Dream Game: Kaiju Bunker

 BIG MONSTER GO RAWR!

So yeah... You know what kind of game could probably be pretty cool? A survival game with a big ass monster wrecking stuff. Think a bit something like The Long Dark, 7 Days to Die or any other survival game, but with Godzilla as the main threat (or more like a similar, non-copyrighted huge monster.) 

Not sold yet? Well, I'll elaborate. 

Part 1: The basics

To start off, I've never honestly been a big fan of survival games myself. After the success of games like Minecraft and Arma 2's popular mod Day Z (that ultimately became it's own game with the same title) back in the early 2010s, the market was quickly flooded full of Early Access survival games. Most of them were low budget, broken titles that were either never actually finished or just did not really get me interested in them. Many still got fairly popular for some time, as streamers and players alike were looking for the next great hit, until the games were abandoned because of their unfinished state and slow updates. (That was also before Battle Royale games became the new big thing.) There have also been some well regarded ones for sure, with games like Subnautica, Don't Starve, Project Zomboid and the aforementioned The Long Dark among them. I've tried out quite a number of them over the years, but none of them ever really grabbed me the same way Minecraft did back in the day. I'll go into more detail why later, but first I'll actually talk about some basics of my game concept. 

Valheim (2021) was the big surprise survival game hit of last year.

Unless you've been living under a rock (or more likely, you just don't really play survival games or any games for that matter, and in the case of the latter, I'd be curious as to why you're even here), you probably know what the term "survival game" more or less means. (I won't go into the whole mess of survival games versus survival horror and what those terms mean to keep it simple.) As a genre definition it's a fairly broad term, but most of them share quite a bit in common. As the name would suggest, their core is built around surviving in a hostile environment. That might sound like it describes almost all games, at least ones with any action in them, but survival games are usually less focused on completing levels and fighting than they are on gathering resources and building in order to stay alive. A lot of the mechanics and gameplay elements are usually directly inspired by both Minecraft and Day Z. (Not that they were necessarily the first ones to have them, but they were definitely the most well known and influential ones at the time.) A lot survival games start you off in a (usually) random location in an open world that is either handcrafted (Day Z) or randomly generated each time you start a new save (Minecraft). The player often starts out with basically nothing, and must gather resources like wood, stone or metals to build tools and weapons. Most survival games also have ticking clocks like hunger or thirst meters in addition to an overall health stat, in which case the player must also find food or drinkable water to stay alive. Some games might even go further and have other elements like body temperature that changes with the weather, time of day and the player's clothing. All of these together are a large part of the "survival" element in these games, where the whole gameplay loop is built around managing these different stats.

Then there's the hostile environment part. In a lot of survival games it simply means monsters like zombies (Minecraft, Day Z, 7 Days to Die, Project Zomboid... you get the picture), other players (Day Z, but also Rust or Ark etc.) or simply AI controlled humans, or other dangerous things like the different terrifying sea creatures in Subnautica. But it can also mean the weather like a really cold winter in The Long Dark or lack of oxygen like in the space survival game Breathedge (it's even in the name!) Really it can be anything, as long as it can kill or hinder the player in some way. 

However, I have yet to see many games feature truly big monsters, kaijus, as the threat in an open world survival game or really any other genre for that matter. Sure, there are some games with kaijus in them (kaiju being the word of Japanese origin often used for huge monsters like Godzilla and the like), but I really can't think of really any good ones. Even when I googled "kaiju video games", I found a list on Wikipedia that mostly mentioned Godzilla games (which I've never heard to be that great, as most movie tie-ins aren't), Power Ranger games (I can't even remember ever seeing one) and the Earth Defence Force series (which are silly schlock shooters with giant bugs, but hardly survival games). The only really good, well reviewed game that comes to mind with huge monsters the size of buildings is Shadow of Colossus, but that's a fairly old, very narrative driven action adventure game with wonky controls. And even then, I've never really thought of the colossi as kaijus. More importantly, a lot of games with kaijus either have you play as the monster (Godzilla) or fight them in big robots that are roughly the same size (Power Rangers, Pacific Rim etc.) The problem with that is that if the player plays as the big thing, it's difficult to truly convey scale as it can often feel like you're simply walking among toy buildings. To truly get the scale of a massive kaiju, you need to be on the ground level as a regular person looking up at the huge monster coming to crush you. It's why movies like Godzilla (2014) and Pacific Rim (2013) were able to truly sell the size of their monsters by contrasting them often against regular humans and showing them from the ground perspective. 

