Game Concept: Succubus
Added 2018-03-09 01:50:18 +0000 UTCI've usually got a few other game ideas tumbling around in my head, and today I thought I'd share one with you guys. Unlike Sitter, this one is purely in the planning stages: no coding yet. The title is obviously a placeholder, if anyone has a better one let me know!
Protagonist: Cinderswitch (or Cinders), low level succubus secretary (succutary?!)
Setup: Cinderswitch works for her boss, Whispervein, a powerful succubus. In this universe, demon society is run and structured like criminal operations under powerful bosses. Cinders basically shuffles paper for Whispervein. Unfortunately, she's rather clumsy and forgetful, and one crappy day she horribly misfiles a routine summoning.
As a result, our heroine is forcibly summoned in place of Whispervein, accidentally "possessing" a guy, who we'll call Doug for now. Furious, Whispervein starts tracking Cinders down to punish her.
Gameplay: Basic gameplay will be similar to a visual novel. However, as Cinders, you are an incorporeal spirit who is tethered to Doug, so you can't actually do anything yourself (at least not right away). You can talk to him and influence him, but you can't directly control him (Cinders is just not powerful enough--initially). Your goal is to build up enough demonic power to break your tether to Doug and/or defeat Whispervein.
Unfortunately, as a succubus, you need to have sex to gain power. And unfortunately for Doug, you only gain power through sex with men. (That's how succubi work in this universe.) So Cinders has to convince Doug to do the deed for her.
Thankfully, she does have some resources. As Doug's possessor, she can use her powers to transform his physical body. The primary manifestation of this power is moving Doug along a masculine/feminine scale, which will hopefully make it easier for him to attract men to have sex with.
In the late game (storyline permitting) Cinders will also have enough power to temporarily manifest in either a human form or her demonic one, giving her a chance to have some fun herself.
The gameplay loop is time-based, taking place over a set number of weeks. Each weekend Cinders can decide how to use her powers on Doug (and how much of her resources to use), and then they decide where he's going to go to try to get lucky. The "quality" of the resulting encounter determines how much power Cinders gains afterwards. During the week Doug lives his normal life. Cinders is still along for the ride during weekdays, though, and random/story events can still happen.
You might be starting to feel bad for Doug, but he isn't the most sympathetic character at the beginning. He's a womanizing jerk who's just been dumped by his girlfriend because he cheated on her. He isn't a bad guy at heart, though, and his arc through the game is finding humility and some empathy for the women he's taken advantage of.
Storylines and Resolutions: Although the main gameplay loop is time/event based (rather than a Twine-like narrative tree), there are still several main paths that our unfortunate duo can take.
1: It turns out that the actual summoning was carried out by Doug's ex-girlfriend (who he cheated on). She's an amateur witch and was trying to get Whispervein to punish Doug. Cinders screwed it all up, but Whispervein eventually tracks our heroine down with the help of Doug's ex. If Cinders can build up enough power, she can defeat Whispervein one on one and take over her operation.
2: I'd like to also have some sort of "good" way to defeat Whisper, and the idea of having some sort of gruff, morally-gray angelic bounty hunter character appeals to me. After he initially tries to capture her, Cinders could convince him to help her with the promise of capturing a high-level succubus (and maybe other things), in which case he sets a trap with Cinders for Whispervein, and she is defeated that way.
3: Cinders isn't permanently stuck as an incorporeal spirit: as mentioned above, she can build up enough power to manifest as a demon in the human world, or even to turn herself in to a human. This is one method she can use to convince Doug to help her initially: promising that she'll be his. Over the course of the ordeal Doug and Cinders can actually come to like and then love each other, in which case Cinders can permanently become human for him (convincing Whispervein to leave them alone in the process).
4: If Cinders doesn't love Doug by the end, she can still manifest and just run away, basically exiling herself on Earth forever.
Notes: If it's not already apparent, this is intended to be a more comedic game than The Weekend or Thin Walls, with plenty of silly setups and crazy demonic hijinks. There would still be some dark humor as appropriate, but overall it would have a lighter tone.
I don't plan on starting this game seriously until I finish The Weekend, but I've been thinking about it a lot and I wanted to share it with you guys to see what you thought. Let me know if you love it, hate it, or whatever! I think it could be a lot of fun.