My Video Game Pitch: GRAVEYARD SHIFT

[captain_slinky]

45-second pitch: In this game, you play a convenience store clerk who is working the dreaded 11pm to 7am "Graveyard Shift" during a minor Zombie outbreak, and you have to be able to tell the difference between the Zombies and plain old drunk people who keep wandering in to the store. Your boss insists that you keep the store open or lose your job. You can kill as many zombies as you like in creative and hilarious ways with stuff you find around the store as long as you keep the place clean and open for business! Can you make it through a full 8-hour shift without getting bitten by a zombie or murdering an innocent drunk?

Expanding on the idea: The game would play out in real-time, taking a full continuous 8 hours of game play to complete (plus the unskippable pre-game cinematic and the post-game credits). Your only companion through the night (other than the drunks and zombies shuffling in to buy stuff and/or eat your brains) is your radio, which will have a half-dozen recorded "Channels" that will provide music and randomized news updates about the zombie outbreak that will increase or decrease the amount of zombie activity for the coming hour - each hourly "Newscast" will have three different versions recorded that could play interchangeably. There will be several different endings to the game, depending on the performance of the gamer AND the severity of the zombie outbreak - the most common ending would be that you go to jail for murdering a drunk (it'll be pretty darned hard to tell the difference between drunks and zombies), but other endings could be "Getting a raise for having handled things so well" or "Super Cool Army Of Darkness-like Ending Where You Keep Killing Zombies Like A Boss During A Zombie Apocalypse".

A big part of the game would be having to clean up your kills. Lots of mopping, lots of stacking bodies in the walk-in cooler...

Comments

[valerie-valerah.livejournal.com]

Haha, that is an awesome idea. I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody has come up with that yet. Can the player customize the avatar? Like choose skin, hair, and eye color, gender, uniform, etc?

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

Nope - I want the hero of this game to become a Video Game Icon so people can dress up like him for conventions; more of a Mario or Duke Nukem. The only customization will come from the blood splatters on your uniform, which are random, and the weapons you make/carry. You'll have a gun under the counter, sure, but that only has six bullets - you do a kind of Minecraft Puzzle thing trying to come up with useful ways to kill the zombies, like taking the head off a zombie and putting it on a stick in order to scare away drunks :)