The main Gameplay mechanic that the game is built upon from and crucial to the main point of my essential exspirenece. "The Experience I would like to capture is one related to Trust and Betrayal, It was an element I wanted to capture in my summer project but this time I want focus on this experience you will have in the game and build up around that before establishing the world and characters. I want the player to explore and manipulate a world with AI that give off real world emotions and actions." is the Mental Health scale. All NPCs will have a constant stat regarding this that will be influenced by several mechanics such as Environments and enemy actions seen in gameplay. This mechanic will lead to the main basis of the games replay ability and hopefully be the element of the game that sticks with the player.
Players Effects -
The Mental health bar can be decreased in several ways, this can be done through the player's actions with them being able to decide the distribution of the items they scavenge throughout the map and to which characters they will go to. This allows the player to have favourite characters and award them with more supplies leading to that character having a higher mental health bar and trusting the player more. Yet this can work in the opposite way, if an NPC feels as if they are being neglected with recourses they will begin to lose health and start to distrust the player. A more adverse way for the player to lower the NPC's mentality health is by beginning to attack them, this will rapidly make the NPC lose sanity and become violent with the player.
Environment -
Some areas of the map will have instant effects to all NPC's mental health such as the forest that once entered will slowly decrease health. There is also a more intense area of the map with the same affects, this area is the main base of the creatures with a sudden dice roll being performed on all NPC characters to see if there is a small chance of an NPC becoming fully insane and hostile apron entry. This area will also cause a massive decrease of the teammates mental health so it is crucial the player has only their healthiest and most prepared teammates when entering. There is also more character specific environment traits such as if the character has a trait which means they are afraid of water they will lose mental health quickly when entering water. Another example is if a character has a claustrophobic trait they will lose mental health when told to hide in hiding places present throughout the map.
Enemy and Damage -
The main area that will cause damage to the mental health of npcs is from the enemies in the game with drops in mental health being seen if they are in the area of the creature, A fellow Npc is killed by them or if they are damaged by the creature. If the player sticks around NPC corpses while fellow teammates are following they will let the player know that they need to move on by vocal ques and beginning to vomit. If a character is damaged by the enemy their wound will continue to get worse over time corrupting them this can be stopped by using a health pack but if not their mental health will continue to decrease until they go insane if not seen to. The last thing the Enemy can do to effect NPC's mental health is if killed by the player or an NPC all close characters to enemy's body will have a massive burst of moral and celebrate, this will massively raise characters mental Health bar but this isn't an easy task to perform.
UI Mental Health
I wanted to make some sort of way to represent this mechanic visually in an interesting way through the UI, so I decided to use the skull and spine I had 3D modelled before and retexture for this. With a metallic red skull be shown when an NPC's mental health is completely empty.
A blue skull will be shown when an NPC is at full Mental Health.
Below shows how the emblem will look when an NPC has taken partial damage to their Mental health.
Below are some quick looping videos that could be used as a nice animatic in gameplay to make the health bars even more visually pleasing.
This Mechanic was also shown in this story board showing the enemy base effect with an NPC spending too much time around a dead body and causing him to go insane. (note story board has pre finalised enemy design.)
