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Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG
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Six months without an update. Surely this project is dead? Far from it!
It’s almost done!
What’s left? Not a lot!
- Code some stuff for NPCs.
- Code a few remaining bits of the conflict system.
- Add descs to ~80 more rooms.
- Add and desc ~30 NPCs.
- Get the game on a website and make the site look good.
When I set out to make Silent Heaven, it was just a bunch of disconnected ideas. But I took more notes as I played more games, read forum posts, and even unearthed a Firan retrospective. One of the big takeaways I’ve learned is to give your players things to do during their downtime to enhance their RP and tell their own stories.
Tying systems together so that they all play off of each other has been an arduous ordeal, but somehow the game hasn’t exploded in my face! I’ve spent a lot of time researching gamer motivation profiles and I’ve made systems that will hopefully appeal to specific kinds of players I want the game to attract.
Overall, my goal for the vibe of the game is players having fun OOC by putting their characters in dangerous situations IC, playing off each other to create plenty of memorable events. Everyone’s comfort is more important than maintaining immersion.
With that preamble out of the way, here’s a handful of day-to-day activities you can look forward to doing in Silent Heaven while furthering your character’s storyline and getting into mischief!
LET’S GO SHOPPING
There’s currency in Silent Heaven. It can be used to pay for goods and services from your fellow citizen, as well as pay for additional residences and buy stuff from a vending machine.
How does this massive vending machine keep getting stocked? Good question.
How can it fit so much stuff? Let’s just say it was designed by IKEA.
What are those prices? Capitalism never makes sense.
Best $5 ever spent.
Bonnie and Clyde are my test characters. They’ll get into a lot of trouble as I put them through the rigamarole. Please forgive their one-liners.
Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff to go over, and this update will just barely scratch the surface!
WRITING
What better way to immortalize your poetry and screeds than through the time-honored tradition of writing it down!
Get yourself some paper and WRITE.
Pick the kind of paper you’re writing, give it a title, and write to your heart’s content!
It’s bread.
I didn’t know there was so much to learn about eating bread!
ART
Got some burgeoning artistic ability you’d like to flex? Your character can create works of art in four different ways!
(Note: Needlework had been added to the list above.)
There are only a few things essential to making artwork: The title and signature, the art itself, and how it’s to be presented in a room.
Can you use color in your artwork? Absolutely! If you’ve played Arx, using colors should look very familiar. In Silent Heaven, you type a % followed by 3 numbers to select a specific color to use.
The names of the colors, however, are ones I came up with. I ran out of ideas for color names partway through. If you look closely, you can probably tell.
When you type something like this:
It’ll come out colorful like this!
Art is more than just a pretty picture or sculpture. It’s said that a masterpiece carries a part of an artist’s soul, and that’s no less true in Silent Heaven.
CHEMISTRY
It’s not all creativity in Silent Heaven. There’s also science!
Do you like the scientific process? Drugs are a staple of many horror stories, and now you can be a chemist, producing all manners of drugs. Prescribe them to patients, sell them to strangers, host parties, or t e s t t h e m o n l i v e s u b j –
Start by getting yourself a synthesis lab.
You can use this equipment to SYNTHESIZE drugs. You’ll be given a menu where you get to choose the administration method, reactive compound, and synthesis temperature.
For those of you who are squicked by certain drug-related paraphernalia, I’ll skip to the final screen in the process.
What will this drug do? That’s where trial and error comes into play!
How is your character going to test the effects? Will they risk the possibility of symptoms and take the pill themself? Or open up RP opportunities to others and offer a clinical study? Or just leave it on a counter and see who wants their next high? What will your character do when they have many samples and not enough participants?
There’s a lot more you can do with drugs than just consume them, but let’s focus on consuming them for now.
DRUGS
Smoke something, have fun.
When you take a drug, you’ll first get a little RP prompt about how it makes your character feel, such as, “Your surroundings grow more vibrant. You see the colors of the air. Your confidence boosts as you feel yourself becoming one of those colors. But you feel a sudden repulsion to the colors red and silver.”
You can roll with that prompt as much or as little as you like. It’s all up to you.
During the time that the drug is going through your character’s system, they’ll get a bonus to at least one skill, and a debuff to another.
After the drug wears off, there’s a period of time where your character might experience side-effects, such as giggling, gnashing teeth, getting the sniffles, and so on.
