When You Absolutely Must Play A Game About Chest-Bursting Aliens
July 6, 2007Instead of working on Nine Suns today, I posted an initial draft of my game Giger Counter over at Thou And One. The intro goes:
- Giger Counter is a survival horror game in which the main characters are gradually turning into alien monstrosities. It is inspired by Vincent Baker’s game Afraid and the films by Ridley Scott (Alien), James Cameron (Aliens), David Fincher (Alien 3), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Alien Resurrection), Paul W.S. Anderson (Alien vs. Predator), and the upcoming film by the Brothers Strause (Aliens vs. Predator). The aliens in these films were originally designed by H.R. Giger (hence the name of this game), based on several paintings from his Necronomicon…
I haven’t actually playtested Giger Counter, but I playtested an earlier version of the same system that was meant for running Scream-style teen horror movie games. This new version fixes a bunch of minor issues with that version of the rules, but I still need to do a thorough re-write of the rules for Conditions, which I more or less stole directly from Vincent’s Afraid.
Originally, Conditions were meant to be the core of the game. In the new draft, there’s some neat stuff going on with “It’s My Time to Shine,” “Revealing My Secret,” and Tools. Those new elements will take some of the weight off Conditions, but Conditions still need to be revised to be more interesting and powerful before the game is really ready to rock.
That said, I’m really excited about it. It’s a quick-and-fast game that’s less thorny than Avatar, but is based on many of the same principles and design concepts. Giger Counter and Avatar are the two games I’m hoping to finalize through playtesting over the summer, while I start putting together a draft of Nine Suns and (maybe) Good Ship Revenge.
Is this an abandonment of the Scream-y version of the game, or are you going to develop it into something with similar cores and modular bits for genre-shifts?
Probably the latter.
Thing is, I can get Giger Counter to work without dealing with the thorny issue surrounding the slasher’s reveal. In the slasher version, when one of the characters is determined to be the slasher, it can be weird if, like, the slasher has been trying to kill them for the past hour.
But the aliens version doesn’t make my head hurt like that. Characters just become aliens. So I’m gonna make this version work before trying other things (slasher, zombies, kaiju) again.
[...] because of that, I completely forgot to mention in my last post that Jon is working on a survival horror game of his own, called Giger Counter. He even linked me to it! I am, as he says, [...]