Idea 1- A story about trying to get out of bed in the morning and how it can be extraordinarily difficult to do so, particularly on days when getting up is urgent and the story of the dream world calls you back to sleep.
“You carefully approach the corner in the hallway, bracing yourself to finally catch the Deep Freeze Killer. Suddenly, a loud buzzing fills your ears and drowns out all your other senses. You fall. The fall must have been swift because you’re aware that you’re prone before you’re able to realize you’re falling.
Before you appears the source of the buzzing, a small device with flashing red numbers. You vaguely recall something urgent.”
Choices: “Attempt to deactivate the buzzing device.” “Try to stand.”
Idea 2-
This second idea explores the idea of “respawning” in games. The story starts like a interactive novelization of a multiplayer shooter game such as Call of Duty, describing a battle scene and offering various courses of action. These courses of action ultimately lead to protagonist death, at which point the player is offered a choice in “character classes” to respawn as, all of which are full except for the “innocuous spider tying to build a web on some hummer wreckage in the middle of the battlefield” class.
Examples of choices offered at various separate points in the story:
- “Lob a grenade over the wall”
- “Add some thread to the web that goes to the left, and then some that goes to the right”
- “Continue spinning and orbiting the sun”
For the first idea, how will the game respond to choices to wake up instead of dream? In other words, how will you make the process extraordinarily difficult? Unless you want the player to actively decide to make it difficult – it might send a more interesting message about how self-sabotaging we are as sleepers.
I like the second idea, but make sure that if you go through with it that it isn’t a one-shot. Make the spider significant enough that playing through multiple times doesn’t render the twist uninteresting.
This is actually kinda crazy, because I was totally going to do a spider in the midst of a combat scene story, and then I decided against it. I guess for that reason I really want the second idea to be the one, but I think either idea could be done well.
I agree with Bueno on the first idea, which I really like especially since I absolutely hate waking up in the middle of the dream. I would love to play that and you could just have the craziest things happen because it is a dream.
The second one is interesting because death is not an issue which goes against most stories.