Fuck having HP. This idea is better.

Instead of having health, the more damage you take the more insane you get.

The more insane you get, the more disfigured people and the environment get.

Like if you take a good hit, you'd see more strange looking/disfigured people. At this point you could heal-up by finding a dark place away from every to calm down.

If you take a good amount of damage, the edges of the screen start to get squirmy and darken.

In this state, people's faces will randomly look disfigured for a moment then jump back. This won't be on everyone, just passers by.

If you take a shit ton of damage almost everyone will be fucked up.

And the fucked-upness will be based on who a person is, like their stereotypes, job, etc.

Like black people would have huge lips and tiny heads and jews would have huge noses and pointy fingers, but all of this has to be scary looking.

This would be on top of other random and common disfigurements and monstrous things. We'll get in to all of that after we get some art going.

People's behavior would also become more stereotypical.

When you're in this state, you'll be incited in to attacking people.

The only way to get back to normal here is to kill as many people as possible in the most painful way.

Yeah, it'd be like Spider-Man 3 when you spend too much time in the black suit, and people would look at you kinda like in the beginning of Assassin's Creed. The controls should start freaking out after a certain amount,or something equally irritating, just to give people incentive not to leave it like that.

My idea is to make it so getting hurt drives you more insane, from an outside view, triggering a psychotic episode.

And it's really fucking creepy?

Very. We got a concept artist working on the first monster guy, the head-mouth thing.

It's going great.

After a certain point, things should stop getting fucked up, and start getting darker. You'll eventually black out and start back at the last auto save (Which I assume it will do after entering or leaving an area). There should probably be safe zones to do this... but you'd have to clear them out first. Like you could enter one, but your enemies will follow you from room to room, so you'd have to take them out from the safe room to keep it safe.

On another note, I love where this project is going.

That sounds like quite a concept. But, I feel that the character should be physically hampered from injury. The "crippled" area should determine the effect. For instance, having a damaged leg would make you limp, damaged arm should diminish damage dealt with melee weapons and accuracy with ranged, and I'm sure you can imagine the rest. Also, I was thinking that blood loss should be a factor, and that if you lose enough, you become very weak and eventually die. This can be slowed or halted by first aid. The setting might allow for clinics where the poor starving people give there blood for money. You could go to one of these places and get a tranfusion if necessary.

the physical impairment should be along with the sanity issue, not instead of. Just wanted to clarify.