Hi, your hostess VioletValkyrie here. I just want to thank you all so much for being a part of my first solo Forum Game project. I've absolutely adored PokéBeach Big Brother ever since I started playing in the second game, and ever since I started playing the third it's been a big dream of mine to host a game of my own. It's been an absolute wild ride and this game had an incredibly long production time, it took me eight months to plan everything necessary to start it, and even then I had to change so many ideas and create so many new ones, some of them even happened while you were playing the game!
I'm here in this final post out of character to give you guys some explanation on things as well as just give my general thoughts and once again, really show my appreciation for your engagement and support in this game. Waiting eight entire months to make something people enjoy to this degree has been incredible.
> General Concept
The setting of a haunted house you can't leave isn't that original, sure. This setting meant a lot to me after a few friends and I from years ago came up with a running joke that we were trapped in a house just like this and had to catch a killer. If I wanted to make a horror-based game, this was my best shot at making a comfortable setting, where I could just easily add rooms for whatever I wanted to make in the house. I've heard from some people that they imagined the house as similar to Luigi's Mansion, and I honestly wouldn't disagree with that, as funny as it sounds.
After playing BB3, I had thought that the game had balanced itself by just making every possible advantage very strong. Sort of a "If everyone is overpowered, no one is overpowered" concept which I never agreed with. When making something horror based, the most important idea is that people are afraid of the unknown, and playing a game like Big Brother, there are times where you're unsure of what will happen next in the game, and this gets frightening as a player.
My general theme for this game was
a false sense of confidence. As the hostess I wanted people to question everything that would happen and wonder if it was ever truly safe. My favourite moment of this is at the beginning of Week 4, where Lorde says she's actually angry because of thinking that someone died just due to something outside of the competitions, and I honestly had a good laugh at that because it's exactly what I wanted. At the very beginning of the game, I had told the players that the Hall of Knives was a complete red herring. The point was never to win the competition, but it was something that immediately scared everyone in the game into thinking they could do nothing to win, and that it was all based on random chance.
I drew a lot of general inspiration. Some of the more apparent ones are Castlevania (due to the reliance of weapons, a life-form that clearly isn't human as the ruler of the game's setting) and Doki Doki Literature Club (the area of the finale being an enclosed space with a void outside, and the theme of a false sense of confidence in a horror game) but I had also pulled ideas past DDLC. That game is somewhat linked to a horror story about a woman murdering someone just to feel what it's like and specifically using an axe, however she used the blunt end of it in a smart way. This is why the Hostess is depicted with an axe, and why the blunt end of the axe is mentioned several times throughout the game. That horror story is one of my favourites, and easily created the original concept for the Hostess.
> The Hostess and the game's Story
I viewed this project not only as a forum game, but as an actual horror story with writing, so I went very deep with flavour and created things like the house, the Hostess and several aspects to make this not only a fun game, but an enjoyable thing to read through. That's why the threadmarks for the weeks have been renamed to chapters, and the game has an epilogue.
First of all, reading that epilogue you may be a bit confused on what the Hostess is referring to at a couple points. This was mostly addressed at the end of Week 8 but I want to clear this up. The Hostess is a previous player of the game (who isn't based on myself or another actual player, rather just one who was made up to give this character to) and had been backdoored by another player who she trusted. Backstabbed and left to die, she began to resent this other player and made it her goal to find him and take his life once she realized she was stuck in the house. After a while and learning about the house itself, she had assumed the role of Hostess in order to achieve this goal, attempting to pull people in, which ended up drawing in the actual players of this game, you guys. Through the entire game, she watches the house and hopes one of the players is the person she's looking for so she can fulfill her revenge and avenge her death. However, unbeknownst to her, the other player isn't found in the house, and she ends up feeding her resentment into constant murders. By Week 8 she snaps and resorts to all she can to accomplish this goal of hers. This is the point where's basically shown to go insane, and some ridiculous game mechanics start coming in. I felt this would be a fun way to make the later rounds of the game more engaging for older players. Dainslef, Gungner, and the Silver Gun and Bullet are specific advantages that can only be used after the red moon rises, making players have to change their plans and adapt to things they never saw coming.
