Gameplay



EXPLORATION: Show day occurs every few days, you can go through day/night and completing side-missions and performing in the clown tent as long and often as you want without re-visiting the main story, but sometimes the story will require you to 'wait for morning' or 'perform in the clown tent' etc.

ACTION: The clown tent performance will be a quicktime event that increases in difficulty each time you enter. Other missions may require you to fight in hand-to-hand combat. There will be various mini-games accessible via the sideshows, and a few actions that will simply be fun to do, such as terrorising passers-by and sabotaging other circus performers.

COLLECTION: Lesser carnival folk pick up individual beads of powder from the ground after a show day, and you can join them (at a very slow rate and risking being attacked, but good if you're only a little short). You can also earn it doing missions and performances (recurring every show night, if you don't show up there are consequences), and sometimes as prizes in mini-games.

ROLE-PLAY/SOCIALISATION: The circus will be filled with NPCs, some of which will be more critical to the story than others. Important characters will have the ability to engage in dialogue with the player and give them missions, whereas all other NPCs will simply say one line if you try to interact with them ("hey watch it" etc). The Jeckyll and Hyde element means that Jamie and JJ will have different:

- Abilities (maybe an area can only be accessed by one character or the other because one has a high jump ability or a ready cache of small explosives).

- Strengths/weaknesses (Jamie could be better at socialising and JJ may be stronger, but JJ breaks down in comical crying fits all the time and Jamie is too scared for some missions).

- Dialogue options (changing the way a conversation may end depending on the character

- and even side-missions (messing with gypsies or helping out at the freak show to gain favour with certain characters),

Switching between them will be dictated by key events in the story arc. Sometimes Jamie will have to put on the clown makeup just to survive a vicious beating, or JJ will go to sleep and wake up as Jamie when all the face-paint rubs off.

Customisation: The game will have 3 difficulty levels, which will allow the player to choose between an interactive story with easy missions and a time-consuming challenge where gameplay shares equal limelight with narrative.

Dialogue:



The character being conversed with will sit on the left hand side of the window, with some scenery visible behind them to the right, and the dialogue options below. The character's head will animate in full 3D. There will be a 'nice', 'neutral' and 'mean' option in each dialogue tree, and choosing each option will either increase your relationship with the character or decrease it, changing their reaction to what you just said. Sometimes being too nice will anger certain characters, such as Gonko. This can sometimes be important in unlocking quests, unless they're essential story quests. If you do not have a very high relationship with a character that you need an important story mission from, they may just give you less of a reward for completing it it and insult you a lot more, or you may miss out on advice to help you complete said quest. Your relationship with each character is shown by a vial of blood on the right hand side of the screen, that will begin to boil if you are too mean to them, and turn pink and spout little fluffy, perfume-like hearts if you're nice enough. This will be explained in this first dialogue scene with a text box next to the vial explaining its importance.