I have an idea for a game: It's the usual "a princess is kidnapped by a dragon and a brave knight is on a quest to rescue her" story. But you (the player) plays as the princess, who is somehow helping the knight on his quest.

The issue is that since the player is playing as a trapped character, I want to make the player feel trapped, but I don't know how to do that.

My original idea is that the princess telepathically communicates with the knight and tells him what to do. But this doesn't work, the gameplay is identical to the player playing as the knight. How can I make the gameplay feel like the player is playing as the princess (and thus feel trapped) instead of the knight?

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[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

You have to do some work for the tower's master and/or you need to gather informations for the knight. That could be stuff like cleaning their orbs so they can ponder them later, preparing/finding magical critters to be used in their potions, putting away his stupid sentient magical artifacts that keep trying to escape or do some shenanigans... Whatever. And try to gather information/find escape routes etc. But imo if there is some knight gameplay, it should be a minor part of the experience, otherwise you will indeed feel like you're just playing the knight.

Edit: I think you could still have a fair share of knight gameplay if you make the princess gameplay some sort of walking sim where you wander around the tower, possibly under time constraints, and when it's over, your have a knight section. You can figure out tons of way to make these gameplay segments interact too. For example there could be roadblocks to the knights progression that require the princess to do/find something. That could be mixed with Libra's idea of having the princess cast spells and do other stuff during the knight's segments, by having the player find the spells/artifacts required during the princess segments