Hello and welcome again to yet another topic about games I think I'd like to see. I do realize that they're almost certainly not going to go anywhere, but I just like talking about game ideas and I like to see how other people react to the concept.
Today I've got two things on my mind... One that was born a long time ago due to a pet peeve, and another more recent one that came about from watching Zero Punctuation.
The first one, which has indeed been running around in my head for quite some time, would unfortunately require a fairly powerful AI. The idea, essentially, is that you are one of the crew/staff members on a spacestation/facility. The area is locked down, and somewhere else there's a hive of "things". I haven't decided whether these should be aliens, mutants, or biological constructs, but the point is that you really shouldn't care. They're growing in number and power, and they don't like you very much.
So far this sounds like Natural Selection or Gloom, but there are a couple quirks. First of all, the original idea was for singleplayer only. I'm sure multiplayer could be figured out, but let's just treat it as singleplayer for the moment. Second, and most importantly, nearly everything is randomized.
The station is composed of a number of compartments, and is randomly designed and constructed every time. Also, the starting points for both the humans and the aliens (for simplicity's sake, I'll call them aliens) would be selected at random. You may start off with most everyone sitting smack dab in the security station, or you may begin the game settled inside a barricaded galley. The aliens might also wind up in the botanical garden, which isn't much use for you but contains all sorts of yummy biostuffs for the aliens to grow off of. You may even be foully unlucky and have the aliens planted in an important location like the power hub or the security station.
The game starts with you and and a number of survivors trying to survive. It would be a first person shooter, but you should have a number of generic voice commands ("yes", "no", "look out", "follow me") that would allow you to boss around people who wanted to be bossed. From there you would attempt to arm yourselves, maintain/protect/restore lighting and life support, locate the source of the alien incursion, rescue other survivors and so on. Meanwhile, the aliens would be sending out workers to develop a sort of anthill colony, fueled by edible organic tidbits, including survivors.
Due to the randomness of the game, every experience would be different. You could either be incredibly unlucky, or you could have everything going for you from the start. The point would be that you'd never know exactly when the aliens would "make contact" or where they'd "contact" from. As such, being able to know about and manipulate the environment (doors, vents, so forth) would become crucial, and you'd always have to be on your toes for fear of something nasty popping out of the woodwork.
The pet peeve was actually the fact that a lot of games will use scripted events or environmental sounds in order to simulate critters moving around and increase tension. However, after a while you realized that they were just disembodied sounds and were completely harmless, so you ignored them. I wanted a game where no shortcuts were taken, so if you heard something, you damned well knew it was there.
The other idea is far more recent, a few days at most. The basic gameplay was essentially just a puzzle/action/"platformer" based around physics and swinging. You'd play as a character with the ability to swing via really long arms (the current take on this is a robot with chain-arms). The swinging would have to be accessible enough that it would be fun and not-too-difficult, but with enough physics support so that you could actually factor in momentum and get real swings out of it. Also, having the rope/chain/limb bend around objects instead of clipping straight through would be fun.
I actually started thinking about this as a console game. Left trigger would shoot/retract the left arm, and the right trigger would do the same for the right arm. With that, you could do a back-and-forth swing to move around, or you could latch both arms on to the same object for more oomph. You'd also have buttons to retract or let out the chains, so you could launch yourself by pulling quickly toward an objects, or you could move heavy objects by latching one arm into the ground and the other arm into the object. As you pulled, you would be stopped from moving by the "anchor" arm.
With this you could have swinging segments, thing-moving segments, and the ability to latch on to moving objects for fun and profit. Two things that came to mind were snagging a plane-thingy that was flying past, and also hitching on to the back of a truck and getting swung about as a kind of dry waterskiing.
I know there are a lot of games with swinging/hookshot arms in them, but I don't know how many actually have the core gameplay based off of it. At least not with the kind of freedom and weirdness that actual physics would provide.
It'd basically be the fun bits of Spiderman and Bionic commando mixed in with some Gmod. I dunno, it sounded good at the time.
I would really like to have some thoughts and comments on these. They're not particularly polished ideas, and I certainly don't expect them to go anywhere (although the first idea may wind up as a roguelike or whatnot), but I would like to see what other people might expect or want to get out of them.
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Topic: More Idea Discussions (Read 1381 times)