouldn't have had the ability to create the graphical quality I wanted.

Another idea I had just recently was a conscious play on the idea above. The soul of a man wakes up in an attic with no recollection of how he got there. He notices there's a glowing trapdoor with a glowing keyhole leading to the lower levels of the house, but it's locked. However there are 'ghost' stairs that lead from the attic window to the street. All around town are people in the same situation as him, everyone having a similar locked glowing trapdoor for themselves near the places they died at. So the soul of the dude needs to help these people in their own goals to get access to his trapdoor. Basically he's given this opportunity to get back into the lower floors of the house (which is his own house) to prevent the murder of his wife and son, because their deaths were 'unnecessary'.

So the basic idea for this is that people have a choice in death. Depending on how they solve the puzzles of their own trapdoors and how they act in the situations put forth after opening the trapdoors, they have the option to either go back to life or continue to death. I've got some bg sketching done as well as character concepts, plus the skeletons for all walkcycles are done. I started this like 2 weeks ago so I'm still working on it .

Yeah, I have the problem of always abandoning every project I start (except one which I'm still doing with Bunnymilk ). Everytime I get heavily involved in a game, something comes up in real life that makes me question everything I do, which in turn makes me spend less time on the computer and abandoning the projects due to lack of motivation. I feel a certain amount of guilt when making games, so I've recently very consciously moved away from games to the art field. Also, there's the notion that I should only do stuff that will benefit me in the future. And as I know I don't want to work on games for a living, but rather be an illustrator or graphic designer, or an architect (fingers crossed ), it really doesn't help the situation. Recently I've got a lot of work done, because of the justification that I'm prepping up my portfolio. But again, I won't be including any game production material in the portfolio (or mentioning it), because of general guilt .

Nice to vent. Sorry for hijacking the thread. Thanks if you got this far .

[deadsuperhero]

Wow. Kind of weird to see how reused ideas are.
Actually, I got the concept for the game/story when I was trying to keep a dream diary (for inspiration). Out of anxiety of not remembering my dreams, I wondered what if it was like to be stuck in a dream for a long time, hence the story.

[Da_Elf]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087175/

its been ages since i saw this film but i really enjoyed it.

[ManicMatt]

Dreamscape:

"When a subject dies in his sleep from a heart attack Alex Gardner becomes suspicious that another of the psychics is killing people in the dreams somehow and that is causing them to die in real life. He must find a way to stop the abuse of the power to enter dreams."

WHAT?!! My story I was writing about six years ago had people being killed in their dreams by a psycho, that killed them in real life, and a detective (Called James Lewton, surname being a nod to Discworld Noir) investigated, and then found himself in danger! Although mine was more horror orientated and had no psychics. ..glad I ditched it now..

[Buckethead]

Have you never heard of a Nightmare on Elmstreet and Freddie Krueger? 

[ManicMatt]

They scared me when I was a kid and I don't like horror films.

I thought they weren't nightmares, but real nightmares, or something. Oh well..

[Mac]

This is all reminding me of Ubik. Could that be one of the first of these kind of stories?

[Ghost]

It has been done in Monkey Bone, too, only there it's Brendan Frasier going into coma, his Alter Ego (a cartoon Monkey) stealing his body, and everything mixing up from there.

The idea is promising, though. The only thing that I would complain about is that after solving my dreams and thus feeling I won the game, I must then do the same thing again in the girl's dreams. Maybe she could've been something like a nurse who read books to him, and he wakes up in a body old enough to match his feelings?

[Vince Twelve]

Also, the BBC series, "Life on Mars."  A modern-day detective's partner is kidnapped by baddies while they're close to cracking a creepy case and then he's hit by a car.  He wakes up in the 1970's and has no idea what's going on.  He soon realizes that he's in a coma and can sometimes hear the beeping of his heart monitor and people's voices urging him to wake up, but he can't.  So he tries to solve a very similar case in his past/dream world that might help solve the real case in the present/real world.

A good show.  I haven't seen the whole series, but as soon as I get some time...

[Snarky]

The gameplay sounds almost exactly like Tim Schafer's Psychonauts. In that game, you enter people's minds and solve various tasks in their subconscious  (finding repressed memories, cleaning up cobwebs, collecting figments of their imaginations, etc.), leading to increased mental health for them and more special abilities for you, including flying, levitation, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, invisibility and so on.

Psychonauts is a platform game, so I'm sure it would be somewhat different in practice, but still...

[ManicMatt]

Oh yeah psychonauts! Still, that game was rather wacky, so would this one be wacky too?

"Life On Mars" (What a strange title) was good!

Sort of spoiler for the show, but without revealing details.

Spoiler

I was annoyed that it ended with the idea of making a second series though. As just one series, it would have been better, and I would have bought the DVD boxset.

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