I was thinking a bit about psychedelic sci fi, music videos, and base construction games.
Psychedelic sci fi and music videos have a lot in common, because they're fundamentally emotional journeys into someone's psyche. You're along for the ride, and a good work will use every aspect of the piece to support the whole.
For example, let's talk about the difference between Evangelion and Gundam.
In both works, the mecha are core to the story, and are flexibly used to guide the audience towards the personal stories of the pilots.
They represent inner struggles and arcs quite solidly - Gundam tending towards stories about how war is bad and will scar you, but Eva towards stories about how you're actually pretty fucked up, ya know?
So the Evas are pretty fucked up. They're not just robots. They represent how fucked up you are, so they are fucked up in ways that echo that. Bio-angel mech.
Now, if we think about construction games, there is an interest in constructing those kinds of psychedelic/horror stuff.
Rimworld has an SCP expansion, and there's also a dozen basebuilders centered around SCP/horror construction.
This is an interesting challenge, because the point of these things is how they help to tell our personal stories.
And a basebuilder game... doesn't, uh, doesn't really specialize in personal stories. It uses personal stories to tell the story of the base.
The whole point of 'horror science' tropes like SCP and Evangelion are in how your pursuit of knowledge and secret power corrupts you.
And while games can show the corruption of your science team, they can't really corrupt THE PLAYER, can they.
Can they?
Well, it's worth considering in detail...
The funny thing is, there's an easy path to corrupting the player, it's just anathema to game design.
Make it broken OP.
Rimworld's horror science goes this route in theory, but Rimworld's balance does not support that kind of progression.
I think it needs to be OP progression into a strange space where being OP leads to wanting to be more OP, rather than just making the game boring.
Because that's the lure of Horror Science. It spirals on forever.
How do you do that?
You make the fitness test the player's own setup.
You can see this in games like Stormworks, where how well your vehicle performs matters less than whether it performs better than your last vehicle.
You can also do it with player-generated challenges. If the player wants to test whether their new mech can survive in more extreme conflicts, let them simply define a more extreme conflict. Let them share those specs around.
'I invaded hell, can you? Here's specs for hell:'
Of course, in the end the corrupted scientist or sorcerer must die, with or without redemption. Their role in embodying a personal arc - theirs or someone else's - ends as the arc culminates.
The facility is dissolved, and people's personal lives go back to being personal, rather than embodied by giant mech fights.
This is something I never see in a construction video game.
So here's a fun #GameDesign idea:
Imagine something like Rimworld, except that instead of a perverse version of Swiss Family Robinson, it's about a scientist investigating something illegally.
The game plays much the same, but of course the raids are angry villagers, government investigators, competitors...
There's a few games kind of like this about cults. But the issue with cults is that they don't really embody a personal/story arc. They're just blobs of exploitation.
Our theoretical Science! version of Rimworld would end with the scientist destroying themselves and their base. Perhaps they'd leave remnants for later playthroughs to start with, perhaps not.
But the key to it all is that the science is not some static tree you grind through, not even a creepy anomaly tree.
Instead, it's based on the character traits and backstories of those in your facility. Including, of course, your head scientist.
I talked about this the other day, a bit - the idea that your tech unlocks and research paths exist because of the people in your base that care about that kind of thing.
They have to have traits related to it, or it literally just never occurs to anyone in your base to care about it. So obviously you can't research it.
If everyone is immune to weather because you're an OP sci fi superspecies, you never invent air conditioning or heaters.
This is the same idea, but with fantastical science.
The idea is that you would pioneer science based on traits and backstories, and you'd have to struggle to keep them under control as they affected the owners of the traits and backstories.
The story ends when you can't walk that tightrope, and they take matters into their own hands - it's disastrous whether that means going on a rampage with a giant mech or realizing they've come to peace with something and just walking off... causing the giant mech to go on a rampage without them.
In this scenario, things that would normally be terrible - for example, injured pilots unconscious in a hospital - may actually be huge benefits.
