The original idea was to be an adventure video game about someone stranded inside a school in a post apocalyptic world where it's constantly raining acid and going outside means instant death.

That was an odd idea.

And as far as art styles were concerned, one idea had the main character as a robot, so the images would be pixelated and in black and white.

That was a dumb idea

Go watch the movie, My Science Fair Project.
Model the school after the school in the movie towards the end.

Make it into some kind of survival horror. As the player goes wandering the area, some things start to get weirder by the moment. What's that sudden movement in the bushes over there? Or is that a blurry picture of a woman with long black hair in the corner? Now it's gone... Why are there heads on the table no- OH FUCK

>>14978266
>Why are there heads on the table no- OH FUCK
I read that as "their" heads on the table and I remembered the "From the Shadows" adventure from Ravenloft.

rolled 20 = 20

>>14978266
This.

>>14978266
Ah, good idea. It also fits since the original idea dictated that all the photos were shot without any artificial lighting.

>>14978287
>spirit rising food donations
>spirit rising

Hmmm

For the sake of completeness:

Another idea was more down-to-earth and had a group of students engaged in a an elaborate game of "assassin". The idea was to be suspenseful, but I didn't see that working out.

And for clarity sake, the photos would just be a reference point, along with the detailed map. I was hoping that they'd add a realism.

Okie dokey. Let me see... I just need to think through things. I hope you don't mind if I do it here.

>Plot = (Premise x Characters) + Twists

>Premise?
>Several students are alone in school at night when when progressively weirder and more disturbing things start to happen. Maybe one of them goes missing and they need to go searching for that person.
>but why are they there?
>maybe it's Halloween night and they wanted to do something scary?
>but they would need access to the school
>no problem, it's a small private school. one of their parents is a teacher, or even the principal.

>>14978348
To make a twist of it, let's say the kid whose parent is principal would reveal that they didn't get the key from the parent directly; They found it near the school entrance, and thought it's their parent who left it there.
The truth is far more sinister than that.

>>14978348
>Okay, so here's a tentative premise:
A small group of students (elementary school?) is spending the night at their school on Halloween without their parent's knowledge. But when one of them goes missing, things start to become increasingly scary, disturbing, and dangerous.


The next thing to establish is the individual characters. Any suggestions?

>>14978377

Let's try and remember those children that exist in every class in every school, that every one of us can remember.

The more real it feels, the scarier it will be.

>>14978402

That kid was always telling lies about fucking everything, and if you called him out on it, he'd respond with more (and even less believable lies).

Maybe he can be telling a bunch of stories at the start about going here before and seeing monsters or something. Though obviously he beat them up, with his dad who is totally a soldier in the Navy SEALS on the secret giant robot force.

>>14978370
Very smart.

I was thinking that the group should be mixed gender. I'm not entirely sure why, but when I look back on childhood adventures (which were often more serious and frightening than people given them credit for), they tended to include both boys and girls. And it would give a well-rounded cast. I don't know how large to make the cast. At least four, with one missing. Maybe five, with one missing. No, no. Four is best maybe.

>>14978402
Very smart.

There's the "Um, actually-" girl. That girl who thinks she knows everything. Her parents always own a restaurant or a car dealership or something along those lines. She constantly makes that scoffing sound when the class clown says something, invariably saying "You're not funny, you know that?"

It'll be kind of like Stand by Me crossed with Silent Hill. Don't shy away from the brutal, painfully disturbing content.

On that subject, what exactly constitutes brutal, painfully disturbing content?

>>14978492

The start is the kids playing hide-and-seek, but weird shit starts going down as you find them. At one point you find a room covered in blood, the body of one of your friends on the ground. When you exit and re-enter, it's gone. You find him again later, right as rain, but he always votes against entering that room.

>>14978460

One kid, one of the other's younger brother, who is an annoying little shit who only got brought along to keep him from tattling. He freaks out a lot and probably wets his pants often.

>>14978540
Good idea. The hide and seek would introduce players to the basic layout of the area.

Maybe a little subtler though in the beginning though. Like you enter a room and you see a limp leg sticking out of a doorway. When you click on it you get a little dialog like "h... hey, are you okay?" and the leg get's yanked inside. When you go inside the person is hiding in the nearby closet or something and is confused when you ask them about it.

Hmm... there needs to be a player character.

What were you like in elementary school? Alternately, who do you think would be the most interesting type of person to play as?

>>14978630

Well, /tg/ *does* want to be the little girl...

You find notes that kids have passed around in class and discarded. They get more disjointed and schizophrenic over time.

