APD - Week 9 - Play & Force

Theme: Play and Forces

Method: To create a pitch for a short game where a player’s input not only drives certain visual mechanics, but also creates the story for the next player.

Context: Partly inspired by Moirai, in which a player’s textual responses create an NPC for the next player that serves as the central conflict of their story.

Also inspired by Elegy of a Dead World, which presents players with a static environment and then encourages them to write stories about their time there. Players can then share these stories.

Both games hinge heavily on player’s perceptions - there would be no story at all if players did not contribute their own thoughts and feelings.

Response:

Deep Sea Diary is a short game about passing time on the bottom of the ocean - and unknowingly collaborating in a writing round robin with future players.

Players take the role of a scientist, who has been recruited to live in a deep-sea monitoring station all by themselves.

During the day, players are free to explore at will. There is no set objective or storyline. They are free to perform experiments in the lab, or play games in a recreation room, or feed the fish lurking outside the window in the observation, or study the books in the library. The day is on a timer, and the lights in much of the base turn out at night, so it’s impossible to do everything in one day. During the night, players can write a journal about their experiences before they go to bed.

With each new day, some small things change around the base. For example, if the player fed the fish the day before, there may be more lurking outside the window.

After two in-game nights have passed, something random in the station breaks. The player is tasked with fixing it - however, they have no idea how to. If the player cannot locate the solution to the problem within the next day, they die, and the game ends for that player.

Then the next player picks up the game. For the most part, things have been reset - the base has been repaired, but the previous player’s journal and corpse remain in the world. Other things the player may have done also remain a part of the game world; the fish will still swarm around the window if they were fed, the previous player’s high score on a minigame will remain in the recreation room, a secret passage a player may have found will remain open.

And so the cycle continues - Player 2 spends their days in the base, doing experiments, uncovering secrets, and trying to work out what killed Player 1. They can write in their own journal or read over the previous player’s, until the same breakage that happened for P1 happens again.

Should player 2 fail to fix the problem, they die as well and a third player picks up the session. Things continue like this indefinitely. Eventually, a player will work out what is going wrong from reading past people’s journals, use their research to solve the issue, and escape. This wins the game, and the base and breakage is totally reset for the next group.

The most important part of the game is that these differing players drive the narrative; they are given a few interesting things to observe and react to, and then theorize about it in a notebook. Their actions become part of the game’s lore, granting future players a vastly unplanned and entirely unique story where the only constant is that shit gets broke underwater.

Is the breakage sabotage? An accident? Are players researching a cure for an epidemic, or are they just observing the sealife? Will they become convinced that someone is murdering them one by one, or will they put aside their paranoia long enough to fix things? It all depends on what people write, and how other people interpret it.