Godzilla as seen in Gareth Edward's Godzilla (2014).

And that's what I'd be interested to see in a game. I'd love to be able to get the terrifying and awe-inspiring experience of being an ordinary civilian as a huge monster the size of a tall apartment building comes to wreak havoc in a city. Not as a super-powered soldier that fights the monster, but as an ordinary person who's just trying to survive.

The thing is: I get why this hasn't really been done before. There are numerous potential issues with the idea even on a surface level. But I'd like to pitch my idea of how it could (probably) be done in a way that's not too expensive, not too technologically demanding and most importantly, actually interesting to play. Hear me out: 

Part 2: How it would work

Tech and graphics

First of all, probably the most obvious issue: the tech side of it, mainly the performance cost. I'm not going to go into the detail of the tech side (as I'm not an expert of any sort), but most of us probably already know that having things like a destructible environment is usually quite taxing on computers. These days we do have games with pretty impressive destruction such as Rainbow Six: Siege and the Battlefield series, but you usually need a fairly beefy gaming rig to run them at a stable and high framerate (at least at the time of release.) Now imagine, on top of that, having a monster nearly the size of a skyscraper walking around, toppling buildings and wreaking havoc. Also think about how absolutely massive the textures for a realistic looking monster of that size with modern graphics would have to be in order for it not to look like a blurry mess. And it's not like a developer can just pop all of those elements into a game and just hope the computer can run it. They have to a ton of work to optimize the game. Let's just say, that most likely even with today's graphics cards, having a photoreal city being destroyed dynamically in real time by a massive monster would probably be basically impossible to make run smoothly on almost any consumer-grade computer. 

The answer seems fairly simple: make the graphics more basic and stylistic instead of photoreal. Games like Minecraft and Valheim have proven that survival games especially don't have to have amazing graphics in order to succeed. This way the both the destructible environment and the big monster can use less computing power when they're on screen and hopefully help with the framerate. Probably also scale down the amount of big destructible buildings, so instead of a big city, have smaller towns with mostly basic houses and a few larger apartment buildings. Obviously the game would still need a ton of optimizing to run well, but these options would at least make it more viable instead of basically impossible. Will it be less sexy to a mainstream audience than the more technologically demanding option? Most likely. Will it result in a more accessible game that's still feasible to make with a smaller indie budget and team? Yes, and a smaller budget means that you don't have to sell millions of copies to make your money back. 

Story and gameplay

Now that we've covered the boring tech side of it, let's talk actual gameplay. What do you actually do? How is it fun or engaging? 

I'll paint you a picture. You start the game and find yourself aboard a helicopter. You are being evacuated from your small home island of around 10 000 inhabitants, after it has suffered a horrible kaiju attack. Suddenly, you see the monster emerge from the sea once more, and before the helicopter can get clear, the monster hits it and causes it to make an emergency landing. The impact causes you to lose consciousness. 

You wake up and see that you're now inside a basement, lying on a bare mattress. There's another person in the basement with you, but they're seriously wounded and slowly dying. They're the helicopter pilot who explains that you were the only survivors from the helicopter crash, and that they managed drag you to a nearby abandoned house. As the surrounding area seems quiet, the pilot guesses the monster is gone for a while and asks you to find them some first aid. And that's where the game officially starts. You can either follow the tutorial storyline by finding first aid for the dying pilot or just leave them to die and do your own thing. You'd be free to go anywhere on the island. Regardless, the objective for a while is fairly straightforward: stay alive and find a way to get off the island. 

