Groundhog Day Adventure Game

[cosmicr]

Could it be done? How would you do it? I suppose most adventure games are already like groundhog day, in that you dont know what to do until you repeat the game and progress a little further each time.

I guess a game of GD could be that you have to do all the tasks he does in the movie before the day is out. If it were timed then there would be a sense of urgency and a learning process. If you dont finish the tasks then the day starts again.

What do you think?

[Darth Mandarb]

I had this same idea a few years back... the reason I decided against it was the over-repetitive nature of it.

Meaning when you 'reset' the day you'd have to do the exact same things over and over again until you got it all 'right' (thus stopping the loop).

My thought process evolved to making it so that each 'segment' of the day (say from 6am to 9am, 9am - 11am and so on) ... once you achieved those parts the proper way they would hi-light when the day resets (IE you don't have to replay them each day).  This could work in sort of a 'chapter' format where each 3 hour block of time is one chapter.

The only way I could figure to make it work would be to have it so that if you screw up any of the order of the current block you're in the day would just reset and wake up to the alarm clock (that's how you'd learn one 'way' was wrong and try something else) but the most you'd have to repeat on any given day would be the time in the block/chapter you're on.

This could also work in regards to those skills needed (like playing the piano) that would take multiple days of doing the exact same thing over and over and over ... once you knew you needed the skill the game would automatically repeat the days needed to learn the skill(s).

I also intended on making the events (that were necessary to complete the day) be a randomly generated series of events thus making the replay value higher.

All-in-all I think it lends itself to a great adventure game idea but it would have to be extremely well planned out in advance!

[GarageGothic]

Similar to Darth, I've been toying with a similar idea for years, but unlike him I haven't given up on the idea entirely.

Yet, I don't think an adventure game would necessarily be the best medium. I'm thinking more along the lines of an immersive sim like Deus Ex or the Hitman series (I think it was my obsessive trial-and-error replays of Hitman missions that gave me the idea in the first place). I hadn't thought about skills like Darth mentions, but saw the whole thing more as a matter of pattern recognition, memorizing NPC behaviour and finding optimal solutions to each situation.

I think it's a good idea as long as the time limit isn't too strict, and Darth's suggestion of time blocks sounds sensible. Depends on the completion time for the day of course, but if it takes much longer than 30 minutes for a perfect playthrough there should definitely be some kind of skip-finished-tasks function.

[Gilbert]

(Shamefully I haven't watched that film.)

I think this idea is quite popular. It often appears in media (as far as I remember a certain episode in The X-files did this, which was about an EXPLODING bank or something, and it's one of the better episodes as it had nothing to do with the "main" plot of the show) and AFAIK a large number of games do this also.

For example, in a certain part of DQ7, your party is trapped in a small part of the land (which happens most of the time in the first half of the game) and the bridge to another part of the land is broken. You are told that it will be fixed 'tomorrow'. However, 'tomorrow' never comes, as after you rest in the inn you find out that it is still the same day starting over again, and thus you have to do things progressively every (same) day, trying to break the loop, until tomorrow comes and you can cross the bridge.

These can give some ideas. There are some factors to be considered (I think Darth mostly covered them already), like:
1. How does the day loop? For example in the X-files episode the day 'ends' with an explosion and EVERYBODIES DIE and then it starts over again; whereas in DQ7 it ends whenever you sleep at the inn and the day starts over again.
2. How to make the day end? Akin to 1, in X-files (which is a TV show and does not have player interaction like video games) time will pass and things will repeat in order (with some differences each time of course) until the explosion occurs; whereas in DQ7 you can call it a day whenever you like (you can either do whatever you can until you don't find any more things to do in that day and then let it end to see the differences in the 'next' day, or just do some small tasks and sleep). So, when you make a game you may make time pass in each day (either in real time or let time advance whenever a certain number of tasks are done), or like in DQ7, let the players decide whether they want the day to end on their own.
3. What people should be aware of the abnormal behaviour? Definitely the player characters would find out about this repeating nature (even if they're supposed to not know at first, they should learn about this after one or two loops), but most other NPCs should not be aware of this, save for a few ones who are thus important in helping to make changes in each loop.
4. What is the goal? That is, how to break the loop, and what series of actions should you do in order to reach this goal (these actions should be set up such that they cannot be all done on the same day and must make the player to do trial-and-error tasks so that you must loop more than once to finish that). In X-files

Spoiler

a certain character who knows about the loop dies eventually

[close]

; and in DQ7 you have to defeat a certain boss to break a certain time curse.

[tzachs]

This has been done both in Orion Burger, and in Warthogs.

While it's a nice idea in theory (and worth trying), in practice I gave up on both these games since it was annoying (though I do appreciate the effort).

(Shamefully I haven't watched that film.)

You should, it's a pretty good movie.

[Anian]

But when editing a movie/series episode, you're definetly not "restricted" by user input, so you can do whatever you like to get an effect. You can do mystery (the characters are basically racing against time, something similar is in Memento as well) or you can do comedy (from silly deaths to mad reaction to waking up) - but all this is really hard to do without editing, the kind you can't do in a video game.
Just as an example, there's youtube videos of dying in Space/King's Quest games and when you watch it one after another it's funny, but it has nothing to do how they appear in the actual game, and usually they're not that funny. In fact the whole thing might end up being more irritating than fun.

An episode of Supernatural from season 3 for example also has the "something needs to change to break the loop" where one of the brothers dies, only there's 2 twists in the story - slight spoiler ahead - one twist is that there's actually a god/demon controlling the loop where nothing can be done to stop the loop, the whole point of it was to realize that death is inevitable (in the story the death is in a month or two) and that you need to come to terms with it fast and that's how it gets broken.

[Snarky]

Has anyone seen Source Code? It sounds like Duncan Jones is continuing to make movies that would make good adventure games.

[Anian]

Has anyone seen Source Code?

A bit of topic, but isn't it kind of strange that Gyllenhall who starred in PoP (where there's also a rewind/time bending mehanic) and now he's playing a soldier who's in a time loop...connecting point that the Prince of Persia Sands of time game...nevermind.
Source Code would maybe make for a good experimental game, but then again there's already games like Braid.

[Snarky]

And the rewind-time movie takes place on a train, like in The Last Express, made by Jordan Mechner, who also created... Prince of Persia! It's a conspiracy, I'm telling you.

[Buckethead]

How about when you reset, your former self is still around? That way you can aid yourself in tasks you can only accomplish with more people. I'm not sure if it would be possible to do in AGS at all though.

An UT3 mod did this already:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n1NLwcEga8

[Jim Reed]

A virtual theater thingy like BASS had, might be good for building a town and it's occupants I think. I also imagine you could get different topics each day when you talk to characters, depending on how much you know about them from previous conversations.