Game Concept
The Mansion.
In The Mansion you play as Daniil Moore, a down on their luck worker who catches a lucky break the day a letter arrives in the mail letting him know a distant relative has left his forest mansion to Daniil after his passing. When Daniil arrives, they discover that the mansion has mysterious magical properties allowing Daniil to flip their personal gravity at will. Explore the mansion, solve its puzzle, uncover its mysteries, and find out what’s making that scratching sound on the roof.
The Mansion is a Sokoban style puzzle game with light mystery and horror elements layered into its story, throughout the game the player will be tasked with using the game’s simple movement and gravity reversal to connect mystical blocks with conduits strewn throughout the eponymous Mansion. My primary inspirations when creating The Mansion are Sokoban and more specifically Microban by David W. Skinner which takes a minimalist look at the Sokoban puzzle style of game and inspired me to iterate upon by adding mechanics that would change the way the player can interact and move within that system. I have also taken significant inspiration from Increpare’s Stephen’s Sausage Roll, a puzzle game which increases its complexity by adding new mechanics in how the player can move and interact with the puzzle objects, this escalation of mechanics will be present in The Mansion with additional mechanics such as boxes that exist in the same position on the ceiling and floor of a room, and load-bearing columns which when pushed shift the entire ceiling or floor of a room. The story of The Mansion is heavily inspired by the game ANATOMY by Kittyhorrorshow and more loosely by the book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski both horror stories about mysterious and malevolent presences living inside otherwise normal houses, a theme explored by the mansion with the seemingly ritualistic nature of its puzzles and subtle ambience suggesting that perhaps the player is not alone, hence The Mansion’s light nod to the horror genre within the premise of its story.
The audience for The Mansion lies mainly within the hardcore puzzle games crowd, people who are aware of Sokoban and it’s various iterations, while this crowd is the primary group the game will be built for I will put in tutorial levels to explain through simple iterations of the game’s concepts designed to convey the mechanics by boiling them down, requiring minimal inputs to achieve a solution so that anyone who picks up the game can come to an understanding of its mechanics. The Mansion’s immediate inspirations, Sokoban and Stephen’s Sausage Roll are a foundational game system within the puzzle genre, and cult classic within the genre respectively, with these inspirations in mind, The Mansion will be an original take borrowing ideas such as being able to move the environment itself using puzzle elements using Sokoban as a foundation. I chose the Mystery and Horror genre for the game’s atmosphere and story because I find both of them highly conducive to a puzzle environment, both the story and gameplay accessing the player’s critical thinking skills and intrigue, with this in mind I believe an appropriately spooky mystery story with a satisfying ending alongside the game will increase the quality of the game and level of interest directed towards it by players. Given the simple nature of the Sokoban movement system, it should be entirely possible to make the game completely playable with one hand, using WASD for movement, Q & E for undos/restarts and the Space Bar for the game’s gravity inverting mechanic. The ability for the game to be played with one hand will means that the game is at once more accessible to people with certain disabilities, and more portable to different control schemes and systems which will give the game a more inclusive and wide-range appeal.
The Mansion will open on the Player Character, Daniil, reading a letter from a law firm informing them that a distant relative has left The Mansion to them after their death, afterwards Daniil will set foot in the mansion and discover that within the building they have the power to reverse their personal gravity. Daniil will explore by unlocking rooms requiring mystical, ritualistic top-down puzzles, placing mystical using the unique mystical powers seemingly inherent to the place. Over the course of the game the mansion will appear more and more sinister, strange noises seeming to come from the roof, and voices imbued with static appearing within Daniil’s mind. Can Daniil find the truth behind The Mansion’s mystical powers? Who is Daniil’s distant relative? What purpose do the rituals contained within the various puzzles of the mansion serve? And can you escape?
The central mechanic that exists beyond the game’s primary mechanical influences is the player character’s ability to flip their personal gravity at will, how this manifests is that each level consists of 2 different screens, a floor and ceiling. At any time the player may use the Space Bar to switch between the floor and ceiling appearing on the other screen in the same relative position that they were previously on as long as there isn’t an object where the player is trying to reverse gravity, in which case it won’t work. What this means is that the player can, for example, get in between multiple pushable objects on the floor by travelling to the ceiling then traveling back in the position between the two objects. This mechanic allows for a great deal of mechanical complexity to be allowed into to formula, creating levels that appear more minimalist than even the inspirations of this game while being slightly more complex when taking into account the structure of the floor and ceiling combined.
Here you can see three pieces of concept art, placed here in order of when during the designing of this idea they were done, starting with a rough sketch of a forest path leading to the titular mansion over which appears a set of malevolent eyes, this sketch was done a while back when The Mansion existed as more a vague thematic idea than a set in stone vision of what the game would become.
The second piece of concept art details a simple set of tiles which make up the various tiles (excluding walls) that make up the mechanical elements of the game in early conceptualisation. From left to right the tiles depicted are as follows, Blank floor tile: The tile on which the player is allowed to move, these tiles are occupiable by the player character and any given pushable tile (block, column, load-bearing column). Sigil Floor Tile: To progress to the next level a player will have to place a sigil pushable block on each of the Sigil floor tiles throughout a level. Block: a pushable object that makes up most of the complexity found within the early levels of The Mansion, blocks can be pushed as long as there is no object on the other side of the block, blocks can either be plain blocks which act as obstacles which must be manipulated, or sigil blocks which must be placed upon sigil tiles to progress. Columns: columns are blocks which exist on both the floor and ceiling of a given level, they can be pushed from either level and can contain sigils.
An object not featured within the simple diagram of top-down tiles if the load-bearing column, something for which I would like to get input from others on how best to convey visually what it represents, the load-bearing column is a column that frags an entire level along with it, a load bearing column can be pushed from either the floor or ceiling, but not both, when pushed the entirety of the other level will be dragged along with it, the load-bearing column will exist solely within the latter half of The Mansion, an advanced mechanic that lends the greatest degree of mechanical complexity to the game.
The final concept art covers more of the general colour pallet and depicts a simplistic rendition of one of The Mansion’s levels as a 3D environment, this concept art is here to convey the colours around which the game will be centred, as well as a reference image to refer to when creating the sprites for the game which will (hopefully) be done in pixel art.
References.
Stephen’s Sausage Roll developed by Increpare Games: https://store.steampowered.com/app/353540/Stephens_Sausage_Roll/
Microban by David W. Skinner (Sokoban): https://www.sokobanonline.com/play/web-archive/david-w-skinner/microban/page-6
ANATOMY by KittyHorrorShow: https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/anatomy
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski: https://www.amazon.com/House-Leaves-Mark-Z-Danielewski/dp/0375703764