The other day I came up with an idea for a game, in which you travel to the past and ensure events stay the same or change depending on what the player wants. I imagined the game as a free-roaming action adventure and elements of puzzle games in it.
The backstory for my game is that, the main character lives in a future dystopia. One day he crosses paths with a man who has invented a machine in which the user can travel to the past. The man, soon dies in the company of the main character and in his dying moments the man gives the main character the machine. The main character tries the machine and goes back about 10 years in time (this is where the tutorial at the start of the game would be). In that time they learn to use the machine. When they arrive back in their present, they run into a number of people who hear of the characters possession of the time travelling machine, some of the people they meet offer them money in return for changing the past in their favour and some plea with the character to use the machine to improve the world they live in. The character then starts on their journey.
I would like the main character to be able to be customised to the player's will in terms of voice pitch, physique and clothing, in order to create unique characters. However so that the game could have better cutscenes in which the player can be talked to and I would make the player have a nickname that everyone calls them. For the nickname I am thinking 'paradox' at this point.
A character I would like to add into the game would be a comic relief character that travels in companionship with the main character, I like the idea of the character being an animal that through technology has developed a human-like personality and can talk. The animal would be either a monkey, a bird or a snake.
Other characters I am thinking of are a crime boss who offers the main character money in return for the character changing the past in their favour; a blind monk who begs the main character to use the machine to help humanity; a corrupt policital power partly responsible for the world being a dystopia; and a scientist who unknowingly develops a chemical weapon capable of killing entire cities of people.
For the environment I am thinking of the main character's present as a city that is falling apart; and for the other points in time, I want them to be very similar to major cities in different periods of time.
