Man, Grindstone takes me back a bit. I still really love the concept, so maybe someday…
The Silent Hill series and (to varying degrees) other PS1 survival horror games are a pretty good starting point for the gameplay, but my intention is to focus more on narrative elements and less on monster-bashing. If there’s a single hook / innovation beyond being a revivalist horror game, it’s the madness system, inspired by Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
Without going into too much detail, it involves using lots of events (in the level, and generic), and using a ‘director’ to decice which ones to activate. If a player walks into range of a level event, for example, it queries the director which then uses a decision tree (based on the player’s current state, what events have recently fired, etc) to decide whether to activate it or not. There’s an endless list of ideas for these: switching the layout of a room when the player uses a door, mixing in some subtle binaural environment sounds, to the more extreme examples like hiding the player’s inventory or temporarily messing with the controls. The idea is to make the game experience itself feel unreliable and unsafe.
In terms of specifics, I’m not imagining many systemic features (owing to complexity) or procedural generation, but definitely branching dialogue and dynamic music mixing.
PS1 retro graphics are a deliberate choice for practical and aesthetic reasons. Practically speaking, all projects I’ve been involved with both as lead and a contributor have struggled because they were trying to maintain a high art standard; it’s why most indie horror games take place in limited environments like ‘haunted house’ PT clones. The scope of this project simply wouldn’t be possible otherwise, trying to create a semi-open world town with linear missions would take a team of artists years to make (even with the aid of procedural generation, as with The Sinking City). In this case, the environment in the above screenshots took half a day.
Aesthetically, I think it just works a lot better for a horror game. It creates a sense of uneasiness and mystery where the player has to fill in the blanks themselves, which is especially important for ‘Lovecraftian’ horror. There’s a good write-up on lo-fi horror here.
I definitely wouldn’t consider Kickstarter reliable, I think it’s good to plan for and the project is unique enough to stand a chance, but ultimately the goal has to be to create a compelling demo first and foremost. As for streaming, it’s a risk with any single-player game, but I think it would be a net positive as a marketing tool - especially given the strong community sentiment around retro survival horror games.