GAME CONCEPT - "Writer's Block" (Patreon)

If you watch me stream with any regularity then you've probably heard me talk about some of the various concepts I have for games. The main ones I talk about are Jamboree, a Paper Mario-inspired game about ghosts, and Winds of Change, a strategy RPG that is my answer to the question "what would your ideal Fire Emblem game look like?" I get asked about the latter on stream a lot.

Because I have no formal coding/game design training and likely will never get to see any of these things come to fruition, I thought it might be fun to share these concepts as think piece posts on Patreon.

Winds of Change is definitely getting a full video dedicated to it in a few years when it's finished (it'll be called "Let's Make a Fire Emblem Game") and I'm sure some day I'll post something about Jamboree on here in more detail, but I figured something older and more simple would be more appropriate for my first post of this nature.

The other two are so complicated that they would most certainly require both an audio explanation AND several illustrations, but this one is simple enough that I can just go over it in text.

Let's do that!

Writer's Block was a concept I came up with in high school. Even if I were given a lot of money and time, I wouldn't go back and work on Writer's Block, so for all intents and purposes this one is completely defunct. But I like some of the concepts in the game design (namely the weapon system) and I think a few of them might be worth going over so one of my Patrons can steal them and use them in some of their projects.

Writer's Block was an action/adventure game where you play a little white eraser-looking cube called "The Block". Like a writer's block. You get it. The block itself is pictured bottom-left in the above image.

The titular Writer has hit a dead end working on several different stories in several different genres. You, as the Block, are tasked with going into each of his different work-in-progress books, finding the mental roadblock, dealing with it, and seeing the story through to its completion. The main hub world would be a library where you could jump into different books. They could be revisited after completion, but in this incarnation of the game they had to be completed in a specific order.

The first world/book was called Zephyr.

I'm under the impression that the names of the levels were just placeholder titles, so Zephyr wouldn't have been the name of the actual book you were inside of. Maybe once the book was completed, you could see its real title upon re-entry. That'd be kind of neat.

Anyways, this world was a corrupted children's book about a vast, beautiful field of flowers and wind. In Zephyr, there are dozens of islands in the sky and air travel is the easiest way to get around. Everyone owns a kite and flies from island to island with either a hot air balloon, personal airplane or a hang glider. A giant dirigible sails high above the clouds, carrying a metropolis, Zeppelin City, on it's back. Zephyr is plagued by skywaymen, ruthless sky pirates in cartoon fighter jets. The block is tasked with meeting up with Zeppelin City's scribe and stopping the Skywaymen.

Scribes were characters within the stories who had been granted a chunk of the Writer's world-altering powers and were tasked with looking over the book that they lived in. If there were any problems, the scribe was supposed to use their powers to fix things.

I don't really like this concept and would definitely drop it if I ever picked this idea back up. The idea of the Writer being, like, a literal god that bestows powers to his creations so they can write themselves is really thematically incoherent. I think it's much more fun to have the Block be a visual manifestation of the Writer going through and fixing the issues with his own stories.

Anyways, the Block was tasked with meeting the resident scribe of the world, Typhoon, to figure out why he isn't dealing with things. (Every character in the games was named after and built around one word, which gave them powers. Something something Epithet Erased)

It turns out, Typhoon is in league with the Skywaymen. He has been using his Scribe powers to control the weather. He throws you off of the blimp to the meadows, thousands of feet below so you cannot thwart his plans.

Luckily you are an eraser so you survive the fall.

So the game actually starts at this point. My favorite part of this game is that the Block uses punctuation marks as weapons, and I love the ideas I came up for using each of them in different ways.

The first level starts basic. The writer gives you the Exclamation Point (!), which works like a sword so you can defend yourself. Hitting friendly NPCs with it does not do damage, but it does get their attention and/or irritate them, which is sometime necessary for side quests.

He also gives you Brackets ([ ]) which work as both a shield and makeshift ladder rungs you can stick into select walls to climb, a la Duster's wall staple ladders in Mother 3.

Finally, the writer gives you a Hedera (❦), which the Block can plant in the ground at any time to grow a leafy payphone. The Block uses this to speak to the writer for hints and save the game. I like the concept of this, though I think in a modern game it'd have to be a leaf cell phone or something so the Writer could chime in at any time, since if I recall correctly, the block doesn't talk.

Your mission is to get back up to Zeppelin City before Typhoon pilots it into a storm. There are a few plane/dogfight sections and a part where you have to invade the Skywaymen's flagship. The boss of the level is a stormy duel with Typhoon on the top of the skyscraper.

The gameplay I pictured was pretty standard action-platforming, but the levels were very open. There were multiple ways to go and lots of things to find. Certain parts of levels were inaccessible until the player returned later with new punctuation powers unlocked in other stories.

