Sanity System Ideas

In a horror game I'm making, your character has a sanity percentage. As this lowers, your gameplay is adversely affected. This will all be controlled by variables shown by "Xail System Variable HUD" script. My only question is: how would you make it affect your gameplay (e.g. darker screen, character speed etc.). Any ideas? BTW- as far as the screen is concerned I am using the "Khas Light Script". Thanks in advanced.

I suppose scripts, variables and switches. I have no idea how specifically, though.

Am I right in assuming this idea was inspired by a certain Gamecube game? 

Just a heads-up if you're planning to go commercial: The mechanic you're describing is under a patent owned by Nintendo, as luck would have it, and has been ever since they filed during Eternal Darkness' development. You're not going to be able to make a commercial game using this system without a lot more luck, and the sort of limited success that keeps people from noticing you're in violation.


e: You can look at it here. It's a pretty ty move, almost as bad as that time Namco copyrighted the idea of putting minigames on loading screens and made them boring forever.

No, it's actually incredibly intelligent on their part. The fact they never used it again after Eternal Darkness shows that they knew it would be mimicked following the game's release. The money they can make from the patent is pretty sweet, and considering Nintendo profits have been going down steadily since the Wii, I say more power to them.

Besides, they made it, they can patent it all they like.

Unfortunately, yes, they can patent it and they have done so. But I am not sure about considering that they made it, they have surely implemented it, but it is not something that didn't existed somehow before (it is quite based on real life reactions and possibilities).

In my opinion, this kind of patent is detrimental to general creativity..

It absolutely is! I'd kill to see more games put minigames on their loading screens or Frick with the player in this way. The fact that it makes the company owning the patent a profit doesn't really change things in my eyes -- yeah, it's theirs and they can do it if they want to, but long term it's taken away a tiny bit of potential.


Anyway, it probably won't come up at all unless you're going commercial and make it really big. Nintendo aren't exactly the most litigious company. I'm just mentioning it so you know the facts and can make your own decision.

Hmm, I disagree. If someone really wants to use it they can license the patent from Nintendo, and Nintendo can ultimately decide how much or little that is. I've heard numerous times of these kinds of things just being given for free simply because they asked permission to use it. It's a little bit like Copyright law in that respect. But I digress.

You're absolutely correct on your second point. Even then if you are making money, major companies usually don't seek damages until you're making over $10, 000 in most cases. If you magically get to that stage though, you could probably quite easily settle out of court with an angreement to give a percentile of profits to Nintendo. That's how these things usually go down. Look at what happened when Atari started making Pong cabinets.

Makes me wonder if Frictional Games licensed this for Amnesia.

I hate it when companies / individuals patent something so vague or simple it can literally prevent competition if they decide to use the patent against another company/individual.

You don`t understand how making a mechanic itself (potentially) more expensive to use discourages other companies from using it?


And I believe Amnesia's system is sufficiently different from Eternal Darkness' that it wasn't a problem. That's the thing about patents; you need to make them pretty specific.

I like it. It forces market innovation.

It shouldn't be too hard to avoid a legal issue with Nintendo, especially for something on this scale. Amnesia and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth got away with their own sanity mechanisms.

Firstly, I didn't realize there was a game that had that system already. I guess I will have to change it. Secondly, with all due respect none of you have answered my question. How can I do this?

You really outta play Eternal Darkness. It's the best Sanity System out there.

Also, I did answer your question. It would be achieved via either scripts, variables, switches or a combination of all three.

Yeh, but you didn't say what script, or how to use variables and switches to make a "sanity system".

The sanity counter should be possible with a simple variable. Have various interaction events adjust its value (also check to see if the value is above 100, then trim it down to 100 so you can't have more than 100% sanity, or at or below 0, so you end up completely screwed if you lose all your marbles), then have others that check this value and have different effects based on what that value is at the time. Some tweaks to a HUD script should allow you to show your sanity level on-screen if you want, but honestly, crazy people are never quite sure they're going crazy. If I were doing something similar, I would make people guess how sane they still are.

I really like this idea. As a general side note, when your sanity reaches "0" you commit suicide, thus ending the game. So it almost acts like health.

Ohh, cool! Like Fahrenheit! (AKA Indigo Prophecy.)

I am not sure if the idea of having a sanity system is patented or even patentable.  I know that Cyberpunk and Shadowrun had a system for loosing sanity (going cyber psycho) and Call of Chtulhu also has a sanity system.  Trying to patent such a thing would be like trying to patent the idea of health points or breathing.  And I am pretty certain that the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 will have a cyber-psycho system implemented.

I would personally have the dialogue choices and NPC responses altered depending on how insane one is, and instead of a HUD showing how insane one is, I would have the screen incrementally fade into black&white as insanity grows more severe (a take on how some ego-shooters tint the screen red as health is lost...), if it happens slow enough, one would not notice going insane until one is already well gone.

Despite your obvious legal expertise, it exists. How you move forward given these circumstances is up to you.

That's because neither Amnesia nor Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth go by the same mechanics as Eternal Darkness as both games are first-person rather than third-person like Eternal Darkness, which is why they did that 'screen going blurry' effect as your sanity dropped. Amnesia's sanity system was more effective as you lost sanity while hanging around in the dark, but staying in the light made it easier for monsters to see you, which caused you to make a decision on whether you wanted to get motion sickness or be killed by bloody abominations.