The island should be handcrafted with some randomized elements, like the exact house you start at for example and item and enemy spawn locations as well. In my opinion, while completely procedurally generated maps can be cool as they can add a sense of mystery and increase replay value, in the end most people rarely actually play through a survival game twice, as the gameplay loop and the progression usually stays the same. Also, the sense of discovery in my opinion is usually lessened by randomization, as it means that the developers can't use the environment to tell interesting stories in the same way they can with a handcrafted world like in Subnautica. For me at least, it's way more motivating to explore a world if I can learn about it and find cool, unique locations instead of copy-pasted houses spawned in random locations. It's also easier to make a handcrafted world feel lived in, which I feel is a good way to flesh out the island's personality. 

Much like in most other survival games, the basic gameplay loop would focus around finding and gathering materials and resources around the world and then using them to build new tools and improve your home base. However, instead of building structures above ground, the base building would be focused on underground shelters. The reason being that having a base underground helps prevent it getting instantly destroyed the instant the kaiju comes and steps on it. At first you wouldn't really have the ability to actually excavate more rooms, so instead you would need to find new, better shelters that already exist around the island. These would vary from basic small house basements to larger bunkers and even a massive nuclear shelter. Some of them, especially the nuclear shelter, would already be lived by other survivors, some of which would be friendlier than others. 

It could be interesting if the you could either trade with the friendlier survivors or even help them by doing quests for them in order to build trust. When the survivors trust you enough, you could either get an invite to live in their shelter or get them to join you to live at your place. But if diplomacy fails, you could storm the shelter and raid it, either robbing the survivors of their valuables or simply killing them all to take over their bunker for yourself. (They can also try to do the same thing to you.) 

The other survivors could also fix another issue I usually have with survival games, the lack of a story. The thing I usually find myself thinking in a lot of survival games is simply: why? Why should I keep going? There often really isn't anything compelling me to progress, other than the promise of a bigger base and better gear. Some games like Subnautica do have a story, but it's mostly told through audio logs and radio messages, and it often gets bogged down by the grind of gathering resources. In Kaiju Bunker, you could actually interact with the other survivors and have them live together in your shelter. They could have actually written dialogue, personalities and stories that give you a reason to get to know them over time. They could help you do things like cooking food, gathering resources and building, which in turn works as a kind of natural progression curve, where you're not doing the same mundane things as much throughout the game as you're doing at the beginning. But you would also keep them happy by doing your part, so that the survivors in your shelter have enough food, water and medicine. The more people you have living in your shelter, the amount of resources needed would obviously go up. 

Alright, I feel like you're still not sold on this. This just sounds like a generic open world survival crafting game that already are dime a dozen. So, let's talk about the biggest thing that's unique to our game.

The monster

The island would be far from safe. There would be wild, dangerous animals and roaming bandits, but most importantly, the monster. The monster could also be a massive machine, but we will call it a monster for now. It would periodically rise from the sea and come on land to destroy. What exactly motives it to do that is not important right now, but it could be any number of things like simply feeding or maybe it's being simply trying to exterminate all human life for some unknowable reason. Whatever the reason may be, it is a dangerous, unstoppable force of nature that sweeps over the island from time to time. It would be massive and therefore could be seen from basically everywhere on the island, rising tall above any tree or building. More importantly, you could hear it coming from afar. 

Sound is one of the most crucial parts of creating a memorable monster. If you've ever seen a Godzilla movie, you can probably remember it's very distinctive roar. Also, although they are not technically monsters, I really like the sound design of the massive alien tripods from Spielberg's movie War of the Worlds (2005) with their low, droning calls. Video below for reference:

Point is, the monster in the game should have a easily recognizable sound that evokes a sense of fear in the player, almost like a warning. It should also be so loud, that you could hear it from far away and know that the monster is coming so you can find shelter. In addition, the monster should make heavy, thunderous sounds with each step it takes, with enough force to shake the ground around it. Basically if you can't sell the size of the monster with sound, it won't matter how big it looks. Which is why good design would be absolutely paramount for this game. 