>>14978663
Damn! See, that's the kind of clever idea that makes me feel stupid for not thinking of it.

Is there some way that these kids could have access to this school without attending it themselves? Like it's old and about to be torn down. One of their parents works for the construction company or something.

>>14978750

There could be notes penned by the missing cast member in that same vein, too.

>>14978663

Oh, and a series of letters between teachers dealing with how worried they are about Sally. You also find a perfectly mundane description of how Sally doesn't like the games her daddy plays with her. Remember, not all horror has to be paranormal. Bonus points if the clues for Sally's evil dad are scattered around the school and only make sense when all put together; alone, each one is fairly innocuous.

>>14978750

If one of them can get in, any number of guests could come along. They know each other from day care, or church, or boy scouts. That would work best for the PC--everyone else already knows the basic school layout, but you've never been there, so you're dead in the water.

>>14978774

Would have to be careful writing that, but it could work great. The player character kid would Not Quite Get It even when the actual player did, and it would be wise to show that.

>>14978774
>>14978762
Fuck, that's great. This gives me a new idea:

The underlying problem with the school might really be that it's sort of unstuck in time. Several timelines drift in and out of each other, which explain things like notes from one time period, the one character's disappearance, creepy things like ghosts and whatnot (glimpses into the past / future timelines), maybe disappearing rooms from when the school was renovated.

OP, check out Little Fears (from rs: http://www.mediafire.com/?bq4dpxmdbo9p721 ) It's a system for horror as a child, and in addition to being an awesome game it has great ideas.

>>14978774
>>14978788
I agree, it has the potential to be really good if it's subtle. Little things like her art on the walls being just a little off and the teacher giving her bad marks in school for not playing well with others. Like, slowly build stuff up.

And it would help if this "Sally" turned out to be someone unexpected, maybe based on the time fluctuations mentioned by >>14978797. Like it could actually be the main character's abusive mother, and this gives background on why she acts this way. I dunno, I'm just throwing stuff out.

>>14978797

FUND IT

There's a child that only the PC interacts with; whenever anyone else comes around, s/he's gone. Is it a ghost, or a hallucination? NOPE! TIME TRAVEL! For maximum horror, there are multiple children stuck in a single moment, and are incapable of leaving said moment. Everything else is frozen except them. Sometimes when the PC gets timestuck, he finds one. But if he ever tries to find that instant again, it won't work, because it's only ONE instant, and being off by even 1/1000000000000th of a second is another place in time entirely.

>>14978825

That's a fucking awesome idea, actually. Establish that the PC is there because mom and her new boyfriend are mean, and she's trying to get out of the house as much as she can.

>>14978832

To clarify: one child per moment. Only one. FOREVER ALONE. But you run into more than one frozen moment over the course of the game.

>>14978832

Every child has a motivation for getting in that makes it seem like they were part of the original group. Early on, the PC wonders why on Earth there were ~12 other kids invited to hide and seek that didn't who up with the main group and that he wasn't told about. Then, one of them reveals that his tenth birthday is going to be in 1988.

>>14978832
>>14978855
Ahhhh. OP's perfectly fine, it's everyone else who's having the problems. After the game's opening (something happens that fucks things up), you never again encounter the others except in one-on-one circumstances, because they're all literally isolated.

>>14978895
>OP
I'm an idiot. MC, main character is totally fine.

bump

Hmm... we're doing really well with all the twists, it's adding up real nicely. But without specific characters, there's still a big question mark. Only once we get them can we develop a fully-formed plot and move onto the format, style, etc.

We moved away from what I original thought, which was a group dynamic, with them all traveling around together, so that frees us up a lot. But... hmm...

Okay, here's what we know: it needs to be at least four kids, maybe more? It should be mixed-gender. And I like the idea of one of them being a little brother ( >>14978555 ), although I'm not sure why. But that's really it so far.

>>14978958
Well the younger brother needs an older brother. What are those normally like? I never had one.

>>14978976

Annoyed at having to tag the little guy along. Trying to get rid of him, insult him, isolate and alienate him.

Bonus points: later on you find the older brother scrambling around madly, crying his eyes out as he tries to find his brother, yelling out apologies and promises if he just comes back where it's safe...

>>14978958
>>14978840
>>14978825
And maybe if we're going with the mom angle, we could have the main character be a girl. That way the mom would have more incentive to be intensely overprotective and paranoid and stuff, you know?


Whoa! I just thought of something unrelated. If this place is unstuck in time, what if it started to show glimpses of an alternate future where you and your friends went missing that night and never returned? You'd see glimpses of the cops looking around the school for you, newspapers with articles about it, maybe even your mom.

