Select a common man or woman in a normal job in a fairly average world, think of how you could build a game based on the character’s everyday life when it suddenly takes a dramatic turn.

Description

Kev is a 47 year old surf instructor who lives on the coast and has surfed his entire life. In his spare time he makes and sells surfboards to top up his earnings.

Turning moment

It is the year 2047 and the seas have become polluted. Deep-sea landfills created 30 years ago have ruptured and waste is being washed to shore day after day. Kev can no longer run his surf business or enjoy his favourite past-time. In addition the world’s coastlines are being destroyed.

Professor Si who works at the British Sea Research Centre has developed a revolutionary technology that vapourises plastic and oils using certain vibrational frequencies found in Vaporwave music. He has created a voice-controlled app called “V A P O R W A V E” that can harness this technology using the vibration module found in a mobile phone. He approaches Kev to build a custom surfboard which can mount the mobile phone and use it to clean the world’s beaches.

Game Design

Washing away sea pollution with your special surfboard, ‘California Games / Splatoon / Slider / Super Troll Island’ style. The phone mounts to the surfboard and the voice-controlled app uses vibrations from Vaporwave songs to send out sonic waves that vapourise the pollution. It also has the ability to create waves so the surfer can go anywhere on water, allowing him to go from beach to beach cleaning the pollution.

Kev surfs varying waves ‘painting’ clean water in his trail, traversing obstacles on his ride. Bigger obstacles will need extra force so Kev must delay around these to give them extra time, all the while avoiding being wiped out into the toxic water. Kev can also rescue trapped wildlife who will then join him on his surfboard and provide special abilities.

Kev will surf in rhythm with the Vaporwave soundtrack, increasing in complexity as the difficulty increase ‘Lumines’ style. As each ride gets longer and longer, his vapor power will increase and allow him to clean up a wider area, with a single clean run being enough to clear a whole bay, multiple clean runs will clear a small sea etc.