The game should have destructible environments that the monster can interact with, like turning buildings into rubble and toppling trees as it moves. It wouldn't really focus on hunting you unless you do something to piss it off, as most of the time humans should be like ants to it. Instead it would slowly roam around the island, causing death and mayhem wherever it goes, and then after a while return to the sea to rest. It would truly be like a force of nature, as in there is really nothing you can do to stop it other than hope it goes away and leaves you alive. Obviously you could hide and run away from it, which is made easier by the constant sounds it would make when moving, clearly signaling its arrival before its close enough to kill you. But you could not kill it. Bullets and explosives simply bounce off from its thick skin, barely leaving a scratch. 

However, other video games tell us that having invincible enemies can be scary for a few hours, but after too much repetition they start to be less scary and mostly just annoying. This is usually the experience players often talk about with enemies like the Alien in Alien: Isolation or Mister X in the remake of Resident Evil 2 (2019). What we can take from those enemies is that the monster in Kaiju Bunker should be a rare enough occurrence that it is always a major event when it appears instead of a mundane annoyance. Also, the game's main story length should preferably be a lot shorter than a lot of other survival games, closer to 10-15 hours instead of the 30+ hours a lot of open world games are. 

Alien: Isolation (2014) was often criticized for being too long for a horror game, making it's main antagonist more of a pain in the ass rather than a terror towards the end. 

Endgame

As mentioned earlier, the main goal for the entire game would be to escape the island. That stays true for the entire game, but the goal would evolve slightly as you find out more about your situation. At first the most obvious answer would seem like finding a boat to sail away on, but soon you discover that even if you were to find a boat that's still functioning, you wouldn't be able to get far before the monster would sink you. Also, as you find other survivors and possibly befriend them, you realize it's not necessarily enough for you to get away alone. 

To be completely honest, I don't have a clear answer to what the ending of the game should be like, but it could maybe be something like this: You manage to radio contact the army and ask for an evacuation. You're told that as long as the monster is alive, any rescue attempt would be dangerous. You would need a distraction to keep the monster busy while the evac plane is getting people onboard. Maybe you would need to build a rig of really huge speakers to either blast loud music or an annoying sound on a certain frequency to draw the monster's attention in order to buy enough time for the plane to land, get everyone on it and take off safely. The game could even have alternative endings based on whether you've played as a selfish lone wolf or befriended other survivors. If you're alone, you simply get on the plane by yourself and leave everyone else to their doom. Except that the distraction wouldn't be enough and the monster would manage to destroy the plane (and you with it). But if you've helped others and  give them seats on the plane, there will be a mechanical issue, forcing you to sacrifice yourself to buy more time for the others to leave. I can already imagine a scene where you drive a car at full speed while the monster is chasing you, until it ultimately manages to kill you, but the other survivors manage to flee. 

I think, in the end, the game could probably be a sort of allegory for surviving disasters and about coming together to help others during a time of crisis. Or just maybe, it's only a silly game about a big monster. 

Conclusion

Phew, I did not think this would be such a long text. I honestly thought I would just write something quickly and get this text out in an evening or two, but it ended up taking almost the entire week. 

Anyway, if by some odd chance you actually read all the way through, I owe you a huge thank you! Hope you found something interesting or entertaining about this. I'm thinking I'll try to write one of these bigger dream game ideas each month, with maybe some shorter gaming stuff from time to time to fill the gaps. Those might be either quick reviews or thoughts on recent gaming news etc. Whatever I feel like writing at the moment. 

Now, I have a LAN party to prepare for (yes, really), so until next time! Cheers! 

Welcome to Gaming Daydreams!

Hello, and welcome to my new blog! My name is Johannes, and these are my Gaming Daydreams. 

And what exactly does that mean? Simply put, this blog is dedicated to ruminating about potential video game concepts that I personally would find interesting to play or make, but do not (to my knowledge) actually exist yet. These can be anything from detailed descriptions of a game concept with a full story outline and individual mechanics thought out in depth, or just very surface level ideas of something that has popped into my head recently. 

To be absolutely clear, I AM NOT A VIDEO GAME DEVELOPER. I have never actually made anything resembling a proper video game other than a few short "choose your own adventure" text-based games, and most of them were never finished. Over the years I have also played around with some level-editors and other similar tools in games to make my own missions or stages. For example, I once made a fairly basic Survival map for Left 4 Dead 2 while learning to use the Source Hammer editor with a friend, and I have spent probably way over a 100 hours in the military sim Arma 3's Editor making my own little combat scenarios for myself and my buddies. 