>>14979007
Let's see, other alternate futures could be equally disturbing. If you were to just open a door and suddenly be standing in a completely leveled field of dirt with no trace of the building (it had been demolished), that would be very unnerving to say the least.

But here's the question: in my vision of this story, the children come here and everything is fine. And then someone does something and it screws everything up as far as time goes. What could that thing be? It would happen around the time they split up to play hide and seek. Reading the Necronomicon and stuff like that seems a little cliched.

So, player character (f)
big bro, little bro
missing person.

I don't know why, but maybe an extra character, so 5 with 1 missing would work better.

The dynamics just need to be tense. The little bro can be the comic relief at the beginning, so if he's suddenly gone for a moment, you can really feel the tension normally broken up by him.

>>14979007
This sounds really good.

>>14979042

There's a kid's book series called the Midnighters. In it, there are a number of teenagers who live inside the "secret hour" of midnight--basically, time stops for everyone except the protagonists and the evil monsters that eat people. Having a necronomicon moment is kinda lame, but maybe at midnight, the school just goes fucked up, temporally speaking. Every intersection of a moment is a different midnight or something.

>>14979062
Yeah, I'm leaning around there too. And one of the other characters needs to be the one with the key. I think it might be nice to have that character be a jerk kind of, but they tolerate them because they wanted to go here for Halloween.

We'd also need to plan out the female lead a little more. Based on the little information we have (single mother who's over-protective), do any personalities spring to mind?

>>14979082

Spunky and rebellious when she can get away with it, but a shrewd manipulator when she can't. Lots of Diplomacy dialog options.

You know the teacher who was *no fun*?
Has a compound-word name: Mr. Cornwall, Mrs. Lockhart, Mr. Whyteflint.

They have a desk drawer full of things that were confiscated.

Toys, notes, paperback books, phones, 3D glasses...

A switchblade, handle slick with an unidentified brown grease, but the blade gleams in the natural light.

Actually, the teacher's confiscation drawer could be a major artifact trove: multiple useful (or useless) items that you and your four NPC "friends" grab.

>>14978976
Big condescending pricks, who hardly ever pay attention to theneeds of their younger ones, feel themselves entitled to do whatever they want with youners' pocessions and think that their youngers are their errand boys/girls.
I know. I am one.

>this thread

>>14979070
Yeah, that's one possibility, but I worry that it'd be tough to explain. Then again, sometimes these sorts of horror things are good when they're implied and not explicitly explained.

But yeah, I was thinking more like... there's some very specific connection that parallels all the different timelines. Like one of the characters experiencing a near-death episode at midnight or something that sort of connects them with someone in the 1980s who had a similar experience. As I type this, that sounds really dumb, but you get the idea of what I mean, just some kind of trigger for the events of the story.

>>14979113

Isn't "being in the school at midnight" trigger enough?

>>14979096
Boy oh boy do I know what you mean.

Sorry I stopped posting pictures. I have A LOT of them.

>>14979113
Yeah, you could have the kid not even know they almost died. Some gas leak, electrical fault, or just slipping in a puddle and cracking their skull.

Maybe a mix actually. So the kid occasionally finds all these bodies of his friends/himself laying around dead, but as someone further up said, they disappear quick what with the fluctuating time line.

>>14979118
Yeah, probably. I was just fishing to see if other people had ideas.

>>14979082
I was thinking smart, clever, kind of introverted.

>>14979135
This would be good.
If you have the big bro as a little boasty, extroverted and the little bro as someone who wants to be big bro.

>>14979042

No. Never, ever explain the source of the creepiness. It kills the mood. Nothing is scarier than a threatening unknown.

Does it have to be at night and with so few kids? You could have a group of friends just walking in the corridor to class, pass the doorway to their next room, and..... no one. The place looks run down, general creepy vibe. There's just something WRONG with it.

So of course they turn back to the corridor. Which is now empty. Turn back to the room, just an empty room.

You could have them trapped but with the world going on outside. But no one can hear them banging on the windows, or apparently cares.

>>14979146

Big brother should use swear words every once in a while, little brother says he's gonna tell, big brother says "yeah right we're breaking into a school at midnight."

Anyone read the webcomic "Bad Machinery"? It's literally a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration for something like this.

no music very little sound and dark everywhere.

>>14979179
Not necessarily, Amnesia was able to do sound incredibly well. Just slow, swelling music that you could ignore easily.

>>14979135
Mmm, we'd need to justify all the characters being there.

