My partner and I are researchers in HCI and Biomedical Engineering which involves analysing brain signals for fields like epilepsy and lucid dreaming.
At the same time, we've been developing LunaGenesis, a first person psychological horror game set in a town of rats beset by plague, where you enter the dreams of the dying to uncover what its theocratic rulers are hiding.
If you've ever had a lucid dream, you'll know it's when you know you're dreaming, while you're dreaming. This can allow you to better control what happens in the dream, though sometimes the realisation causes you to wake up. So we thought lucidity could make for an interesting resource system, where more lucidity gives you more power, but can also cause you to wake up if you overfill.
We also implemented 'reality checks', which lucid dreamers actually use to check if they are awake or asleep, often using a physical or physics-based check, like the classic pinching yourself to see if you feel pain or trying to manipulate an object and seeing if it responds with realistic physics. In our game, reality checks allow you to re-fill your lucidity resource.
The choice to depict rats is also influenced by our experience with rat experimentation for epilepsy research, which we have come to criticise, and even adopted two pet rats of our own. Photos of our rats were even used to texture our characters!
Our game has strong themes of disease, mortality, experimentation and horror. We invite players to hold a mirror up to their own lives and hopefully identify overlaps in our depiction of restricted access to information and technology, and how it can have direct impacts on society and health.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on dreams and the mechanics they offer for a horror game :)
