I HAVE AN IDEA FOR YOUR GAME...

I Have An Idea For Your Game...
April 30, 2024
Recently, there was a bit of discourse at the ol’ game narrative saloon about people who want to send studios (especially their game writers) their story ideas.

Short answer: Never do it.

We get fans are bursting with ideas, but from a legal standpoint, we can’t see them. It opens us up for lawsuits if something a fan wrote shows up in a future title, even if it’s by accident. If the fan can prove they showed their stuff to a game writer, it’s a short leap to looking like the studio stole from the fan. So please, save everyone the headache and don't send your ideas to us.

Yet one thing I didn’t notice in the discourse was, just what do we tell players to do with their ideas.

Well, like with fan art and fan fiction, you make your own game. Just don't make your own Uncharted/Fable crossover game with Uncharted/Fable characters and sell it. You’ll get sued by Mr. Sony and Ms. Microsoft.

But you can be inspired by your favorite franchise and use it as a leaping off point. I want to talk here about four excellent narrative examples of that. They took the source of their enjoyment and did far more than tweak a color or a sound effect. Some dared to make something wildly different.
Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2008 as a mod, 2012 full release)

Inspirations: William Burroughs and “quiet moments” in games.

Dear Esther started life as a Half-Life 2 mod, but writer/designer Dan Pinchback (who was doing a Ph.D. on shooters at the time) looked at HL2 in a different way. What would happen if you took the core gameplay loop out of a shooter? What would you be left with? What would the experience be like? The result was whole lot of stillness. And it's from there he wondered if you could make a game out of atmospheric moments devoid of action.

He and other devs formed The Chinese Room and discovered just what that game would look like. And what they made became the poster child for Walking Simulator games. Dear Esther puts the player in the skin of an unnamed narrator, exploring a Scottish island as he reads bits of letters to a deceased woman.

You come across crumbled cottages, caves, shipwrecks, and other relics of a faded time. It's brooding, contemplative, and entices you into multiple playthroughs to learn more about just what's going on. It’s a meditation on grief, loss, guilt and so much more wrapped up with an ambiguous ending. It just about opposite of everything that was Half-Life 2.

It was one of the earliest at-bats for The Chinese Room, which has gone on to make absolute curveballs of games. This is a studio that went from visceral horror (Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs) to a gentle English apocalypse (Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture) in two years. Their 2008/2012 release Dear Esther is what you can do when divorce an engine from its original purpose and do something drastically different.
Portal Stories: Mel (Prism Studios, 2015)

Inspirations: Well, the Portal series

Out of this list, Portal Stories: Mel comes the closest to "I want to make a game in that universe." And thanks to the same Source Engine that made Dear Esther a reality, a group of fans did just that with a game set in the Portal world. Created by Prism Studios and released in 2015, PSM has an original story, original music, voice acting... everything you'd expect from a Portal title.

If you know the Portal series, PSM will sound familiar. Woman becomes an Aperture Science test subject, things go sideways, you need to shut down a computer, and you solve puzzles with a portal gun to earn your freedom.

So, why didn't Prism get slapped down for making a game with Valve's intellectual property? First, it was released for free (a common trait among mods), so they weren't trying to make bank off of Valve's hard work. According to the devs, it was possible to sell Portal mods, but the process was so complicated they just opted to make it free. Furthermore, Valve were big supporters of fan mods of their games. How big? Prism talked with Valve devs for development help.

And Prism's four years of hard work was worth it. PSM was a hit in the Portal mod community and got coverage in the press for its polish and difficult puzzles (One critic called it the "Dark Souls of Portal games"). Perhaps the highest praise came from press and fans saying it was on par with Valve's own work and that this is the closest we'll ever get to Portal 3.

For Prism, PSM was the gateway to made and released their own game (The Captives, 2018), but sadly, Prism shut down in January 2021. And just three years later, Valve suddenly starting taking action against fan projects, threatening anything like PSM being made in the future. PSM now exists in a slice of history, a special time in modern modding that isn't around anymore.
The Forgotten City (Modern Storyteller, 2015 as a mod,2021 full release)

Inspirations: Star Trek, Agatha Christie, open world RPGs, using Skyrim as its vessel

Like the other games on the list, The Forgotten City started as a mod, this time for Skyrim. But even a mod, TFC was something special. It had original music, voice acting, multiple endings… stuff you might find in Bethesda's epic series. To me, Modern Storyteller took Bethesda’s tools and made something better than even Bethesda could make. And then they released it as their own standalone game, no Skyrim required.

And it’s a doozy, while the mod was a time-hopping mystery the standalone version is that and more. You start by exploring Roman Empire ruins and find yourself seemingly back in the past, with the city restored and alive. It’s not long before you discover the city is under a curse: if anyone commits a sin, everyone is turned into gold. Naturally, you want to find a way out, and that begins a twisting journey through time as well as a hard study of laws and consequences.

I won’t spoil the rest for you because it’s a really clever experience. It shows that you can start something being in the shadow of a major AAA game and then morph it into your own thing. Writers have been doing it for years, crafting fan fiction based on their novels or films as they learn the craft. With steady nerves and experience, they step out and make something grand from their heads and hearts.

TFC is that but with polygons.
MyHouse.wad (Steve “Veddge” Nelson, 2023)

Inspirations: Doom, childhood loss, House of Leaves

Okay, first a word about WADs.

Back in the day, Doom became the outlet for game modding, where players developed their own tools to make, share, and play custom levels from other players. The game data (like the level layout, sound, and graphics) for these mods all lived in a file format called a “WAD” (as in “Where’s All the Data?”). Before long fans were trading WADs with Doom versus Daleks or turning Doom into a crude Ghostbusters game. If you could imagine it, you mod it into being. But some modders made personal WADs, mostly based on something familiar, like their own house. From these familiar roots, amateur modders grew in skill and ambition. Some modders got jobs in the game industry because they cut their teeth on Doom modding.

MyHouse.wad is a tribute to that era, but more. It takes Doom’s trappings and unfolds reality with every playthrough, taking you into unexpected and sometimes unnerving places (The novel House of Leaves is a big influence here).

For me, the mod looks back and forwards at once, a bit like Dear Esther. It looks at a youth spent building mods with friends framed with the modern knowledge that one childhood partner-in-crime is dead. Among his belongings you find a level you worked on with him long ago. His childhood home, rendered in a Doom level. Playing it now unearths something in you. Myhouse.wad is your journey into memory, of an easier time, when the hardest point in your day was getting through your homework so could go back to replicating your kitchen and shooting a demon in the face there.

MyHouse.wad is about what a game meant to you, more than speedruns or exploits. It’s about remembering a friend and making sure he and his passion aren’t forgotten. Now, thanks to Nelson, his late friend won’t be. Even if you don’t care for Doom, I highly recommend you check it out.

I Have An Idea For Your Game...