Im going to set up this developer blog to trace out the ideas and concepts that are grashing around the inside of my skull in the hopes of, at the very least, getting them out there, and perhaps giving myself some peace. A long, LONG time ago I took an interest in Dreams and Nightmares because...well, it's a long story. Perhaps I'll post it some day. The point is, I became fascinated with nightmares and horrors and dream mythology.
After a while I began to keep a dream journal and noted down some...really weird dreams and ideas. Dreams and ideas that seemed to keep popping up in random places in real life.
Worse yet, my dreams kept on having running...themes. Similar characters, similar...feels to them. You know what I mean? Like a dream can have a ..flavour, or an atmosphere. Well, after my latest Silent HIll Project I decided that I wanted to make a game about escaped nightmares...perhaps in a small midwestern town in America, or maybe set it somewhere new, like a collapsing english coastal village, one that only sees action during the holidays when the out of towners come to stay in their summer cabins.
But I knew the story, and the project, would be too big, too grand for me to finish or, really, make anything really worthwhile with. But what if I did something smaller? Something that tapped into that twisted, deranged universe of Dreams Escaping into reality, infecting those around them and spreading like some osrt of plague? Imagine having to go and catch the nightmares. Imagine having to find the fragments of dreams, of having to figure them out, and having to find the original host, to catch the dream in a journal....
Now lest scale it back, make it portable and easy enough for a one man team to do. A horror platformer, perhaps? One based on teh players fears and nightmares? One that changes for each player, though the core game loop and progression remains mostly the same?
A new type of horror? A new type of platformer?
I need to research this and see if anyone else has done something similar, at the very least...