Plot ideas for horror game?

 Main character:

 

11 Year old Timmy.

Fragile young kid, has'nt previously been away from his

family for more than hours at a time.

Timmy has been bullied by everyone around him since he can remember.

Timmy goes through depression, and hallucinations, or are they?

 

Plot:

 

Timmy's last friend, John passed away last month, but Timmy

insists, John is still alive. John is with him.

And so is all other people, Timmy can see things, people.

Dead people.

They are still alive. They are still with him.

 

Timmy hasn't told anyone about his visions, he knows he'd get even more bullied.

Timmy would like to only see John, his friend. But he is followed by others aswell.

 

Timmy is left alone over the weekend, all by himself.

All alone, or is he?

Timmy is looking forward to the weekend.

After all, it's a whole weekend he can spend with John.

 

The parents leave.

Timmy is left alone, and has to take care of himself.

Timmy meets few people he knows that have passed away.

He also meets a few new spirits that in his eyes go out of their way to scare him.

 

Timmy later finds out that these scares

are not without reason, they are all to get his attention, and to lead him away

from a certaint death. The spirits that he thought wanted to harm him, saved his life.

 

They all wanted to get Timmy away from the house, because if he stays. He will die from a fire.

 

Ending 1:

Timmy gets away from the house.

And shortly after it sets on fire.

It all makes sense now, the matches burning without touching them.

The notes about death, and get away.

And the mystic urge to get away from the house, even if he wasn't persay scared of staying.

All the weird feelings he'd get when he was near anything fire related.

It was to protect him.

 

Ending 2:

Timmy wakes up in a thick cloud of dark smoke.

Timmy does his best to get out of the house, and finally gets out climbing out the nearest window.

He got severe burn marks from the fire, but gets out.

And in the end he's laying in the hospital bed, with his family surrounding him.

 

 

____________________________________

What do you think about the plot?

is it too dark, too sad?

what should be worked on, and have you got any ideas

on how to improve the plot?

This should go in Plot and Character Feedback Thread.


That aside, I like the idea of a fragile mentally unstable kid. He insists that dead people are still alive... hmmm... sounds familiar...





As long as you stray away from the phrase, "I see dead people" you should be fine.


Those 2 endings aren't all that different, though. The ending where you don't listen to the spirits should be a negative ending, but being surrounded by your friends and family and having narrowly escaped death is very positive. I'd just make the kid die in a fire, or scrabble off to a bush to die from the burns. I know that sounds brutal, but otherwise it's not the *sad* ending. I'm pretty tired of half-bad endings, I want a real miserable one.


The ending #1 should be the happy one. I'd encourage you to think about his character development, too. Him coming to terms with being able to see ghosts. So he reaches an understanding that not all ghosts are malevolent? Then perhaps he has a lighter outlook on life afterwards too. Perhaps beforehand, he was very inward-focussed and troubled, but afterwards he feels relieved, life is lighter again, and he's able to tell his parents more about how he feels.


I feel like "go out of his way to scare him" could be something else, like they are actually trying to help him but they're scaring him instead. You'd have to make the ghosts truly visceral and creepy though. I'm curious to see how this turns out. Keep up the good work.

I was thinking of Paranorman, myself:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1623288/

I don't think it's too dark a storyline, but it's not automatically a horror story.    I think the worst ending should be that the main character dies in the fire.  

You could even make that the middle ground ending, where all of his closest friends are there and they go off into a pleasant playground to enjoy themselves, and fade into the white light.  Sort of like the excellent Twilight Zone episode "A Stop at Willoughby"

In that case, the worst ending has Timmy ending up barely escaping the fire, a permanently severely crippled burn victim, trapped in his now nearly useless body, for the rest of his life, alone, in pain and cut off from his ghostly friends...yes, that is VERY dark, but it IS a horror, after all...

The best ending, of course, would be Timmy escaping the fire, unscathed, with a new sense of self-confidence, etc.

The way I'd do it would have each ghost take Timmy into its own world.  And the "bosses" could be Timmy's fears.  But, win or lose, when Timmy fights the boss, he's dropped out of that ghost's world.  Losing to the bosses gets Timmy the bad ending.