Art Journal
Ida’s Flowers (Game Concept)
This is a game concept I’m actively working on and making concept art for. It’s a big personal project I’m doing for the purpose of creating portfolio work and because I enjoy doing it. This is not a game that’s actually being made. Note, this is also a work in progress and I will continue to change and add to the below as I go.
Story Summary
Nobody on the continent has died in almost 1000 years.
People start to go mad and become flesh eating ghouls. Immortality is viewed as a curse/illness.
Their part of the world is ruled by a religious monarchy that believes the gods are withholding death as punishment and that everyone needs to repent through constant servitude. They build up cities with tall charmed walls.
Life is full of suffering and toil.
Ida’s friend starts to show signs of the madness.
She and her friends decide they won’t sit back and watch their friend be excommunicated and transform into a monster. They embark on an adventure to confront the Gods and to reinstate death. They devise a plan requiring a bunch of rituals to be performed to lock the gods in enchanted items (since they can’t actually die).
Throughout their journey they encounter various quests and events that explore different aspects of death from philosophical, theological, psychological, and creative perspectives.
Throughout the story Ida has strange visions and there will be a bunch of different theories on why and what they are and what they mean.
In the end, the ritual brings them to the domain of Death-Fate, where Ida remembers that she herself is Death. The Gods had abandoned the world when humans went extinct and left Death-Fate to control the realm. Death-Fate bares the burden for a long period of time with the assistance of five loyal psychopomps. She grows depressed and lonely, and starts losing her mind, experiencing bouts of psychosis, eventually begging her psychopomps to help her escape her blood paradise and her responsibility. They oblige, and cast her out into the world where she lives as a mortal with no memory of who she really is.
With Death gone, these five beings were the most powerful in the land, and they inevitably became revered as Gods by the people.
Ida’s “final form” is a tree-being anchored in her realm.
There will be various options for an ending based on choices made throughout the game, initiating a final battle, and closing out the game with results and outcomes of their decisions.
Various Details
Action RPG
Ida is the main character. She has seven party companions she picks up throughout the first half of the game. And a number of potential additions to her caravan throughout the entire game. The caravan are allies who remain with the caravan and contribute in various different ways.
Ida can choose three companions for her party before departing the caravan. Certain quests, particularly companion quests, will require certain characters to be used in the party.
The caravan is customizable. It’s made up of decorated wagons, a large communal tent, a planning tent, and a fancy horse species along with other animals.
Each playable character has a unique skill tree.
Real-time hack and slash combat style.
There’s a central tent for strategizing and making choices on how to build and maintain strength in opposition to the Gods and the religious monarchy. The caravan allies will heavily be a factor in this aspect.
There are six total regions on the map, plus one secret region where the finale occurs:
Tall Tree Island
Coastal
Desert
Prairies and Marshland
Mountainous Forest with a Valley Oasis
Ice and Snow
Dark Paradise
After advanced human society is destroyed by global warming and war, life as we know it ends and humanity is reduced to a very tiny dispersed population. Nature engulfs the world again and after some time a species of nymphs start to emerge from the land. The nymphs copulate with what still remains of the humans and the elven species is born. Over time humans go entirely extinct, leaving only the nymphs and the elves.
There are also demon dolls. These are life-size dolls created for the specific purpose of being vessels for demons. Demons originate from Death-Fate’s domain.
You can’t die. But you can lose a fight. And if you lose a fight there are a number of potential consequences:
You wake up alone with lost items in an inconvenient location.
You wake up alone with a temporary or permanent injury in an inconvenient location.
You wake up with a temporary or permanent injury and you’re somehow restrained or imprisoned. You then have to complete a puzzle to escape.
You wake up while being cannibalized by a ghoul and you have to complete a puzzle to escape. This causes a permanent injury.
The permanent injuries can be treated consistently at your caravan, but not cured. Customizable prosthetics become an option for when entire body parts have been lost to ghouls. Prosthetics require some level of consistent maintenance.
Measurement for relationships with party/caravan characters determine their endings.
All party/caravan characters are romanceable with the exception of familial relations.
There is a measurement of psychological status that relates to whether characters are in danger of descending into the ghoul madness. Activities like reading, making art, forming strong bonds, socializing, being entertained or entertaining others, etc etc, can improve psychology.
Can accumulate various pets to add to your caravan.
Occultist dark fantasy aesthetics.
The ghoul madness typically hits around 70 to 110 years old. But it very frequently comes on much earlier the longer deathlessness carries on. Without the expectation of death, people are a lot more fragile psychologically and have a much lower threshold for coping with stress and trauma.
The terrain is generally pretty harsh with a lot of empty space. It should feel gruesome and exhausting and tedious. A mechanic in large empty spaces where the player is regularly transported to a random spot in the same empty space without being able to really realize it, but it happens with clues and patterns so the player can actually strategize a way out of it, so it’s not just some entirely hopeless random bullshit loop.