System Design

Challenge

The player must experience a ruminating type experience through seemingly random thoughts, reflective of those experienced in the period of time right before falling asleep. This phase is called hypnagogia. At the same time, some thoughts should navigate the player closer to deeper, more meaningful, and uncomfortable thoughts for our protagonist. After having found 5 of those thoughts, the player would be able to go to sleep without nightmares. How are these thoughts structured? What makes up these thoughts? How do we get from random stuff to deeper meanings?

Solution

• A, B, C, D, E are the 5 required thoughts in order to win the game, internally called “nuggets”
• XY are thoughts really close to nuggets; going the “wrong” way will leave you not too far from a nugget.
• PCXY are “pre-crucial” loops of 4 thoughts that can lead closer to the nuggets or into the nonsense
• N is a massive construct of nonsensical thoughts that overlap with the precrucial loops. They have an internal structure and logic too, but that can’t be felt by the player
• 0 is the introduction thoughts when starting the game
• NM, not shown here, are the nightmares one enters when attempting to go to sleep. The same goes for ABCDE, the thoughts that arise when actually being able to go to sleep after surmounting all personal challenges / finding all nuggets.

Any of these thoughts is highlighted if they have already been discovered. This prevents the player from discovering the same nugget twice and therefore steers them to new undiscovered nuggets.

Implementation

Tony Pravemann populated all these thoughts, giving each a topic. The natural random structure of the nonsensical thoughts was smoothly enforced through my predefined structure.