The main side quest for completionists would have been filling out the Block's Lexicon, a collection full of special, rarely-used words that could be found by interacting with the environment. Some of them were gained automatically. For example, "petrichor" would unlock any time the Block was walking around in a grassy area and it started to rain. Others are more hidden. "Wanderlust", for example, could only be found by locating a man hidden at the edge of the map on a tiny, hard-to-reach island.

There were 15 hidden words located in each level, one of which was always unlocked by defeating the area's boss. The first world's word is "snollygoster", meaning "a politician that uses their power for their own gain instead of helping the people."

So, every politician.

The second world (and the one with the worst artwork) was Calliope. This one was a murder mystery set at a traveling circus. Unfortunately... the Writer didn't really know who the murderer should be, and thus the story wasn't getting off the ground.

In order to investigate, the Block is given a magic staff, the Question Mark (?): The question mark can be used to fire a small blob of wibbly-wobbly magic. If it hits something, the object becomes transparent, and, in some cases, the Block can walk through it. The magic blob inflicts no damage to enemies, but it does momentarily stop them in their tracks as they forgot what they were just doing. If the question mark is used on NPCs, it asks them a question, which can be used to interrogate them and gather information.

The question mark and many other punctuation marks used in combat require magic to use. The magic meter is called "The Ink Well". The well refills after a time, and each weapon uses a different amount of ink.

Later in the level, the Block gains the Underscore (_), which gives it the power to hide underground, out of sight so it can listen in on private conversations or hide from foes. The Underscore is also used to avoid otherwise-unavoidable obstacles in platforming sections. The Block cannot move while using the underscore.

In my original concept for this, the murderer turned out to be a sPoOkY Jester who murdered people for no reason and eventually tried to crash the circus train into the circus, also for no reason. I remember thinking this was the coolest level as a kid.

Can you tell I came up with this concept when I was like 15?

In a new version of this, I think it would be much more interesting if the question wasn't "Who is the murderer?", but "Who should the murderer be for the sake of the story?"

The objective would be to go around and figure out which suspect would have the right alibis and motive. Maybe you'd need to locate like... 1 murderer and then 3 suspects. Maybe the writer would have to generate a new character altogether. Only then, once everything is set in place, does the story work.

To complete the level, the Block would have to guide a hapless detective through a series of investigations to complete the story.

The third world is Inferno, a Jules Verne-inspired adventure novel. It takes place in a vast series of underground caverns in a world populated by creatures called "soots". Mechanically speaking, this level was supposed to be a return to platforming after the much more dialogue-heavy previous stage.

The soots live in ramshackle towns made of sheet metal that pop up around gold veins, then sit abandoned after the vein is depleted. At least one of these abandoned ghost towns was supposed to be part of a platforming section.

According to my old notes, the driving force of this level was finding sources of fresh water, food, etc for the soots. Today I would alter that into a quest where the Writer can't figure out the worldbuilding of this area. He wants the Block to help him discover ways that these fantastical societies of people can live in a lava-filled, smoke-filled cave. How do they get fresh supplies? Where does their air come from? Why do they stay? Are they mining for gold... or something more? The writer would have a handful of ideas he would want to build this world around, and the worldbuilding would have to support those ideas. Maybe in the end one of those ideas simply couldn't work. Maybe his reluctance to part with that idea could turn into the idea fighting you as a boss. Maybe that idea, once defeated, could return in a different story. Who knows?

In order to explore the mines, the Block is given the Carat(^) which functions as a drill to dig through soft rock and deplete enemy shields, and later the Interrobang(‽) , a combination of the exclamation point and question mark. A single swing of the interrobang eats the whole magic bar, but one swing generates a huge, explosive blast that can clear blockades of stone and destroy cracked walls.

Eventually the boss shows up and ravages things: A giant, molten monster named Colossus, pictured in the first image on this post.

He was called "Balrog" originally, as if that was a term I'd be able to use in an original work, lol. I didn't even watch Lord of the Rings back then. Not sure why I took the name like that.

Looking through my old notes, it really seems like I wanted every level to last about 5-6 hours and have a lot of unnecessary steps focusing on story. I think that's a bit misguided. There's a lot of fun to be had with the concept of "What would a writer need to finish this story? How can we turn the search for that missing thing into a gameplay mechanic?" Meanwhile most of my pre-existing game concepts are just "Completely quests A through F until a boss shows up." No fun at all.

Luckily, those notes mostly peter out past this point, lol.

The fourth world is Grotto. This is my favorite little art banner I did for the project, but there's not really much to this world. It's listed in the notes as a "corrupted fantasy novel", but that seems pretty close to the previous world's set-up, doesn't it?

