Shades of Noir, Part 2
October 18th, 2006 by Pierre-Alexandre Garneau
The first thing to do when trying to come up with a good game design is to get some documentation: read some books, find appropriate websites, watch movies, etc. It sometimes feel like wasting time you could use more productively, but in the end it improves your work tremendously. Finding good documentation helps you get ideas and avoid mistakes others have made before.
In the case of this film noir game, I had limited time to do proper research so I only went to Wikipedia. I found a great article on film noir, detailing its characteristics. Beside discussing the genre’s visual style (word of the day: chiaroscuro, an artistic style with high contrast between light and shadow), the article describes those films as crime dramas with morally reprehensible characters.
The typical film noir is set in a large, maze-like city like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York or Chicago. The cliché is that it features a chain-smoking private eye as a protagonist, who gets lured into trouble by a femme fatale. While that’s overused in movies, it’s seldom seen in games so I wouldn’t feel too bad using that archetype. It has the advantage of setting the appropriate mood easily and quickly.
Using a private eye as a protagonist also leads me toward the appropriate genre for this title. While I wouldn’t see an investigator shooting everybody, I’d definitely see him sneak around to get evidence. The genre comes naturally from this: a stealth game like Thief, Splinter Cell or Commandos.
The visual style is perfect for this genre: dark shadows where the character can hide abound. The pace is great too: creeping along the dark streets of a metropolis, trying not to get detected by fedora-wearing thugs. It sets the tense mood needed by that kind of movie and game.
I believe we’ve got the basics for a very cool and fun game. The chiaroscuro visual style and the compelling stealth gameplay should combine to create a unique game that’s still close enough to what the public knows to avoid being too creatively risky. It’s different enough to stand out from the competition, but it’s also easy to communicate what the game is about to the public, because everybody knows what film noir is.
I’m still far from done, however. There are lots of questions left to answer: who is the playable character and what can he do? Who are the other characters (friends and foes)? Where does the action take place? How does it progress? Come back tomorrow for the answer to those questions, and check back Friday to see if I’m able to wrap this whole thing together into a cohesive whole before the end of the week.
An interesting start!
What kind of worries me, though, are these lists you pick themes from ; unless they are very extensive, it could somewhat limit your potential to come up with a particularly original design.
Not that particularly original designs are the be-all and end-all of game design, of course.
I’ve got two lists: one for platforms and one for themes. The platforms list is nothing special, just the popular systems on the market.
The themes list is, I think, pretty varied. It goes from the general (”Africa”) to the specific (”the movie Pulp Fiction”) and from the conventional (”Superheroes”) to the original (”Wine Tasting”). This list came from me only and in a single brainstorming session, so admittedly it’s biased in some ways.
Still, I think it’ll give some interesting results. While I’m trying to come up with concepts that would have a chance to be popular — it wouldn’t be that hard to come up with concepts if they didn’t have to please anybody — I don’t have a boss or a publisher telling me what to do, so I have the freedom to do creative stuff.