Design Challenges

Abstraction

Problems

• The spiritual realm is abstract
• 3D, and especially real-time first person 3D, is very concrete
• First person 3D is not well suited for directly depicting spiritual state

Solutions

• The Bible is full of concrete symbolism
  • What if spiritual state was depicted through symbolic game actors?
• Or maybe just keep it abstract and hidden, as a meta-game that the player only sees indirectly?

Spiritual Game Scenarios

Survival

• An idea I had a few years ago was that survival can be a powerful framework for moral choices and spiritual implications
• At the time I was toying with the extreme notion of a scenario of an entropic world where sooner or later all of the denizens will run out of resources and die
  • What would the player do then?
• While interesting and engaging on some level, it didn't sound fun
• Maybe that would still be a possibility, and maybe I could salvage some aspect of that
• Mortality is sobering, and this world could use a little sobering
• Survival can be both individual and communal

Individual Protection

• The original spiritual game idea of mine back in the 90s, where the player would need to protect and guide a character through a treacherous environment
• Resident Evil 4 later implemented this idea, though only partially—have the irony of my vision was that the player could die but as long as the ward reached the end of the level, they would both spawn alive at the start of the next level
  • In other words, my version had a more profound depiction of sacrifice and spiritual causality