1st blog post of 10 Week Project – Lost Souls

My group, Zwölf, chose the game concept Possession written by another group of our class. We will create this game in 10 weeks, and from now on I will choose one artifact from our game to write a blog post about once a week.

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Most of my work has been concentrated on writing the game design document, and so this blog post will be about the design of the so called lost souls in our game.

Lost souls are a kind of resource in our game that can be dropped by enemies or found in hidden areas. When obtaining a lost soul you have to make a choice to either sacrifice it or free it. To avoid having a window pop up asking you what to do, it was decided that we will have two separate buttons for this choice. You press Q to sacrifice the lost soul or W to free it. This choice has different outcomes depending on what you choose. When a lost soul is picked up, there will be a counter in the HUD showing the amount of lost souls that are currently held.

If the soul is sacrificed you will receive three elemental points (that work as both health points and power-ups) on the currently chosen element, and one point each to the other two elements. If you decide to free the lost soul though, you will be given one point to each element. Clearly, sacrificing the lost soul gives you more resources and would be the most beneficial choice for the player. However, this choice will affect your karma, thus affecting the game’s ending. When sacrificing the lost soul you get bad karma and when freeing it you get good karma. Bad karma will give you the bad game ending; you are the conqueror of the village. Good karma will give you the good ending; you are the hero of the village. To prevent the karma from being neutral, the choice of sacrificing a lost soul will give more bad karma than what the choice of freeing a lost soul gives you good karma.

A simple sketch of the introduction to the lost souls. Sketch by Christoffer Svensson

Sacrificing/freeing the lost souls is our game’s dynamic. This supports our aesthetic goal, which is being conflicted with a moral choice, having to choose if you want to play as the good or the bad guy. To make it clear to the player which choice is evil and which choice is good, the player will be given a lost soul in the beginning of the map. When the player approaches the lost soul an animation of the player’s character picking up the soul will be played and the two buttons which you use to sacrifice/free the lost soul will be shown. The buttons will be visually represented with stereotypical symbolism of good/evil. This also teaches the player how to use the lost souls. When you pick up lost souls later in the game, they will simply be shown in the HUD and you may sacrifice or free them whenever.