Because if they're unconscious, they're not pushing your works. You can have a few days to shore things up, change the protocols, add some new safeguards-
Maybe even call in some of the pilot's family or friends or enemies to change the timbre of their personal struggle-
The more I think about it, the more I realize what's missing from most basebuilding games is closure.
Most of these games are intended to go on forever. They usually have some kind of final trophy for you to earn, but it's less a payoff for your base construction choices and more a notification that the game ran out of content.
DF, for example, if you do well you eventually get bored and decided to make terrible decisions on purpose. "Losing is fun" becomes "losing is the only fun".
If we have an end state implied from the start state and specific to your intentions right from the start, we can have a final payoff, an ending that the player can see coming and work towards making epic.
For example, if we start our game as a science team in charge of defending our country from space invaders using giant mecha, we know there's really only two possible endings:
We destroy the country, or the country destroys us.
What about winning against aliens?
No, that's ridiculous.
Think about it. The space aliens are an excuse. They represent our hostility towards an uncaring universe.
You can never win against the uncaring universe. You can never lose to it either. It's not competing.
All you can do is destroy yourself, be destroyed, or find peace.
So those are always the three possible endings, and clearly one of them is significantly less likely.
The key is, I think, making those inevitabilities tangible, so the player can work towards them and push to accomplish as much as possible before things explode.
The goal is no longer "can you make a base that functions" but rather "how much can you do before your own time bombs go off".
Every new technology you create is a time bomb. You created it out of someone's obsessions. It will, someday, come home to roost.
This reminds me of Tokimeki High School, oddly enough.
Very few other dating games did this, but Tokimeki had a "bomb" system. If you ignored a girl long enough, she'd fuckin' end you. It was represented by a literal bomb on the planning screen.
So unlike modern dating games, Tokimeki was about how long you could juggle things, and if you could hook up forever before you got taken down forever.
That's the kind of energy I want to bring to horror science construction games.
By the way, if you hadn't noticed yet, the reason Gendo and Shinji are the Ikari family is because it would have been a little too obvious if they were the Ikarusu family and Puromishiasu would have been super awkward.
On wax wings we fly ever closer to the divine furnace...
The difference between horror science and horror sci fi to me is whether you build something new.
Because both the horror and your personal story are expressed through the creation, not what already exists. You made your bed, now lie in it.
This is a major constraint on SCP-style horror: it largely consists of grappling with existing monsters.
It can still be representative, but you didn't make it yourself.
The issue is, base-building games specialize in, uh, basebuilding.
The normal approach of SCP-style basebuilding games is to give you random pre-existing SCPs from a list and then you have to build the defenses and labs to suit.
However, this is a strictly reactive and very flat challenge that doesn't tell any story at all.
This is why I never particularly liked Rimworld's Anomaly expansion. You just tie up monsters and press "study".
And then your people just get worse. Exciting, I guess.
However, the idea that you make your own bed is fun in a basebuilding game because - well, you are literally making your own beds.
So the idea of you building the horrors seems like a natural fit.
There's a few Rimworld things like this, both mods and expansions. You can engineer your characters or mutate them or make them cyborgs-
But it's just a flat stat change. There's no story there, no personal arc of challenge, no time bomb. You just have a supersoldier now, congrats.
So if we consider what we can build in a basebuilding game that can express personal stories-
Well, obviously there is the option for facilities. But believe it or not, I don't think the facilities themselves should reflect the arcs or be the time bombs. The reason is simple: it'd be incredibly messy and difficult to handle.
I think it makes more sense if you literally build something. Like, your facility manufactures something.
Whether it's mecha or viruses or xenomorphs or drugs or supersoldiers or whatever-
If you build it, you can give it traits based on the traits and backstories of the staff, reflecting their obsessions and permanently tying it to them.
And it can be customized per playthrough, because it's not the base itself. The core rules of construction and micromanagement remain undamaged.
How well your products do in whatever challenge you intended them for is your main source of income!
Craig P