In making this game, before I did anything I found the oblique strategies card ghost echoes and was reminded of an old story idea I had about a ghost, so I pursued that idea utilizing other strategies and inspiration. My game is a kind of fetch quest in an attempt to aid a dead boy that you as the player character do not know, but get to know while helping him.
To get my bearings, I used Otter.ai to transcribe myself talking out the ideas I had for the project, and from that I knew I needed some basic details like what objects to find, what the setting is like, and also what the personality of the player character was. To get a personality, I blindly crowdsourced from my friends different personality traits by asking them to pick a color out of ones that I had tied to possible options. For some more inspiration, I used Botnik with the ‘Seinfeld: Jerry’s lines’ to generate some text that influenced certain objects you can find around the setting. I also used Botnik to generate text that I used as lines in an in-game book.
I input some text from ghost stories into charNG to generate more sort of flavor text and dialogue throughout the game. And in a similar line, put quotes from the 1995 ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’ movie and from the anime ‘Noragami’ into N+7, and the output was used similarly. Finally, I used the anagram generator to find names for the two characters.
The other four oblique strategies that I used were:
What would your closest friend do? Which I used by including an early 2000’s rock song in the game.
Cut a vital connection. Which I used by never mentioning the ghost’s mother.
What mistakes did you make last time? Which had me thinking of the midterm and how I got a bit ambitious in the planning and ran out of time and space to include everything so I tried to keep this smaller.
And finally, Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do.Which I used by allowing myself to keep most of the game choices singular threads.