Game Concept: The Game I thought singularity wanted to be.

For about the first 20 minutes or so of Singularity, I genuinely thought it wanted to be a different game.

You walk around unarmed, then you find a pistol. The pistol has limited bullets, and throughout the level you find locked boxes and lockers that you can open only by shooting the lock.

Additionally, and this was partly due to my unfamiliarity with the game. The enemies that early on were HARD. It would take several non-headshots to take one down, with a headshot being an instant kill. They also hit like a truck, and when your melee attack does negligable damage (not that you want to be close anyway) and your pistol's probably half-empty unless you've found an ammo stash, those early fights were pretty intense.

Let me set the scene for you as well. 

It's an abandoned school. Greyed peeling walls, rusty old bits of metal everywhere. The entire thing is draped in a blanket of dilapidation and emptiness. Often doors are blocked by detritus, but other openings have appeared from collapsed walls and ceilings. As you walk through you find letters, messages, audio recordings, all pointing towards the more sinister nature of what occurred there, through the high pitched voices of unhappy children or the scrawl of teachers, talking about them in ethically questionable ways.

Shuffling noises and inhuman grunts occasionally echo down the hall, and following them often results in a sparring session with an scarily strong and durable mutated mass, long of limb and warped of flesh, but worst still, they result in no fight, leaving you wondering what monster will descend upon you and when.

All this is compounded by the sheer stagnant loneliness, bitter and empty. A true metaphor for a childs life. Later on tiny bones and skeletal corpses appear in corners, often huddled beneath desks as a futile attempt to the prevent the inevitable and sudden end that consumed this small microcosm. Open the desks (often in search of the rare bullets) results in pictures drawn by these children; faded, browned but still indicative of the vitality and earnestness of their once creators.

As you make your way through a collapsed wall, ducking beneath mouldy beams and shoving away planks the truth comes clear. You are alone. This world is long dead, and you are a tiny scavenger ill-equipped and easy prey for the others that pick this bones of this giant corpse. Why even try? Your survival chance is minimal anyway, and there's nothing left to save. 

Coming to a dusty mold-filled library, where even the ideas of man are rotting away, you spy between shelves and books a large number of the creatures moving at great speed around. The labyrinth of knowledge will keep you safe for now, but this is it. Eventually they will find you, and your chances are growing slim, with limited ammunition and poor equipment. Even if you succeed it changes nothing. You're still alone, you're still ill-equipped, and there will always be bigger and nastier things out there than you... Oh look, a machine gun.

At this point any former pretext of the game being akin to survival horror is gone. There's occasional creepy bits, but when you start to get more and more weapons, the TMD which allows you to freeze time, instantly kill enemies through ageing, or pick up and throw giant objects at them, not to mention an overabundance of ammunition, a few supporting characters, and multiple human grunts to kill, the "creepy, eerie, crushing loneliness" part of the game is gone.

And I missed it.

The Point

The point is. This short segment of Singularity did something I don't often see games do. It compounded loneliness, ill-equipment with making bullets matter. Too often in games guns, devices for shooting and killing people, are treated like water-pistols. Easily replenish-able, and not very effective against targets. Even my beloved Fallout 3 on the harder settings makes me wonder whether my guns are actually doing anything other than making visceral noise. Maybe not against the humans, but certainly against some of the harder super-mutants and deathclaws.

And again, Fallout is set in a dystopian future where the large part of manufacturing weaponry like bullets has stopped. And yet my guy was practically sneezing the things. Check a bin. ANY bin. there would probably be a few clips in there. It could be a church and I'm still going to find ammo.

And yes, I'm not stupid, I know the reason why weapons aren't treated realistically in ever game is because you'd die in one shot, and most gamers like the feeling of having just headshotted their way through 5 enemies, even if their own guy is currently walking Swiss-cheese.

But I suppose the real thing I admired about Singularity's early section was the cost-benefit of shooting the gun.

Scenario:
Locker with a Padlock. One Bullet. Locker might contain ammo, but there's no guarantee. You think there's an enemy around, and technically one bullet should be able to kill them (provided you get the headshot).

This was utterly ruined later on when the TMD's aging function could be used to just oldify the padlock off of the locker, but at this early section, where I was low on health, low on bullets and either staring down another taxing fight or wasting one of my precious bullets on potentially nothing, but potentially more ammo, health, etc.

Yeah, that was quite brilliant. 

So I wanna be a game designer.

So I want to make a game focussing on that. Stagnant, lonely environment. Maybe there's few enemies, maybe they're easy to kill, but you've only got the one gun and not many more bullets. Some locks on doors, you can either go to try and find the key or shoot the padlock off, maybe there will be ammo behind, maybe not. 

It would only be a short game. Alice: MR taught me one thing, it's that shorter is often better. But if I could pack in some interesting puzzles, a cute story and the focus on "yeah, you've got a gun, but you probably don't want to waste your ammo in it" then we'd be better off.

Amnesia taught us that you don't need weapons to make survival horror, and in fact you benefit from not having them. I'd like to make a game where you can use them, but you probably don't want to unless absolutely necessary.