Here’s a brief example of Bonnie getting a side-effect during her RP, “Bonnie sniffles once.” She plays it off as a cold in her next line, writing that her breathing sounds stuffy.
Side-effects are intended to add a light layer of unpredictability to a scene, but if you’re not comfortable with the possibility of side-effects being added to your RP, you can avoid them completely by never having your character take drugs.
Additionally, a higher skilled chemist will craft drugs that have longer highs and fewer side-effects. Plus, if your character take another drug, the side-effects will stop until that next drug wears off.
MEDICINE
There is a such thing as too much fun. In those cases, call in the doctors. With a medical station, a doctor can TREAT patients for a variety of symptoms, including deep wounds, injuries, bleeding, unconsciousness, and overdoses.
A doctor is also able to SAMPLE a patient’s blood to get a blood analysis report, which will give the doctor information about the patient.
TRUST
There’s no HIPAA in Silent Heaven, but there is a TRUST system. By default, there’s almost nothing another character can do to your character unless you explicitly trust them to do a specific action. Healing is one such action.
Another example is physically picking up another character:
Adorable.
GREETINGS
Your character is a stranger arriving in a strange town. Because of this, Silent Heaven features a greeting system.
Your character will initially appear as a shortdesc to everyone else until you type GREET in their presence, typically after you’ve introduced yourself via RP. Then they’ll forever see your character’s name.
GREETing is always truthful. If your character wants to lie about their identity, they’ll need to work on their Deception skill and wear a disguise.
DISGUISES
Is your character trying to keep a low profile? Do they want to try to talk their way into somewhere they shouldn’t be going? Looks like it’s time to prepare a disguise!
Wearing a disguise effectively turns your character into a new character that you get to customize. It even gives them a new display name, appearing ungreeted to everyone that you’ve previously greeted!
Here’s an example of Bonnie taking on the persona of Maylee, greeting her good friend Clyde, then surprising him with her ability to pull off a unique look.
Maintaining a disguise takes effort, and as you RP, it’ll become more difficult for your character to maintain the illusion. Eventually, your character’s true self will shine through, so be sure you get to a private spot before that happens!
INVESTIGATION
Here’s the last system I’ll touch on today, and it was a doozy to code.
Do you like solving mysteries and piecing together what happened? Grab yourself a forensics kit!
Your character can INSPECT things, rooms, and even other characters, provided they TRUST you to do so.
Here’s an example of what would happen if your character inspects a pair of fluffy boots.
Your character got a partial DNA signature off the fluffy boots! Someone’s been touching or wearing these boots recently!
DNA signatures aren’t the only evidence you’ll find. There’s a lot more, somewhere in the range of 100 different types of evidence.
Go forth and investigate!
ANGELS AND DEMONS?
So far, I’ve been talking about systems that are somewhat grounded in reality. So where’s the religious supernatural horror? It’s there. Trust me, it’s there. It’s practically omnipresent.
But at the time of launch, I’d like the town of Silent Heaven to be shrouded in mystery. The first “season” of the game will be all about uncovering the surface secrets of the town and finding your character’s place amidst the central conflicts.
It’ll be a spooky time.
WHAT’S NEXT?
There’s so much I’ve put into Silent Heaven that I don’t think I’d ever run out of updates like these. If you’d like me to go into further depth about a specific topic, I’m happy to explain further. There’s a lot that goes into each system, including making sure multiple characters with the same skills aren’t made redundant by a character with a higher skill level, anti-metagaming checks, and more. What I’ve shared above are very small overviews.
If you’d like to see everything there is, in greater depth, or you just want to get more frequent updates on Silent Heaven, please feel free to join the Discord server.
I’m giving myself a goal of launching Silent Heaven in May of this year. I’ve officially spent 3 years working on this game. It’s time to move forward. Pencils down. Turn it in for grading. Revise it after launch. Tell stories.
My thanks go out to everyone who’s encouraged me to see this project to fruition.
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@Jumpscare holy crap this is SO MUCH WORK and it looks amazing
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Well now I feel extra bad and lazy for
and losing track of all sense of progress on the Star Wars thing.
(I do not really, I am joking about the lazy/bad parts. NOT joking about this being awesome progress!)
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So exciting!!
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This sounds pretty neat, and I don’t usually go for horror games.
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This is remarkable. I have to say, I’m in complete admiration of your thoughtful approach to building the game to engage different types of gamers. The level of coding is remarkable.