However, I do not have the skills or the knowledge to actually make any of the games I write about on this blog. I do not know how to write code, create or rig character models or make graphics. In addition to the previously mentioned experience, my actual knowledge of game development is mostly based on reading game journalist Jason Schreier's books Blood, Sweat and Pixels and Press Reset (highly recommended reads, both), game development documentaries and podcasts like video game writer Alanah Pearce's Play, Watch, Listen, featuring game director Mike Bithell, composer Austin Wintory and voice actor Troy Baker. I have also watched probably hundreds of YouTube videos about how games are made over the years and several recorded GDC talks (GDC as in Game Developer Conference). But no matter my interest in the matter, I am still not actually a game developer.

Instead, in reality I'm an aspiring Finnish screenwriter and editor, currently working as an editing intern at a television production company. More importantly for this blog, I'm also an avid video game enthusiast (my jokingly preferred term over the word "gamer"), as I have played video games since I was probably around 6 years old.  I've played countless different games and genres over the years, from RPGs, RTS games, "walking simulators" to racing games and military simulators. I get bored fairly quickly and move from game to game at a fairly rapid pace, which in turn means I also have a lot of experience with different kinds of games instead of putting a thousand hours into a single one like League of Legends or Counter-Strike. (Which, I must stress, is not in any way a bad thing to do either.)  In the past, in addition to consuming a lot of game reviews and critiques, I've also dabbled in writing my own video game reviews and making game related YouTube videos, but in the end I preferred simply playing games for my own enjoyment over making them my "job." 

Why then make this blog? Well, ever since I was a little kid, I've had the habit of sometimes daydreaming about interesting video game concepts I hoped would one day be a reality. Especially back in the day, most of them were simply way too ambitious to be feasible with the technology available at the time, but that didn't stop me from thinking about them. As a fairly lonely kid, I used to do long walks outside by myself, simply thinking about cool video game ideas. Might sound pretty sad to some people, but I prefer to think I was exercising my imagination and creativity, which is much preferable to simply spending all my free time with a smartphone in hand like a lot of people do these days. (Damn, I'm starting to sound old.) Plus, I was outside, getting fresh air. 

Although that habit has sort of died down quite a bit as I've gotten older, made more friends and simply spent more of my free time doing other stuff, it's still not completely gone. To this day I sometimes think about these things, and as I now have a lot more actual understanding about games, what goes into making them, what's possible and what makes them good or engaging, my concepts have become more realistic and actually viable, at least to some extent. 

So... Instead of just bottling up all those ideas inside my head, forgetting them over time or keeping them private in some chaotic notes, I thought I might actually really write some of them down and put them out for the world to read. After all, as much as I would be interested in one day working on a game as a writer, I have no intention of changing my whole career path into suddenly becoming a game designer, meaning I will probably never actually work on any of these ideas for real. They've always simply been a fun time sink for me, and if by a slim chance an actual game dev someday finds these ideas and likes some of them, at least I've inspired someone else. Possibly some may try to "steal" these concepts and claim them as their own, but it's not really a loss for me as I wasn't planning on acting on them. Obviously any kind of credit or shoutout would be absolutely fantastic, but that's only if anyone ever actually even wants to use any of these ideas. In the end, all I want is to someday be able to play these games. 

Also, as literally hundreds of new games are released every week these days, there's no way of me knowing each and every one that exists. So, if ever there's a concept I write about that's awfully similar to something that already has been made, I probably didn't know about it, in which case I would love to be informed that such a game is already real! (There have also been times when I've noticed a new game release that has similar concepts to something I've thought about years prior.) 

I already have my first game concept ready to write about, so I'll probably put that out very soon after this post is published. Expect to see it in the next few days, maybe even tomorrow! The one hint I can tell you, is that it's going to be huge, even monstrous! 

(...And no, it's not a sex thing. You pervert.) 

Edit 23.05.22: Corrected Jason Schreier's book's name to Press Reset instead of Press Restart.