>The Stuck-Up Girl ( >>14978460 )
She has the key. Everyone puts up with her because of it.

>Big Bro
Outgoing, kind of pompous, but fun. Sort of like ( >>14978418 )

>Lil Bro
Had to come along in order to keep him quiet.

>Main Girl
Ostensibly friends with Big Bro and Other Boy

>Other Boy
Hypothetical other character?

>>14979175

I remember when that was called Scarygoround.

>>14979182
>other boy
oh! oh!
What about that there's this young boy who was in her class. quiet. unassuming. Because of bullying/abuse, he topped himself in the school. Massive coverup by school and teachers. All the kids think that he'd moved to a different school.

But they see him, wandering around, perhaps even not knowing that he's dead.

>>14979151
Well, I was imagining doing it only at the climax of the story, but okay. And either way, certainly the storyteller should know the source even if the audience doesn't.

>>14979152
I'll tell you what, there was another idea... an idea I actually made a short film about. The idea was about a group of people who find themselves sealed inside a building. Like, one day they just can't leave. All the doors and windows are being held shut. And so they have to survive, sort of like one of those desert island-type stories, on the few supplies they have.

That's what your idea reminded me of.

>>14979182

Other Boy is the Big Bro's conscience, he keeps his teasing of Little Bro from being too overly cruel. Generally mature for his age, but he's still like eight, so that's not saying much.

>>14979194

This is fucking awesome

>>14979194
That'd be problematic for a main character, but there could totally be a suicide victim at the school. In fact...

OH OH OH OH OH OH! You talk with the kid at several points over the course of the game and he helps you and stuff, and then finally you find him crying in the corner. No matter how many times you click on him he doesn't respond. But there's an article laying nearby, and if you read it, it's his obituary

>>14979182
See, to clarify, the early structure of the story is this:

The five main characters come to the old school after a night of trick-or-treating. Maybe they do some stuff like tell ghost stories and eat candy, and finally decide to play hide-and-seek in the old school house at midnight as a test of courage. However, during the game one of them goes missing, and the events of the story begin.

So you see, it would be tough for one of the main characters to be something kind of abstract.

>>14979218
Yeah, who would go missing?

There would be less incentive to find the The Stuck-Up Girl. But... ooh, if The Little Brother went missing, that might be sufficiently desperate. Although it'd take some good writing to convincingly convey the sudden change in mood of the older brother.

>>14979232

It doesn't matter if Older Brother hates Younger Brother. He has to find him, because he won't be able to face their parents afterwards if he goes missing. If the parents are domineering, he's scared of making them angry, if the parents are nice, he's scared of making them worried. In any case, he has to find his brother no matter what.

"Searching through the teacher's desk with troubled curiosity, you find what appears to be an old class photo. After studying it for a moment you notice notice something unnerving... The children's faces have begun ageing. Getting older as if what you were holding in your hands was a screen. The faces warp and wrinkles appear, hair thins and turns grey before finally the faces, one by one blur off of the photograph. Leaving one untouched by ageing, staying young.

Before you can alert the others, the photograph shudders and crumples. Vanishing from existence."

Perhaps a young boy was killed at the school in the 60s or something, and that's why it was closed down. Now the school is violently haunted and warps in and out of different time lines.

>>14979256

Or maybe the school was already caught in time, and the boy vanished into a different time line?

>no skill with programming

Goggle RenPy.

Or learn Python itself. It took me 3 hours ( Had a lot experience with c++ before. ) to learn and ~2 weeks of really sparse work to write my own VisualNovel Engine.

>>14979256
That's it! Dammit. I felt like there was some missing link I was forgetting. See I knew that there should be some reason for these time anomalies, and we're getting closer to establishing what that is, by asking one key question:

Why was the school closed down? If we can establish some kind of connection between the time or the kids or something like that, and the event that caused the school to close, then I think we'll have that missing link. You know what I mean?

GAH! Damn, I need to go to sleep. I'll be back in a bit, try to keep the thread alive.

>>14979232

Or possibly Stuck-Up Girl locks the school doors at the start of the game (because she's It and also because she's a prick), and everyone agrees not to unlock it until the end of the game. And then she goes missing, and at first everyone thinks she's just messing with them. Ooh! Especially if they played some cruel Halloween prank on them earlier in the night, and now they're all convinced that she's trying to get back at them.

>>14979205

I LOVE this idea.

>>14979205


>... then finally you find him crying in the corner. No matter how many times you click on him he doesn't respond. But there's an article laying nearby, and if you read it, it's his obituary

Make that child the Missing Little Brother instead

>Their faces when

>>14979300
Seriously, don't tell the player WHY the school is fucked up.

