I thought it might be nice to have a thread just for brainstorming game ideas. Not quite the same as the "games you wish existed" thread in other games, but rather actual ideas which some of us might act on and bring to life. Anything posted here should be something you believe is possible for the B12 community to make, and by sharing your idea here, you give everyone permission to try to make it. No fights over copyright and such, please. We can all work together and share our skills. Also, they don't have to be fully-formed game ideas. Just suggestions for interesting mechanics, etc., might be useful.
My first idea is in regards to hidden object games. They are always... just so terrible. And that's a shame, because I enjoy solving hidden object scenes. I'm really good at it. Lots of hours invested in Where's Waldo and Eye Spy as a kid. But in all these games, the hidden object scene is always shoehorned into a terrible plot with nonsensical puzzles and, universally, atrocious voice acting. Why the voice acting in point and click games is always so horrifically bad is a mystery to me. These games are all marketed towards middle-aged women. Why can't "hidden object" be a part of more interesting, better quality games? It certainly is perfectly possible to make a hidden object scene fit smoothly into the plot of a game.
Usually, you are given a scene with a pile of junk and a list of items to find. One of those items is something required to advance through the game, and you get to keep it, but the others are just useless crap. Even worse are the multi-part ones. You need to find a two-headed dragon, and there's a drawing of a three-headed dragon. Somewhere in the scene is an eraser, which you use to erase one of the dragon heads to get the picture you need. It's completely nonsensical and a cheap way to try to make the minigame more challenging. In any case, the whole time I'm doing one of these scenes, I find the object I need, then ask, why the hell do I keep looking? Why do I need to find the rest of this crap?
There are better ways of doing this. I can think of a few easy examples:
1. Have it in a situation where there's a reason to be digging through all this old crap, such as, you're exploring a house that belonged to a hoarder, who is now dead. There's some kind of mystery or detective case relating to this person, and you need to put the pieces together to solve it, which requires finding particular items buried in the mess. You go into each scene with an idea of the kind of thing you're looking for, but you have to get all the other crap out of the way first. Even better, narrate it in the past tense. A simple introductory line like "sifting through the pile of boxes, I found..." before the list of words gives an explanation for why you have to find these things *before* just grabbing the thing you need - which is buried underneath them somewhere.
2. Similar situation, but instead of solving a mystery, you're trying to catalogue all the stuff. Maybe you've been given the horrible job of managing this hoarder's estate, and you need to do a good job or you'll get fired, your business will go under, etc. Instead of having to find every object in a list, the list can be very long, and you have to find as many objects as you can before time runs out.
3. Make a use for every object you need to find. Instead of a pile of random crap + one useful thing, make it a list of parts you need to build something. The story can be about an engineering or robot-building competition, and you are too poor to buy stuff (or possibly you come from a very poor family living in a very poor country, without easy access to materials), so you have to dig through the science department's garbage and whatever you can find at the dump. For added challenge, there can be a list of parts you need, but they are spread across multiple scenes. I could see this, instead of being a standard point and click adventure game, being a sim or tycoon sort of game where you research designs then have to scavenge for the parts for them. The end goal of the game could be to get discovered / get a paid job somewhere. Or, the game could have a sort of environmental message - that there are literally landfills packed full of useful materials that everyone just throws away.
4. Make it a post-apocalyptic or zombie survival game. Makes perfect sense that there's piles of crap everywhere. In each scene, you have a list of critical items you need to find, and maybe a time limit on finding them before the zombies or raiders or whatever find you and you have to fight them off. Leave earlier and you're safe - you have to balance the risk and reward of continuing to search. Each item on the list is food, medical supplies, weapons, etc. Or there could be no list at all, and you have to use your own judgment to decide what to take with you. Instead of clicking "scavenge" and having the computer roll the dice for you, you have to actually scavenge. The more you find, the better off you are. The rest of the gameplay could be action, rpg, what have you. The downside to this one would be the sheer number of hidden object scenes necessary to make the game long enough. A game like this could be amazing, but it would be a hugely ambitious project to do it right.
I'd also like to see hidden object scenes with different graphical styles. The standard ones have that vaguely realistic style, which works, but why is that the only way people go about it? What about a surreal hidden object game where you're wandering through an abstract world trying to make sense of the world around you by identifying the various shapes that blend together throughout the landscape? Or a cartoony one with a funny theme, rather than the typical "supernatural horror" they always go for? I bet it could be fun to make a pixel art one, though it would be a challenge to make it anything but a joke.
If anyone is interested in these ideas, I'm willing to work on them. I can't code, but I can write and design, and depending on the style, I can draw. I also have access to several very talented voice actors (including myself) who do the audio recordings for my magazine, though I'd have to see if I could get permission to use the recording studio at work, and I'd probably have to pay them.
Author
Topic: Game Brainstorming Thread (Read 903 times)