I want to make a horror game. The main mechanic is your ability to kill the monsters. Yeah it sounds dumb, done already. Well my twist is your utter incompetence with weaponry. You are a regular guy who has never used a gun before, you've never even really been in fights. An average guy with no combat experience. Suddenly you are thrust into a dangerous and unknown world full of shit that would naturally terrify you. You can use guns or knives or hatchets or whatever, and in fact you can use physics objects as thrown weapons and or as striking objects, but you are really fucking bad at it in such a way that the player has to compensate. The character, like in games like Amnesia, will have a level of sanity or terror or something that going lower than it will inflict psychological and physical issues. For example, in the normal range you can swing effectively, use guns with the amount of recoil and sway as one would expect from someone without experience, and do things in a rather normal manner. However as you lose sanity or gain terror or whatever you will slowly begin to be unable to aim, your swings will become more haphazard and you will in general be faster, but at the expense of accuracy. So you can swing like a madman with a bat but you may not do much damage because you are just flailing like a scared child. Your gun won't do less damage or shit but it will be hard to hit the fuckers and reloading in moments of horror and low sanity high terror whatever will have a chance to just fuck up. You might drop the mag or jam the gun because you simply aren't thinking. I think the way to go about this is kind of like in Receiver, where you can control every aspect of your weapons. So you have to be sure to check your safety and mag lock and if a bullet is chambered etc. This way it won't be cheap if you fuck up, because if you fuck it it could be your fault. In this way it is not only challenging but also fucking scary to realize you are out of shots and the monster isn't dead. There will be no HUD, so no bullet count or shit. You can check your levels amnesia style in a menu. I don't want the menu to pause the game though. I feel that if I could get a team of a few people I could make this happen. Frankly I am just sick of games being horror because you literally can't fight back. Outlast, for example, had many parts where I was like "JUST FUCKING PUNCH THEM OR STAB THEM OR SHIT AND RUN" but you can't. Same with amnesia. You can't harm the enemies so that is the horror. I want the player to scare themselves more than the game scares them. To be freaking out because they jammed their gun or because their golf club snapped when they brained that last creature, and there's another right over there. Also punching of course. So yeah. Thoughts?

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I just realized another problem with my game design. The protagonist. I think the character is going to be the problem. I kind of want it to be a trip. The character is under the influence of something, either drugs or just straight schizophrenia. The monsters aren't monsters, they are people. In fact throughout the game only police and such will attack you, people trying to stop you. The game will be a hallucinogenic paranoid murder spree where you lose your sense of humanity and you are trying to survive in a world where, to you, everything is out to get you. Monsters will react if you are armed and not risk their lives in general. Regular people may even cower, but to you it will appear as if they are readying to attack. I want your first kill to be something abnormal. The vision I have is you are walking down a corridor when this monster comes through a door, in reality it's a coworker or something but to you it is a lovecraftian horror with non euclidian geometry and dark intent, so you kill it with whatever weapon is on hand, going into a short scripted sequence. For example, you pick up an axe before coming into the hallway, and when you see ths creature you rush forward and murder it with the axe, knocking it to the ground and hacking it up. After you kill it, you stand back up, sway a bit, drop the weapon and vomit. Somewhere inside yourself you know you just murdered a human being. Maybe even have the character say "what have I done" or something. At this point in the game you won't think much of it, he did just kill something, but later it will come to light that he said that because he had a moment of lucidity and realized he just became a murderer. The game will focus on human faults, and play a lot on things we don't understand. I think the beginning will be the player at work. You walk around, overhear small talk, learn how to manipulate items and such, then something will happen and the world will come crashing down into this horrifying place where nothing really makes sense anymore. The models on the monsters will be unstable, and pieces may move or melt or things in ways that they shouldn't be able to. Perhaps you will look a monster in the face only to see their eyes turn behind their head and a giant eye open where their mouth was. Shit like that. I am not looking at this from an actual programming standpoint but from an artistic one, that is the vision I have.