Doing that is the equivalent of a scene in a horror movie when the monster leaps out and you can clearly see the zipper running up its back.

>>14979373
Or just a milk carton. You know the ones.

>>14979389

I've always enjoyed a certain amount of answers.

But it's only good when the answers just come with more questions, and the answer itself is actually horrifying anyway.

Like.. oh it's haunted? That sucks. Oh a little boy died and that's why it's haunted. Fair enough... makes se..

Oh so.. so the children actually killed the boy. Oh.. fuck that's pretty awful why would they do tha..

They... they were all in love with their teacher who used to abuse them? Oh god.. that's sick...

WAIT I TALKED TO THE TEACHER THIS MORNING AND HE TOLD THE TO COME H....

etc etc

>>14979373

I think this would work better if the "dead" character is The Guide. In all/many of the timelines he fades in and out helping when he can.

Fuck me, that's your reason. In normal space/time the kid has yet to commit suicide. After his suicide his desire for friendship manifests as a "hidden hour" that appears at midnight. Once in trapped in the hidden hour, you can't leave until you know the truth of his death. As this is a temporal anomaly, you have kids from previous years and a few past (up to the closing of the school) who were trapped and never made it out. These provide the alternate timelines that you encounter.

>>14979397

Yeah. The idea is basically "and then the players were the ghosts". Then when they think of what they remember, being normal kids and all, well, that's how it begins.

Somehow, the SCP-ish properties of the building make it make more sense. The school feels abandoned for longer than it has been, it's actually full of the ghosts of missing kids on Halloween, and it's not a tourist magnet already? Not even thinking of the masqueradea breach it means for a real-like world. No, it's a one-time occurrence, and all who entered it in any reality will get lost in the maze. In the other realities, the building's life was different every time, some versions were even located in other countries, and/or at other times. Some were still active at the time of the mix-up, others had been destroyed, some have milk cartons with missing child advices, some have paper clippings neatly stocked in a folder, detailing stuff about missing kids, missing kids statistics, notes about how <Teacher X> loves how kids disappear, then other notes about how horrible it is and half-begun amateur investigation to find some back.

>XIII nowityou
Indeed, captcha.

Okay...

.. Which of you fuckers stole my next script?

>>14979430
Yes, that works.

Or look at Silent Hill 2, which is my example of a perfectly executed scary supernatural mystery - the game never comes out and tells you why Silent Hill is a fucked up town, but you do learn why James had to go to Silent Hill, and why it is the way it is to him.

But it never actually outright says "this is why Silent Hill attracts people who have committed sins and forces them to face up to them" or "this is why Silent Hill is actually capable of the above feat".

>>14979437

I see it much more worse.

Timelines actually curl back on themselves, they're tied in knots and you can find yourself in an unstable zone. Like in >>14979455 , the PC finds a folder full of "missing children" data, at first by a sadistic teacher who hates kids, then further in the file, the teacher appeasr to be searching for them himself, thinking if the System can't, he will. Of course, if he kid goes back to find the gleeful notes, he finds color photographs with dates and prayers for the missing instead. See? It's only haunted for one night in our reality, it's just that the kids happened to step in the knot, and some versions of some kids can get out - the adventure is finding a way to be that one, not to figure out how it all works.

>eashoo ailleurs
This is getting disturbing.

>>14979476

Yeah, I think the rules are;

1. Don't give all the answers

2. When you give answers, make them creepier than not knowing

3. Never give answers to relieve the audience

OP, please dear god, make this happen and release it to /tg/. I want - NEED - to play through this now.

>>14979476
>>14979519

In my idea, there's not even an answer. The rules are good, but I think the way to do it right is making the rules of the game world without explaining why they come up at all.

>>14979519
And remember that 99% of the time, a terror imagined is scarier than a terror revealed.

It's like...you're in bed. Suddenly, you become aware that there is a horrible gigantic bug hiding behind your bedroom door!

The door moves, and the bug is revealed. It is ten feet tall.

Believe it or not, the typical reaction your brain has to this is "phew, it's only ten feet tall, I was afraid it was going to be twenty feet tall."

>>14979535
But there has to be at least the appearance of rules. If the reader thinks you're just making shit up as you go along, the magic fades.

The reader MUST believe you, the writer, have set the rules of the story in stone, that you know all the reasons and have planned everything out to the last detail. If the reader believes this, they'll be drawn in and try to guess at the rules from what breadcrumbs you toss them.