> Twists and Advantages
BB3 was very interesting to me in the fact that in contained Advantages, something I believe should become a staple in the series, changing up gameplay and offering interesting abilities to the players who collect them. I fell in love with the idea of tying the advantages to a certain theme, which at that point were the Seven Deadly Sins. I considered re-using the idea but quickly dropped it due to seeming unoriginal. I wanted to create something completely new.
I then thought to find things that were more unique and couldn't be guessed easily. The theme for BB3's advantages were guessed very quickly, and I wanted to still surprise players by preventing them from guessing what was coming. My theme for advantages was weapons, many people were quickly aware of this, but something no one was aware of was that these weapons are all based on different weapon types from Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. The knife, axe, polearm, mace, and sword all have different play styles and change combat differently in the game, so I thought it would be a neat idea to implement that. The Red Moon advantages were all based off specific or high-leveled items of some of those weapon types. Dainslef is a powerful greatsword that can curse foes, Gungner is a powerful polearm that can attack with lightning and the Silver Gun is the best handgun in the game.
For those of you who never got them, or never used them, here is a list of the normal advantages with a small description of what they would do.
Trusty Pocket Knife - Raise your score in the current competition at the risk of having 2 more votes against you in the next death ceremony.
Axe of Judgment - Break ties yourself, instead of the Grand Reaper for that week.
Naginata of Suspension - Okay, you all saw what this did. Gain a free week off, but die if you tell someone before the week ends.
Mace of Misfortune - Ignore every vote during that week's ceremony and one of the two tagged houseguests are killed at random. Lose your vote weight for the game.
Estoc of Faith - Use it on another player to swap scores with them during a competition. They'll be told it's just an advantage that boosts their score.
This is a big one that I'm sure people are wondering about: What about the statues?
...I wasn't lying when I said if you guessed correctly, you would instantly win the game. I created the statues as a way to distract people from playing the game itself and getting too greedy, and thinking they could simply win by guessing something rather than winning the game properly. One person had told me they refrained from guessing the theme of the statues because they were afraid the statues would kill them. This is something I never thought of and honestly, the whole thing backfired. Now that the game is over, I'll tell you the correct answer.
UMA.
The three statues depict the Yeti, Flying Humanoid, and Mothman enemies from Dawn of Sorrow and act as the final advantage to follow the theme. These three are secret enemies you wouldn't normally encounter, but the game teaches you about their locations and how to defeat them through the in-game magazine UMA News.
I intentionally created the statues absolutely sure that no one would ever guess correctly, and I was right.
As a small touch, before they were re-worked and changed, Dainslef had originally planned to be the Portrait of Markov, as a reference to Doki Doki Literature Club, as well as the Mace of Misfortune being A small wooden box with a heart on it, as a reference to the horror story linked to the game.
Some of you may be wondering about other features the game had. The graveyard was planned as not only a method to earn an advantage (The Trusty Pocket Knife) but I had hoped a player would continue making confessions and feed into a late-game trap. Somewhere during the last three weeks, I had planned for an End of Week event to reveal every single graveyard confession publicly to the entire game. This never happened due to the overall lack of confessions made.
Crying for help during End of Week was a very valid strategy that most of you ignored! It ensured that you were never at risk of any negative effects during the week to come, and eventually, Gungner was given to the last player standing who had cried every single week. This eventually went to mirdo, who cried at the end of every week until his elimination.
> Closing Thoughts
I think this shows just how massive this game was and how much work and effort was put into putting it all together for you guys. I'm actually incredibly happy we were able to fill sixteen entire spots for sign-ups as that's a big number compared to the first two games of BB on the site. I really enjoy playing this game and I hope I could help continue to spread the appreciation and fun I've had with it for quite a while. I hope this post just shows the amount of fun I've had creating this game because putting eight months of thought into this game... Wow. You come up with a lot of stuff.
So that's about all from me, where do we go from here? What's next for PokéBeach Big Brother?
Well, the funny thing is I've already had someone ask me if I'm planning a BB5. The answer would be no, but there are some plans hanging around, and honestly I'm just excited to be a player again. I'm sure some great stuff is coming soon.
I really do appreciate everyone signing up for this game and I hope that over the weeks I could make this a fun and enjoyable experience for everyone involved. It was an honour being your Hostess.