The book is set in a bay where one side belongs to the navy and the other side belongs to pirates. The grotto is forever cast under a blanket of night and people use the stars to navigate across the grotto.

But secretly! It turns out there is a third faction, hidden beneath the waves. A group of scientists who's submarine was destroyed by a giant monster, and so they were forced to set up a secret society under the waves in a tiny air pocket.

Hm! This sounds... remarkably like a Jules Verne book again. Whoops.

Not to mention, the boss was, once again, just a big monster called the Leviathan. I pretty unapologetically ripped off the design from Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

If I were reworking this I'd probably turn it into an action story aimed at teenaged boys or a YA novel aimed at teenaged girls with a female protagonist born on one side of the pirate/navy conflict and trying to rise above it to stop the fighting.

The first punctuation power gained in this level was the Quotes (" "), which, in the original version, allowed the Block to copy the appearance and skills of another person so it could sneak into the Pirate and Navy bases without being noticed.

I think it'd make more sense to have the quotes duplicate the Block into Left Quote Block and Right Quote Block. They could be moved around independently over a certain distance to solve puzzles by being in two places at once, pressing switches, holding doors open for each other, doubling their weight to push down buttons, etc. You could even use the extra block as an additional footstool for platforming.

The Block also unlocks the Degree (°) here, which can be used to either heat up or freeze your immediate surrounding. This reacts with various machines, gunpowder, traps and waterfalls in every level of the game. Useful, but it drains the Ink Well rather quickly.

The fifth level was called Thingamajig.

As I mentioned much earlier, in the original version of this game all of the NPCs were basically sentient versions of singular words. The scribes were the most important ones who has the ability to access the power of their word like the Writer did.

Thingamajig's world takes place in a giant floating clock suspended over an infinite sky. In the original version of the game, Thingamajig's scribe, Time, was basically the only scribe who was still doing a good job protecting his respective story. The mechanism that kept their clock aloft began to fail, and it could not be repaired in time to save everyone. Seeing this, Time, the embodiment of his word, literally offed himself so that time would stop, suspending the entire world in a freeze-frame until the Writer could show up and fix things himself.

When the Block arrives, the entire world is on an angle and everything is frozen.

I kind of love this concept and it's basically the only good thing that came out of the "scribes embody a word" idea.

Again though, I'm not sure what kind of story this would have been in the Writer's universe. Perhaps it could be reworked into something sci-fi? Who knows. One of the notes says "maybe this world is a textbook!" I adore the concept of that, but the people who write stories and people who write text books are very much not the same people 99.99% of the time. Idk! Maybe this writer could be into clock repair or something? Worth considering.

The worlds' names changed over time, as you can see in the above drawing.

To beat the level you are given the Superscript (B⁵) and Subscript (B₅) which allow you to grow and shrink to activate various machines and work your way through the mechanical complex.

The antagonist of this level is listed as, and I quote: "Some sort of Gadgeteer maniac who's been living in the factory slums and is mad at the nobles or whatever. You fight him and his robot from the inside out on that giant gear underneath the Clock. The fight may be timed."

Clearly I used all my good ideas on that really cool evil Jester fight in Calliope, lol.

The sixth world is Phantasmagoria. I'll just copy sixteen-year-old me's description verbatim for this one:

Phantasmagoria, is a corrupted horror story. The world is ruled by fear and supposedly evil undead creatures, but as the Block discovers, the ghosts and ghouls are actually quite nice and just want to party long into the endless night. The overly Gothic and religious people of a nearby town despise these abominations against their gods and are constantly out to destroy them. The Block has to save the ghosts and monsters before they're all killed. The Block notes that this world isn't very scary and the Writer admits that he was never very good when it came to horror.

In this level the Block gets the Dash (-) which allows him to run very quickly, because at this point in the game if you are revisiting past levels to find secrets and stuff you are going to want to be able to do it at a fast pace. There will probably be a running thing from the beginning, but this will be an extra speed boost. The second power up is the Obelisk (†), a more powerful sword/throwing knife with a chance to critical hit enemies, which does... I dunno, probably like x3 damage? Yeah, that sounds good.

I'm not sure who the boss of this level is. Maybe it's YOUR OWN FEARS and you have to fight a shadowy version of the Block that uses the Inverse Exclamation Point and Irony Marks. Or maybe it's just an evil ghost or a townsperson. We'll see. Originally this level was going to be an extra, post-final boss World 8, but it got promoted to World 6 when I realized that my original idea for World 6's plot was too similar to World 4's.

