Greetings all!
So I’ve been mulling over this project idea for a while, and have been working on designing the main mechanic for it. The mechanic consists of the player being able to use an in-game tablet-like device to view events that happened (or will happen, wink wink) in an area in order to solve puzzles related to what they’ve seen and progress through the area. There are a few more details that go into this (such as the player needing to know what time the event happened in order to view it), but that’s the main gist of it.
Now, my question becomes what would be the best way to go about executing something like this? The way I envisioned it, the player would be able to “pull up” the tablet in a similar fashion to Outlast’s Video Camera system, though in contrast to that, the player wouldn’t just be viewing the scene through a different type of lens; they’d technically be viewing the same scene, but with Actors that aren’t actually there.
My original idea for it was to simply have the viewing part just be a video or a cut scene shown to the player, but I felt it’d be better for the viewing to feel a bit more “live”, so I’d like to have it so the player can still more their character (which is in first-person) while the tablet-device is still being held on-screen and the event being viewed is playing out, but can only be seen through the tablet-device. Sorry if it sounds confusing (because it kinda is…), but it’s kinda like the tablet is viewing the event as an augmented reality-esque thing. When the player moves the tablet, the event being viewed does not move with the tablet, and the scene would play out like normal. This would be essential to the mechanic, as the player would be able to look the event playing out from different angles as it’s happening.
In any case, I’d greatly appreciate any help/direction in going about something like this, and if there’s something I said (wrote) that was confusing, I’d be glad to try to better explain it. Oh, and if anyone’s interested in this idea/project, feel free to ask any other questions.