So it does help to have worked out the reason for why something happened, like what's being done in this thread. But only so that you can keep the reader believing you worked out everything beforehand.

>>14979539
You've read Dance Macabre too, eh?

>>14979592
Yes, and On Writing, too. I love me some King.

>>14979611
Me too, the man knows his stuff. Apart from occasional overuse of Deus Ex Machina but eh, still good.

OP, if you could find it your heart to upload all of the school pictures in a zip file somewhere I will name my firstborn after you.

Halfway trough the thread i was too scared to click on the thumbnails.

Anyway, gameplay-wise you can set up some puzzles (I really don't know how visual novels works, the nearest thing I've ever played was Ace Attorney): each one can take place in a class or in a sub-set of the school place (floor/two or more classroom/gym/bathroom/any combination of those).
Every time the player enter a puzzle area the time starts playing circularly (Dawn of the First Day
- 72 Hours Remain), with NPC entering and leaving the area, some of them interacting with the player, some ignoring him. Sometimes the player takes the body of someone else (example: as he enters the room he is somewhere int he past, and every past-NPC start reacting to him as he is $children from 1988), just please avoid the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadAllAlong trope.
Sometimes the player is stuck in the puzzle, sometimes he can exit and enter again, resetting it; sometimes alone, sometimes with others; some puzzle areas can be plain stupid (as the field of dirt >>14979042) and no puzzles at all; some can be seen as a class with a glowing door and be pretty obvious, but some can start without notice.
We can make a complex plot with the PC reappearing any moment in time in the school: maybe one of the five NPC dies and after a while he solve a puzzle completely unrelated and pop out just in time to prevent it. Or just a moment too late... maybe if he was faster with the puzzle...


...fuck i want to play this as an adventure game now

>>14979651
you would name your son "OP"? All the kids will mock him

>>14979709
If he's smart, the kid could always claim they're initials and say his name is really Orphaner Painslaughter or something.

I think the 5th character "Other Kid" could be improved by having him not well known to the other characters. He could be from another school and tagged along because his mother and stuck-up girls' mother are friends.
The important thing is that hes a bit of an outsider at the beginning of the story. Now, he should be the one to disapear first. The other kids go looking for him cause it was their idea and they'll get in trouble if hes missing.
When weird shit starts going down the kids (and importantly the player) suspect the Other Kid of causing it.

Now there's 2 options to progress:
-Other kid is in fact the kid who committed suicide/was murdered and the source of weirdness
-Or theres a twist where hes innocent and got trapped in the weird, and you must rescue him as he turns out to be a bro

>>14979917
I'd go with option 2, the first one sounds too much a clichè, although I have no idea about what the weirdness fuel would be. Do we even need one?

>>14979437
What if a Janitor got caught in the hidden hour and is driven insane by being locked in it for 20+years and not knowing what the fuck to do. Also he tried to kill you, i dunno just an idea for a clocktower type enemy.

Also could the fucked up version of the school be an acid rain/something else version of the school from a future date? Just trying to see a way to fit that back in I liked that Idea.

>>14979975
Wierdness fuel?

Since it's halloween / midnight: lets make the wiedness fuel goddamn terrifying:

It's artificial light.

Walking down the hallway you see a tiny red flash. Was it a clue? Is something happening? It doesn't look like.

Shit! It's a little red LED. It's on a camera! They're filming us!

And then you go up to inspect, and: nada.

Later in the game: sweeping flashlights (with no-one behind them), a spotlight in the auditorium, and, at epic climax: the whole gym, lit up, broad as day.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, have my creepy, abandoned school pic.

>>14980363
Oo. So if player character gets a hold of flashlight, could we start triggering the weirdness ourselves? But that'd give you a bit too much control, huh...

bump

Has anyone in this thread ever played:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Megami_Tensei:_Persona_3

It sort of reminds me of this.

>>14979300
OP here. I'm real late, and I need to go again. I'll read what everyone wrote when I get back.

But I saw a few things that people wrote about whether or not things should be explained. I think one guy who does this stuff really well is Junji Ito, the horror manga writer. You've probably seen some of of his stuff. But in his stories, there's usually some explanation hinted at, but it's incomplete and not fully satisfactory, so it leaves a sense of mystery about it.

>>14978832
Holy crap! the halloween idea fits perfectly with this! no one qustions what people are wearing on halloween so until less subtle hints are made, it is very easy to hide.

