I’m working on a game called Gray.
About 2 weeks ago I was lying in bed staring at my ceiling wondering why I can’t get to sleep at a normal hour like most people. Somehow my brain wandered over to “mob mentality”, and more specifically this quote from someone I heard somewhere.
Men in Black?
A person is smart, but people are stupid.
That stuck with me, mostly because it’s a bit of a hopeless paradox. Those kind of thought experiments always intrigue me because it’s such a simple reality with no simple solution, or maybe none at all. I’ve found the smaller a sentence, phrase or idea, the easier it is to abstract out into a chunk of digestible gameplay. So the basic idea of the game is an attempt to explore this idea through player interaction. Essentially, the game is very simple. The player controls a character [similar to the others] attempting to stop what seems like an endless riot. By interacting with individual NPCs in the riot, it’s possible to turn them to your side. There’s more, of course, but you can figure that out when you play the game here shortly.
The big problems we’ve faced so far have been about the design. In a game this small, the only real challenges are the design decisions, some of them with the symbol design of the visual elements in the game, and the rest of them of course with the interaction. We want to make everything in the game support the general concept we’re trying to communicate [see above quote]. There’s a lot more I’d like to go over about the game, but it’s not finished [although close] and once it is hopefully it will speak for itself.
If I were to tell you that a sheep is sly, but sheep are bashful, could you make a game out of it?
Also, this looks very cool. Link!