The "idea that was too similar to Grotto" was a music-themed world where rock-and-roll demons wanted to fight the angelic forces of classical music, which, incidentally, is the exact plot of Trolls: World Tour.

While I acknowledge that "two factions fighting against each other" is very similar to Grotto's plot in the broad strokes, its very funny to me that I realized these two concepts were similar, but not that Grotto, Inferno, and Thingamajig were all essentially the same genre. Whoops.

Anyways, a horror concept is good to round out the books. I even like the idea of the ghosts being aggressively un-scary, because that would give the Block something to fix.

If I were being honest, I think the best course of action here would be to cut at least one world, or possible fuse some of their concepts together. It wouldn't be too hard to fuse Phantasmagoria and Grotto into a sort of Lovecraftian horror setting where the problem is that it just literally isn't scary. Then Thingamajig and Inferno could be fused into a single sci-fi adventure story, or at least Thingamajig could be repurposed into sci-fi and Inferno pure fantasy.

Love, or, in some versions, Sepulcher, is the last story. In the game.

It's an uncompleted poem, which is an idea that I like.

More specifically, it's an uncompleted poem about the death of the Writer's fiancé, the grief of which has been the root of all of his writing trouble. This is an idea that I do not like at all. This is 100% the type of thing I would call from minute one of a game and be bored by when I see it in action. This is some 2013 indie game shit.

Which, in fairness, I wrote this in like 2013. So I see where I'm getting my inspiration from.

I don't hate the idea that the Writer is going through something emotional that's taking a toll on his work, but I do hate the idea that all of his roadblocks would come from this.

Originally, the final boss was the Block fighting the Writer's own sadness in five phrases. The five phases... of grief. Ooh! Do you get it? Writing!!!

If I wanted to implement this idea a little more elegantly—it'd be hard to do it less elegantly—I think the right move would be to have small verses of poetry scattered about the game as standalone short levels between all the books. These poems could talk about his various feelings in regards to meeting and eventually losing this woman. At least that would tell some kind of narrative.

I'd also definitely want the Writer to already be over the death of this woman. The idea of a magic block appearing and fixing all his writing and, by extension, his emotional holes like some sort of fairy that appears at night to fix a cobbler's shoes is boring and unearned. If you're going to secretly make this story about grief, I'd rather it be about recovering from grief. Maybe the game starts a few months after this fiancé's death. The Writer's been out of practice and he's only just returned to writing, finding all these issues with his various unfinished stories at once. Now he's healthy enough to deal with them and he, as the Block, can repair them all.

If the stories all have issues, they wouldn't have those issues for the same reason, especially if they're each different genres.

To be honest, I think it'd be more fun to give the Block the ability to exclusively jump through written paper. Not just stories, but everything from IOUs to bank statements to notes written on scraps. These could be left between the books as bridges, and they could give hints to what the Writer is like as a person outside of his writing. I think it'd be much more interesting to round him out and characterize his entire life that way instead of being like "and he had a wife... who DIED!!!"

Boring.

If given the chance to go back and change things entirely I think it'd be fun to restructure this game in a way where each book has maybe... 1-5 major issues with it that need resolving, where each iteration of the book is treated like its own stage in a greater level. Sometimes a breakthrough in one story could spark the inspiration needed to finish another, just like in real life. The player could hop back and forth between stories, some of them requiring more "completed iterations" than others, until they are all finally finished.

After solving the issue in Zephyr, you can access whichever book you want, in any order. But, only certain parts of the books will be accessible until you finish others. Kind of like a multi-level Metroidvania run through a Mario 64-style connecting hub world.

The idea of having small platforming bonus stages made of scraps of paper between stories, checks, ideas jotted down on receipts, stuff like that, seems SO interesting to me. There's a ton of room for fun there. It's a great way to characterize the writer too. Like, imagine the difference between finding receipts for a ton of beer purchases vs. finding five or six receipts for the same type of plant that this dude just can't seem to keep alive next to a "HOW TO RAISE PLANTS" book. Idk, there's a lot to play with.

Anyways, that's this concept. As I document this I'm already coming up with more ideas for this game, like having harder, unlockable "Italicized" versions of boss fights and things like that, but I really don't want to allot any more brain space to this thing.

I hope this post was interesting to some of you!

Looking back on it, this really feels like a very half-baked idea to me, but I still wanted to post it in anticipation of doing more of these posts in the future.

I'm so excited to talk about Winds of Change and Jamboree, but I really don't want to reveal those in any official capacity until I have more of them "finalized". WoC is much closer, but I want to do a video on that one so I'll be leaving it alone until then.

As a treat, here's some concept art I had commissioned of one of the monster races. Maybe that will tide you over for now:

(we went with the Mouthless design)