>>14979496
playing on this maybe the MC meats alternant versions of themselves/friends ones form the Bad Ends. One time they meat the little brother, missing one arm, his ragged stump crudly bandedged, sitting in a conner facering away, mumbleing something about "time out" and "momma, don't get mad"

Puzzle ideas:

-slide desks around so you can leave a room; you're too weak to pick them up
-assemble a key out of LEGOs
-you have to find a kid's teddy bear before he'll let you through the door; it's in the possession of his nephew, 15 years later, who also got stuck here

>>14980118

Make his horror build; he starts out trying to get the kids to safety, then gets angry when they don't listen to him, gradually turning homicidal towards these immature, irrational kids who refuse to listen to his legitimate authority.

>>14981328
Back.

>>14979437
Whoa, idea: And in the game, he's always really excited to see you, and slowly drops more and more hints that you're the only person he talks to and that other kids and teachers bully him. And in the end, when it turns out he killed himself, it's more potent.

His character, I feel, should be some kid who seems to come out of nowhere and appears to be in the school that night for some other reason, like he says he ran away from home or something. He helps you search for the missing kid until the revelation.

>>14979455
I mean, that's possible, my idea was that the original kids were just totally normal until they went into the school, then they became unstuck in time, and started experiencing all these bizarre glimpses into the past, alternate timelines, etc. For example, the "ghost boy" / suicide victim would be a character from one of these timelines ( >>14982912 ), the notes about "Sally" / the main character's mother would be from one timeline ( >>14978774 & >>14978825), the changes to the architecture would be from one timeline ( >>14978797 ), etc. But the main characters would have to just be real, normal kids who found themselves in a weird situation for this to work.

>>14979651
Oh, that's not a bad idea.

No, wait. Maybe it is. Some of them are painfully blurry, and would only be useful as a vague reference in the art. And others reveal specifically where I shot the pictures. Which might not be a problem, I got their permission beforehand, but it might be kind of rude somehow.

>>14982988

Yes, I got that. And the reasons are nowhere explained. It's just a random space/time anomaly, that happens to normal kids, on Halloween. And also had happened, and will happen, to other kids in other times and other places.

There should be subtle misdirection, like how there are hints about missing kids, but no kid who got lost in the maze is on any of them they ever found. (One constant is it's random and happened once in each reality, it's not something that should have happened. But even this is not certain, as far as the players know. And yet they find clippings about missing kids who are with them, but come from a timeline where the same kid disappeared earlier. Even the obituary some one is reading may be from another version of himself, and maybe he hasn't read that if the date is makes sense, the paper clip is from a city of the same name in other country.)

>>14980118
That's a good idea. What are some other things we could do with time anomolies?

Remember when I mentioned Junji Ito ( >>14981328 )? Well, he has a story called "The Long Dream" about a man who has progressively longer dreams each night. For instance, one time he was trapped in endless hallways desperately needing to use the toilet for eight years.

>>14983099
Yeah, precisely!

Sorry, to reiterate it all. It's just that some people wanted to make one of the original main kids the suicide victim and whatnot. Which actually, now that I think more thoroughly about it, might make sense if the obituary they found was from the future. But still, that causes unexpected problems with causality and characterization and stuff too.

>>14983189

The content should ensure that the elements that fuck with the characters' perceptions (obituary for suicide kid who was one of them) can be explained by coming from a similar timeline, or one that had enough common elements. It's no less powerful if one character, while two are comforting the kid, if one character then notices the date on the paper is 1988.

>>14981775
Oh my god, you're right! Okay okay okay okay okay... okay... let me think...

This could be used for a couple of things. The Suicide Kid could not be wearing a costume, and that could be an early hint about his background.

And there's something about kids wearing masks that's scary. Especially if they don't talk and just stare at you. Could we do something with that? maybe with the kid who goes missing?

>>14980440
Whoa! Where's that from? Are there more?

Here's an idea

Each of the kids eventually meets a grownup who appears and disappears seemingly at the whim of the school. The grownups seem to know something they don't, but never stick around long enough to figure out what.
At the end of the story, we find out that they're future versions of themselves. Twenty years later, haunted by the experience, they gathered at the school that should have been torn down, and were caught once again in the temporal shenanigans they saw when they were young.

Some of the children never meet their future selves, having died in the interim. Or maybe some of the grownups that showed up are already dead, or have been trapped in the school for who knows how long. Something that you don't want to find out about your future, in any case.

>>14982441
>>14979680
Puzzles are tough. You want them to be intuitive and not actually challenging in a game like this (in my opinion). But if used properly, they can really be cool.

