In Huggy Bear, the player controls a stuffed bear who needs hugs to survive. The core game loop (which can be seen in this prototype) is similar to that of a brawler: you and a friend walk down a street, murdering passers by. However, unlike other video game protagonists who murder, Huggy Bear murders only because he loves too much. Also he murders people of specific religious and ethnic subgroups.
(Spoilers! This game is about how video game morality is pathologically simplified, and how in real life you can choose your own morality, and how if you're not careful your real life morality might end up like video game morality.)
Before we go on, here's a good place to start listening to some sample music as you read! This track is by chiptune artist Samuel Ascher-Weiss, a.k.a. Shnabubula. I asked for a tune in the style of Genesis brawler Streets of Rage 2, which is how I'm envisioning the soundtrack. (If you can't see the player embed below, here's a direct MP3 link.)
Huggy Bear uses a scoring system based on poker hands. When you hug people, their religion gets added to your combo meter. Every five people, you are scored on your "hand." For example, if you hugged three Christians, one Buddhist and one Jew, you would get "three of a kind." If you hugged three Mormons and two Atheists, that would be a "full house." Five people of different faiths would be a "straight," and so on.
Before being added to your total score, this combo is multiplied by the violence of your hugs. Starting a hug begins a golf-meter-like minigame. Press the hug button in rhythm to hug better and better bones out of the victim. A good hug should be able to extract three or more skulls out of a single person! On the other hand, less violent hugs will merely leave the person dazed. Unlike the Huggy Bear prototype, it is possible to go through the game without killing anybody, but you will not get any points.
(Spoilers: my intention with this design is to set the player up to think to him or herself "man, I really need to kill a Jew right now," stare blankly into space for a moment, then turn off the computer to go lie down for a while.)
The game as described so far would be developed by myself, artist Juan Ramirez, and musician Samuel Ascher-Weiss. It would probably best be a Flash game with short levels stitched together out of reusable components, and have following budget and schedule:
So when considering these schedules, bear in mind that I made Frog Fractions in three months of man-hours, but over a year of clock time. I spent a lot of time percolating, getting feedback from friends, and idly coming up with ideas. It ended up a lot better than it would've been if I'd just barreled through it in a straight three-month shot. If we can take the same budget and stretch it over a longer period of time, I believe that will result in a better game.
Also, there's more I'd like to do with this idea, so keep reading! How about this:
At the end of each level you meet up with a different philosopher, in the form of a boss fight. After winning the fight, you'll unlock that philosopher's thoughts on morality, or "scoring modifiers." After each level, you're presented with a timeline of actions from the previous level, and can swap in new systems of morality that will recontextualize your actions and give you a new score for your previous actions.
(Spoilers! JUST LIKE REAL LIFE GEDDIT?)
Example scoring modifiers:
This version of the game would have unique art across several levels and simple opening and closing cutscenes. Also, a few times per level you will come across a phone booth and have a conversation with family members about goings on:
This version would probably take thirty minutes to play through, but would be replayable via different scoring systems. It would maybe be pushing the scope of a Flash game, but if it were one, it'd have this budget and schedule:
The protagonist of this version is a cyborg bear. There are five levels, with cutscenes before and after each level.
Level one takes place in a simulation where the military is testing your ability to target specific ethnic groups. The simulation has a simplified art style, perhaps similar to the Huggy Bear prototype.
Level two has you breaking out of the military testing facility, and levels three through five take place in San Francisco, on jetskis, and on the moon respectively. As you proceed through the game, your bear skin deteriorates, leaving only a robotic endoskeleton.
This version of the game will add the innovation of "losing." You are given a health meter and a mood bar, but only the mood bar moves. Over the course of the game you will have to fight the military, the police, and most dangerous of all, psychoanalysts who can depress you and momentarily scramble your system of morality. You are immune to physical attacks (the health meter never budges) but in the style of brawlers, you cannot proceed without killing everybody on the screen, so you are in danger of your mood meter running low simply by passing of time.
This version of the game would take about 45 minutes to play through, have fully unique art across all levels and cutscenes. I'm presuming a bump up to a native PC or downloadable console game here, so I'm not as confident in my ability to estimate a budget with those additional requirements and degree of polish. Perhaps a year of development time. We'll have to discuss it.
All of which is to raise the question of how to deal with the negative consequences of people not getting it. This isn't like Frog Fractions, where the people who don't get it just think I'm dumb. The absolute failure case for me is that rather than the obvious reprehensibleness of the protagonist's actions prompting reflection on morality in games, it merely expands the range of reprehensibleness that gamers are willing to accept as the norm. I'm pretty sure that'd make me a terrible person.
The other thing that'd make me a terrible person is if a religious bigot played Huggy Bear and appreciated it at face value. Man, that'd be gross.
So how do I deal with this? I don't know! The subject matter is designed to appear inflammatory at face value, so it's all about the thousands of tiny decisions of execution, and I'm going to have to figure it out as I go. For example, in the case of a bigot cherry-picking Jews out of the crowd, I might watch for the player favoring certain traits and decrease their spawn rate.
Thoughts? Want to mix and match features? Let's talk.