The Me of Yesterday
In your dreams (an eternal white staircase leading infinitely up), you interact with the you of yesterday. You don’t know what happens outside of the dreams, but depending on how your day went, yesterday’s version of you will be in different moods and environments. Interacting with yesterday’s you shapes how your next day will go. At the end of each dream, you also have the option of killing yesterday’s you to simply forget yesterday.
Balloon Seller
While at a festival, you meet a balloon seller who sells balloons filled with memories. They come in different colors and shapes such as bittersweet, nostalgic, that-thing-I-really-should-remember, etc. with prices that change relative to importance. Spending time with him as he sells memories to other festival-goers lets you see why he chose his profession and how other’s react to remembering what they’ve forgotten.
the first one is a huge mind fuck for me and after reading it once through i don’t quite get it.
i like the second one a lot. it seems the set up is static and you’re sort of just exploring the story? why are we interested in learning about why he chose profession?
I like the second one too, but have the same sorts of questions as Melissa- why are we talking to this guy? I guess “he’s an interesting dude” works, but is there another reason?
I’m a little confused about how the first game would work… Do you play through multiple days? Do the results of previous playthroughs get stored and used for the next game? If you kill your previous self does the game end? I think it could be really interesting if you managed to pull it off but it sounds pretty complex…
I think the second one has a great concept (i.e. memories in balloons) but it sounds like playing it might be kind of dull. Do you make choices that affect the gameplay or is it a linear story that you can only prompt to continue?
The first one has promise, but unless you can create a narrative arc from it the player might become uninterested after a few iterations. How many ‘yous’ do you plan to interact with and what ultimate effect does it have? Same thing with the second one. We have to be taken through an arc with conflict, which you can create with the balloon maker’s story.
Both are somewhat hard to wrap my head around especially the first one. The first one seems really interesting but I really have no idea how you are going to do it. The player is you but you are talking to your past you? So you only know what you knew yesterday but you can kill your past you to forget so you can only know less and less? I am not sure how to progress or why you would want to talk to your past you. Well I know I would tell my past self to do laundry so I wouldn’t have to do it today or something like that but I don’t know how that would translate into a game.
The second one is and interesting idea but I think it is out of scope because you suddenly are introducing an infinite amount of new characters through the customers he interacts with. Also you arent really talking to anyone, just watching him talk to people so I don’t know how you interact with this story at all.
The first one I find very interesting. It makes perfect sense within its own universe and the player can definitely relate to it because its a familiar idea. Who hasn’t had a bad day that they didn’t want to forget? But it brings the player to the decision if they’d actually do it, in addition to figuring out what happened. Very cool. However the goal is a bit foggy, what is the gratification of winning? And what is winning in this situation?
The Me of Yesterday could be really cool: you are finding out how your day went by relating it to yourself (atleast, that’s my understanding of it). While that information may not be interesting in and of itself, the game carries a tone of self-discovery: as the player, you know nothing about the character, but through talking to “yourself” you find out more about them.
The Balloon Seller is a really cool idea, but i’m not sure if finding out why he chose his career and seeing other people react to their balloons is as interesting as the idea of a man selling memories. Can you think of a dialogue path/option that may be more enticing? Like how does he get these magical balloons?
Both of these could be very effective if time and depth were put into them.
I like both these ideas, however I guess if I had to pick one I would choose The Me of Yesterday. First off it is a little more original. The second one actually has some themes that (while you may not realize it) have been done before in a number of stories and movies. The idea of killing the you of yesterday strikes me as a bit much, at least it might be something that most people would need some serious convincing to actually do. I know if someone told me that to forget something I really didn’t want to remember all I had to do was kill myself in the past I be very reluctant, even in a dream. It might be prudent to keep in mind that we often are not aware we are dreaming, and while more likely to accept some things at face value self preservation is one of the most basic instinct. So, perhaps the source that tells you it is okay to kill yourself in the past should be very reputable; like a loved one, beloved teacher, or something.
I find dreams to be both a past and future scene of my world. The brain needs time to comprehend what we have experienced and also can create an entirely different world for ourselves. Perhaps the dreams could be used to compare real world interactions with other possibilities that could never happen in reality. For example in my own dreams, social interactions are usually blown up into really positive or very negative, where as in reality we never react like that to each other and if we did we would get thrown in an insane asylum. Maybe that is the game, figuring out what state you are in and trying to avoid going crazy. The second idea is a bit removed from the world the player inhabits and needs more direct interaction. But still a good idea.