You’ve mentioned creating and descing NPCs; will these be like MUD NPCs in that they’ll have objects in rooms, and be interactable? What role do you see them serving in day to day RP?
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Thanks! I’m glad you all like it.
BONUS SHOWCASE: PARKOUR
Here’s a short story involving 3 other game mechanics:
- Shouting
- Looking from afar
- Gravity
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I’m here for it. 100%
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@Pyrephox said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
This is remarkable. I have to say, I’m in complete admiration of your thoughtful approach to building the game to engage different types of gamers. The level of coding is remarkable.
You’ve mentioned creating and descing NPCs; will these be like MUD NPCs in that they’ll have objects in rooms, and be interactable? What role do you see them serving in day to day RP?
Thank you so much, and thanks for asking!
I love RPing, and I feel like I do my best on the other side of the screen. I want to help weave all sorts of stories players have, and provide you with prompts when you’re out of ideas. I’ve come up with a cast of NPCs that each have their own likes and dislikes, wants and fears, histories and goals. There are dozens upon dozens of potential storylines they can kickstart, and it all depends on what the players would like to explore.
While the history and “rules” governing the supernatural state of Silent Heaven are set in stone, the story of the town post-launch is fluid. Plots won’t go on rails, and NPCs are there to help facilitate the actions players want to do.
I haven’t coded NPCs yet, so this could change a bit in the end, but there are both automated and Storyteller purposes that NPCs will serve.
Automated:
- Some provide history and information for characters, as they’re long-time residents of the town.
- Some provide necessary services such as medical attention when there’s no PC around to do the same thing.
- Some are able to induct PCs into groups / factions, such as working for a cafe.
Storyteller:
- They help kickstart RP and storylines. They’ll never take the spotlight, instead taking the backseat to give characters opportunities to do things.
- They run events, both plot-related and social.
- You can request scenes with them when you need their input on a matter.
- You can use the Story Action system, which serves as part of what you’d see in a normal +job system.
STORY ACTIONS
If you want to attempt to do something that isn’t codedly possible, such as investigating something in a room description, or trying to dig a tunnel, or attempting to blow up a building, your first step is to talk to an NPC who your character suspects might support this action.This gives storytellers an opportunity to review and prepare ahead of time for any potential story actions that may take place. The more a request could fundamentally change the town of Silent Heaven, the greater the difficulty it’ll be for your character to garner the support of an NPC. Some story actions will be downright impossible or come with severe consequences, which the right NPC will let your character know of ahead of time.
There’ll always be an NPC that’ll be up for something you have in mind, and I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction.
Before you propose a story action to an NPC, make sure you’ve thought of what your character will do in the event the action fails, and how you can make a failure fun. Story actions aren’t required to access anything Silent Heaven has to offer. Story actions are for when you have a creative solution or harebrained plan that the game code doesn’t support.
Story actions are the moments I hope will be most memorable. I predict they’ll take a significant amount of time to set up, though, so my only request is to bear with me if there are times when a lot of these come in.
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@Jumpscare fucking laughing in a grocery store parking lot
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How dare you update me on a game that I had put out of memory for so long because I really wanted to play it and couldn’t because it wasn’t open. Now I have to live through all that angst all over again.
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@Jumpscare Oh gosh, that looks painful. Might have to go back to character gen for that one. xD
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@Gasboy said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
@Jumpscare Oh gosh, that looks painful. Might have to go back to character gen for that one. xD
Good news! Due to lore reasons that I’m not spoiling, characters can’t die while they’re in the town of Silent Heaven. Your character can be an unconscious, bloodied, broken mess on the sidewalk, but they will eventually recover from it.
However, if you’re specifically looking to kill off your character, there will be periodic opportunities to venture outside of town.
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@Jumpscare I assume it’s because the town is built atop the wreckage of a prehistoric spaceship built and flown by the tommyknockers, which emits radiation in the spooky EM spectrum causing all the town’s inhabitants to become tommyknockers themselves.
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I was notified that some of the images got broken in the post at the top of this page. For anyone who missed out, they’re back!
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@Jumpscare Owie still, laying around until you recover. xD
But that’s a neat premise.
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I really like this concept. Might get me out of retirement.
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Super excited about the work you’ve done so far, the investigation/analysis systems and depth are fascinating! I can’t wait to check it out.
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Just a reminder that I have not forgotten about this and it is something I’m still excited about.
