New Project: Year 2

Our new project for year 2 is to re-imagine a game from a choice of 5. 

These games are;

Medal of Honor (EA, 1999) 

Flow (Thatgamecompany, 2006) 

Fatal Frame II; The Crimson Butterfly (Tecmo, 2003)

The Portopia Serial Murder Case (Yugi Horii, 1983)

Moshi Monsters (Mind Candy, 2008).

The task from the PDF for BA4

Description
A Game Design Document describes every aspect of a game concept in a single
treatment suitable for presentation to publishers, financiers and developers.
The objective of this project is to re-imagine an existing Intellectual Property (IP) or franchise to meet the demands of a modern audience. Working in teams,

you will create a comprehensive Game Design Wiki based on a selection of games provided for  reinvention.As a formative stage of development, you must ‘pitch’ the nascent game concept to validate further research-and-development. Subsequent feedback MUST be incorporated and responded to in the project.
The completed Game Design Document will outline all key elements of your game concept, and should include persuasive imagery, prototype artwork, narrative, and thorough explanation of your inspiration and the game's core mechanics. It will also evidence research into proposed audience, platform, and marketing. 

Our task is to create a design document on the new game that we re-imagine. We have gotten ourselves into groups (mine being: Kai Creedon, Juliette Desforges and myself) and have chosen a game out of the selection. Our group, after narrowing it down to Fatal Frame II and The Portopia SMC have decided to go with Fatal Frame II.  Previously in a project in year 1 we researched into horror and survival, having this research will help us to get clear idea on how to approach this re-invention. We have been given quite a bit of freedom of how we approach the game and the style that we use however it must still feel like an influence from the one chosen.

The first step I felt was to look at the game, to see how it works and what is uses to become a horror/survival game.

I started by watching gameplay videos on YouTube as I haven't had a chance to play the game first hand. You play as one of the twins (Mio) in the game and have to solves puzzles and find various objects in a village in order to progress. The instrument used as a weapon in this game is a 'camera obscura', this allows the player to take pictures of the ghosts and exorcise them. Depending on how the picture is taken will determine the amount of points you get for each shot. The cameras film is the ammunition in the game, you get a basic type of film which is unlimited throughout the game however this is the weakest one, you can find more powerful films however these are harder and rarer to find. You can sometimes play as the other twin (Mayu) but there is a grey filter and only helps to push through the narrative side of the game. The game uses a first person camera and the only 'weapons' you have to defend yourself is the camera and a flashlight, both these items help you to avoid ghosts and also defeat them. 

The game overall doesn't feel as if it would scare me at every turn, I feel this down to the way the ghosts are actually seen, for instance in most of the game you run into the ghosts and can stare at them for quite a while, yes you are helpless when looking at them through the camera but most games now you will only see a little glimpse of the monster/ghosts such as Slender (Parsec Productions, 2012) or even Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2011), both these games you are very limited in the resources that you have and it's not often you actually see the monster up close and for a long time. This creates the suspense and gets player nervous and every step they take. Fatal Frame 2 isn't necessarily a non scary game but however maybe a less suspense filled shock horror game. The game gives you the opportunity to visually see the ghost for too long in my opinion.

After looking at the game and seeing how it works and what it involves we decided to each go off and research Horror folk tales in Europe. We decided that researching them in western Europe was better choice for our game rather than following in the footsteps of the J-Horror game Fatal Frame 2. 

Through my research into horror tales on the internet I discovered such tales as The Wickerman (1973 film), Black Umbrella (suite101.com), A yellow ribbon on her neck, How Brer coon gets his meat and Waltzing in the moonlight (themoonlitroad.com). It was good to read these tales however there wasn't much in terms of the horror tales found in books or through word of mouth. So after a few lectures me and Kai went down to Waterstones to see what there was on horror, ghosts and haunted places, we found a few books that seemed really interesting and that could help with the project such as; 

Haunted Britain (Richard Jones, AA) 

Haunted places of Scotland (Martin Coventry)

 Monsters, A bestiary of the bizarre (Christopher Dell)

The most amazing haunted and mysterious places in Britain (Readers Digest)

On Monsters (Stephen T. Asma)

The element encyclopedia of ghosts and hauntings (Theresa Cheung)  

Although useful to our project this did however have a problem, money, since we were in Waterstones we couldn't exact loan them nor were we the richest of people to just buy them so we figured why not look for a library in Norwich other than the university one. We started by going to the Norwich Forum library, this proved to very successful as we found some of the books in Waterstones and some others also. After having a cup of tea with Kai and discussing some of the research we had Kai brought up a really interesting piece on ghosts from the middle ages, the idea is that they believed the ghost to have 'unfinished business'. The idea is that the person after they died if they had not done something or not finished a task so to speak they would then have that object or task for centuries as a ghost, a good example of this is there was an old man who didn't leave his cloak to the poor so he was condemned to wear the cloak but it was as heavy as a church tower. The idea of these spirits/souls having unfinished business sparked up the idea of implementing it into the game, to have the player as a 'ghost hunter' having to help these spirits finish the business in the world, however it wouldn't be easy for the player to easily help them, throughout the game the ghost may have an item or trinket associated to them,  the player then must have to get the item to a certain place or even get the item in a certain time limit to achieve the goal and progress through the game. 

We then gathered more books from the Library at university and the Forum and headed to a group meeting with one of the lecturers to which we found to be helpful in bouncing ideas off of each other. This is where some of the ideas came from about the associated items and trinkets. One of the books that I have loaned out from the university library is Phantoms of the Isles (Simon Marsden). Me and Kai went back to Forum library to then loan out The element encyclopedia of ghosts and hauntings (Theresa Cheung) and Haunted castles of Britain and Ireland (Richard Jones). 

Other research I wish to look into as well is the instruments used within game such as the one used in Fatal Frame 2 the 'camera obsura', also the use of symbols such as the butterfly used in FF2. There is the white butterfly which can symbolize death or a spirit to help you and there is an item as the dream catcher to keep nightmares away. I will research further into to this later but for now our group needs to discuss our research and where we are heading with the game.