New Rule

My entry for this weeks Game Design Challenge, conceived by James Portnow and hosted on the Game Career Guide. View the full description of this week’s challenge - “Design a WWII shooter.”

WWII Game – Croix de Lorraine

Selling points:
Bold new perspective on the conflict
Rich urban environments
Unique guerilla missions and level design
Strong female protagonist!

The game takes place in occupied Paris beginning in the early months of 1940 and continuing through the rise and fall of the Vichy Regime and the Nazi occupation of central France. Players take the roll of a young French woman, mother of a small child whose husband is killed during the opening moments of the game. Forced to flee for her life, our heroine is harbored by and eventually inducted into La Résistance. Divided into three “Acts,” the story and level progression follows thus:

Act 1: Paris Brûle (Paris is Burning)
Our heroine witnesses the horrible death of her husband and many of her neighbors at the hands of the invading Nazi armies. As the shells fall and the city shatters around her, she must flee through the ruined streets, scavenging supplies and weapons from fallen foes and friends alike. To add to her desperation, her young daughter, Cloë, travels with her. Teetering between numb shock and violent hysteria, Cloë must be constantly protected and tended to. [Level Design — Opportunities abound for HL2 or Thief-like sneak missions that require the player to traverse an area with Cloë at their side, trying to keep her calm and quiet and avoid attracting attention. Think missions with extremely scarce weapons – a pistol with three rounds, for example – that require environmental ingenuity to complete.] Act 1 concludes when our heroine and her daughter are found and smuggled into the underground by French freedom fighters.

Act 2: Défense de la France
Cloë is safe and our heroine burns with the desire for vengeance. Taking up arms with La Résistance, she trains in guerilla tactics [Design: think character customization, fitting out our heroine with skills in different categories: knife fighting, riflery, explosives, safecracking, codes and radio espionage, escape artist, etc.] and joins gangs of freedom fighters in daring raids and hit-and-run battles with Nazi forces throughout the city [Level Design — Endless great options for rich levels depicting ruined Paris, and a wide variety of challenges and opponents: small bands of infantry, armored columns , VIP guard details, Nazi warehouses, etc. Opportunities for villain characters – brutal Nazi taskmasters who hunt down resistance fighters, kidnap them, or hold them hostage. Think arch-nemeses for our heroine and missions based on thwarting them.]

Act 3: La Libération
The Normandie invasion has succeeded and Allied forces are pushing inland. The Vichy regime is crumbling and the city is in chaos. The Paris Résistance joins the effort with other bands in the newly formed French Forces of the Interior (FFI) and the final stage begins. Now our heroine finds herself a soldier in pitched battles, part of an elite squad created to undertake the most difficult and critical missions: stealing codebooks, sabotaging Nazi convoys and airfields, pathfinding for Allied advances, breaking Allied prisoners out of Nazi camps and escorting them to safety, etc. [Level Design – again, plenty of rich environments around the French countryside, small towns, prison camps, and of course, Paris. Scale of the game grows from the more intimate, four-man team missions to larger battles with hundreds of combatants.] Act 3 and the game conclude with the Allied liberation of Paris.

Tags: Game Design, The Industry //