I'll give you an example: In Silent Hill 2, one of the more disturbing things to me was this long puzzle where you unlock a box that was deadbolted, chained, locked multiple times. And when you finally open it, the only thing inside are a couple strands of hair belonging to the owner's dead daughter. I don't know why but that fucked me up good.

>>14983332
That's an interesting idea. Maybe just one of the kids, or... OOH! Maybe you hear a disembodied crackly voice over the loudspeakers at certain points telling you what to do. And at the end of the game, you get control of the loudspeakers and... naw, maybe not.

Since this thread has evolved so much, I think it would help to start a new thread that is more clear and concise for newcomers.

But before that, we need to clear up just a couple of things:

1.) It seems like in a situation like this, there should be at least three close friends involved. "Big Bro" and "Main Girl" can be friends, but "Stuck-Up Girl" and "Lil Bro" are the odd ones out. Should we drop one of them and replace them with another friend? Because five would be a lot, even if one was missing from early on.

2.) Why was the school closed? In my mind, it would help to have some manner of tragedy that we can reference later. And it could be helpful in knowing why the kids become unstuck in time.

>>14983485

Why have 3? Just the main girl/big bro works well, allows for a slight romantic angle if you feel so inclined. It also makes looking after the stuck-up and lil bro two major focuses. Leaves chances for decision making later. Save lil brother and possibly sacrifice the stuck up girl who has (hopefully, become more likable as the story progresses).

>>14982441

Maybe the only light source the kid gets is fire-based: a bic, a zippo, a kerosene lantern...

>>14980447

Erm... the Lego key idea is okay, but skip the push / pull desks puzzle. sliding titles to progress does nothing but break the mood of a Survival horror game.

... and having one of the kids with you have a teddy bear is prime character development material. But no ghost quest should be a simple fetch.

>>14983631
Yeah, that's what I was worried about though. Because any hint of romance would feel so grossly out of place, and it would be so weird for just a boy and girl to be casual friends at that age. Maybe really close friends, like if they had grown up together, but I don't imagine that dynamic between these two.

But I agree wit sacrificing Stuck-Up, although I still like her on her own, she doesn't work well in this dynamic and the story as a whole.

>>14983777
I should clarify that when I meant romance I mean that little kid kind. More like really close friends. etc.

>>14983831
Right, right. But still, based on their personalities... I don't know, it might help to have a third. And it helps a whole lot with writing dialogue.

>>14983777
>>14983485
Okay, here's what we know:

>Big Bro
The outgoing one. Sort of the ringleader. Organized this thing.

>Little Bro
The tagalong kid, dead weight. Big Bro is constantly stifling him. He's kind of clingy to Main Character.


And here's what we need:

>Main Character
We know that she's female, and has a single mother who is overprotective. But what is her personality and why is she friends with these guys?


>Other Person
Sorry sorry sorry. I know I'm being difficult, but there has to be at least one more guy. I just can't imagine some guy like Big Bro coming all the way out there with the above group. I think there should be at least one more boy. But what's his personality and background?

>They Key
One of these two should probably have been convinced by Big Bro to bring the key to the old school. Their parent works for the construction company or something. Either Main Character or The New guy. The person should probably be a little shy and easy to boss around. Also, would it help if the main character was timid and easily scared?

>>14984019
Well, one of them needs to be kind of a doormat. Willing to do whatever other people tell him/her to do, taking the key, etc. I'm leaning towards the Main Character.

But I don't know what that leaves for the other guy. The Funny One? That would be a normal setup for a group of friends. The Leader, The Smart/Shy One, & The Funny One.

Also you're gonna want to look into names soon for convenience sake. Some kind of theme-naming? Based on famous people or

>>14984196
Okay, for now it's settled. We can change it later. I just want to make the new thread soon it'll be more clear from the start what it's actually about, y'know?

The last thing: Are there any ideas regarding why the school was closed down? Something pretty bad or heinous, maybe. The pictures are from a small, private school, grades K-12, if that helps.

I ask because A.) it might help us with some creepy flashbacks, and B.) it might give us some kind of clue about how they became unstuck in time. Wait... am I repeating myself? Sorry.

Someone should really archive this. Loads of good horror ideas in here. Also some great discussion or horror tropes/concepts in general.

>>14984196
>theme naming
I suggest ancient Greek names. Like... the girl could be named Cynthia, after an epithet of Artemis, and the Big Brother could be named Philip or something. I dunno.

>>14984377
see
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/14978204/

>>14984326

After a history of mysterious disappearances, and principals getting fired every time a kid went missing, they simply couldn't find anyone to run it anymore. Nobody wants the job for the money the district is offering.