Age of Dreams Devblog #1: the general concept of the game
Here I describe the general concept of the game
The initial concept of the game is fairly vague. I don’t want my game to be a typical “Backrooms” walking simulator, to be nothing more than a dull copy of a popular franchise, or to be seen purely as yet another game on that theme. What is the point of that, if the project has no originality of its own, or if the only originality is moving the Backrooms into a cubic world?
The idea of a simulator of walking through worlds of dreams came to me even earlier anyway, before all of this “backrooms” culture appeared on the internet. The idea of a “dream world” like this probably took shape after I played the Japanese game LSD on the PlayStation 1 (a screenshot of “LSD” in image 1). From the very first moment I saw the gameplay of that game online, I saw something unusual in it, something that other games did not have, even more modern ones. The thought that a game world can become a source of melancholy for the player, a source of a feeling of endless emptiness and, at the same time, a source of the feeling that you are not alone in this world. Huge lifeless worlds, each more surreal than the last, unlike the real world and yet somehow familiar.
I got a similar contradictory feeling from playing the old alpha versions of Minecraft (screenshots of the game in images 2 and 3), where the particular art design gave players comparable feelings.
Long abandoned worlds, worlds where a whole society could once have lived and flourished, now empty, and all that is left there are ancient forgotten buildings, monuments and only the strange sound of an echo of emptiness that comes now and then from the depths of endless corridors and labyrinths.
So what is the main difference from the Backrooms? It is that the Backrooms universe follows a set of strange but still rigid rules. For example, on some levels in most Backrooms games and videos there will always be some scary beast (with a scary face, of course, a horror classic!) that chases the player until they escape from it to the next level. And every level always follows the previous one.
The universe in my game will follow completely different rules. First, there will be no “single” list of levels that follow one another the way they do in the Backrooms universe, where every level has its own description of the monsters on it, of the environment design, a name and even a number! What is frightening about that, if after one playthrough you already know what comes next? My game will have a completely randomly generated set of a thousand different universes made up of a thousand different unique patterns, so every player’s experience will be completely unique and particular, as in a roguelike.
Second, nobody is going to scare the player with naive jump scares and scary faces running after them. It is frightening, but it looks terribly banal and drags the game down to a cheap D-grade horror flick. There will be a constant feeling of being followed, and even possible encounters with an enemy, but they will be so rare that the player is unlikely to be expecting one at that exact moment. Unlike the Backrooms universe, you will not be able to learn by heart that on this particular level, in this particular spot, there will be these particular beasts; everything will be random.
So far I only see one type of world - “grey pillars”.
This is only the first prototype, I have only just started working on world generation. The plan also includes different biomes within one and the same world (and there will be thousands of levels). Essentially Minecraft-like world generation, but with a larger number of biomes and more variety in structures.
The bet is on the world generator itself and on trying to tie it to advancement and progression in the game (including through crafting and the player collecting various items, rather than just moving from level 1 to level 2 and so on until the ending).
All in all it came out a bit chaotic (and even a bit schizophrenic, lol), but I hope I managed to describe at least a little of the vibe of the game I am aiming for! Overall I am trying to make something closer to a delirious dream generator, where everything works by its own rules - strange ones, but structured in the end.