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[Muz]

Well, you guys seem to have the same tastes in games as I do. I've got a few projects in mind, but very limited time to work on them. So, just doing a general poll to get see what you guys are interested in. I might not follow your advice, but I'll certainly read and think about it.

Combatant
Turn based combat game
Production: Several years

A game that simulates combat. I'm not happy with how RPGs handle character vs character combat. I wanted to make something as entertaining as fantasy book and movie combat, but fully believable, and interactive. The game tries to go into as much detail as possible, but tries to keep it from being confusing. It'd allow you the kind of detail Toribash gives you, but simplifies it by allowing you to customize your moves, and providing in-built moves. A right punch would be someone jerking back the left side of his body, and whipping his right fist forward. Customization isn't needed at all. It should suffice to play the game without the finer details, but the game engine would use them to provide a more realistic response.

It also allows many different form of attacks, and I wanted to allow it to take advantage of attacks from weapons like the Chinese Ge and Ji. The scope is planned to be big enough to scale from hobbits to giant robots, though the more extreme cases will be in later updates. The combat calculation system should also be able to calculate damage from bullets and kevlar jackets.

It still takes believability very highly. A single hit will kill, but put two skilled combatants together and they'd be clashing swords for a while.


CRPG (name will change)
RPG
Several years

This is basically a more RPGlike version of Combatant. Combatant would be a pure hack-and-slash. This RPG would give you a full storyline, an interactive world, where your character can make a difference. The combat system is a highly simplified version of Combatant's but still more detailed than in many other games. The game mechanics shine in the detailed character building system, as well as how the game interacts with what types of characters you want to build.

My philosophy for RPG games is that they give you a world that you'd actually believe in and want to explore, even try to simulate a copy of yourself in the game. Your actions can affect the game world strongly, but it becomes quite a challenge to be influential enough to actually change the world.


Chaos Wave 2 / Attack Wave
Platform RTS
3-12 months

Chaos Wave is the first truly original game I made. Not proud of it. It was buggy as hell, lacked polish, way too steep learning curve, and didn't show the game world properly. But as bad as it was, people actually downloaded it and some people emailed and said that they're interested in a platform RTS.

I'd like to redeem myself by remaking it. Get some cuter graphics, casualize it. Lower the learning curve. Also, instead of the color theme, I'm thinking of making it a typical medieval fantasy war theme. I thought that Iron and Wood is easier to understand than Red and Green
Building converts Iron -> Sword.
Human + Sword -> Swordsman.
Human + Sword + Magic -> Battlemage

Sweet thing about a platform RTS is that two people can play on the same computer, the whole game can be played in the same window, and you get some instant satisfaction.

Web of Time
Uhh.. interactive fiction?
2-8 months

The game lets you go back and forth in time and influence major decisions made by a civilization. Maybe you tell them to focus more on agriculture than war. Maybe you tell a civilization to distrust another, tell them to wipe out a race competing for the same resources.. or work with them. But all these decisions change the future of a civilization and the other civilizations they act with. You don't have any other active role in the game, other than to make their decisions for them.

Sort of thinking of using the technology in that RPG game. It'd show how your smaller actions in the game ripple throughout the rest of the future of the game. But most likely it'd be a later add-on, because of complexity.


Attack of the Killer Robots
X-Comlike strategy
2-4 years

The game my avatar is based on. A bunch of robots reach sentience, break out of the military base that your small town is built near and block all exits in and out of the town. It's a near-apocalypse game where you find other people and try to gather some survivors and fight the robots.

The game has a bunch of parts on the map for you to explore and fight to free survivors and recover tools. Eventually, you'll have to build a base around one of those map locations... you could perhaps fortify a mansion, old shoplot, the local mall, a gas station to hold off attacks. Any location that can be used as a battle ground could be used as a base. Eventually, you gather up your party and try to break into the military base when you find their weakness, or escape from the town to get outside help.


Multiplayer thief game
A few years?

You play as a robber out to heist a building. You get a character, with his own skills - lockpicking, safe cracking, fighting, etc. After successful missions, this character levels up and gets more skills. The missions you can play are based on your character's level, starting with robbing convenience stores to large banks, military buildings, and breaking people out of prisons.

But you have to team up with another real player to break into these buildings. The two of you will get plans of the building (based on recon and stuff earlier), and you'll get to plot it out with your friend and communicate. One of you might disarm an alarm, while the other disables the guard. One guy could be the explosives expert, another might be the lookout. Optionally, the multiplayer aspect might let you play as the good guys, who'll have to try to make sure the place doesn't get robbed.


Voice modifier tool
6-18 months

A tool that lets you modify the pitch and loudness of voices. Even generate different voices and emotions for fake voice acting. Or things like modifying your voice to sound different, though so far, the algorithm doesn't let you change your voice to another gender, sorry. I've seen some people wanting this, but it doesn't look like there's enough demand to justify the time needed to make it.



Sorry if I didn't go into detail in a lot of the ideas. There is just a lot of detail and I'm not sure what to focus on. Anyway, what do you guys find interesting?

[Lap]

My logic behind most of these is that your time is valuable so I'm also taking into consideration how many people I think enjoy these games.

Combatant - Somewhat interesting, but I'd really need to see a bigger feature list to differentiate it more from Toribash.

CRPG- Until you have a mostly full idea I can't really make any recommendations as there are way too many questions with this one. I can say that full RPG's are probably not worth doing considering how crowded the market is and how much work needs to be put in to compete.

Chaos Wave 2- I absolutely loved Tyrian2000's "destruct" hidden gamemode. However, network multiplayer is going to need to be implemented or it will get almost no playtime by most players. This project sounds like it belongs on Kongregate though and there are likely a lot of similar games.

Web of Time- Probably not worth your time. The audience is just too small. The audience is also the type that would expect a huge amount of depth to warrant playing it. That means a huge amount of work for a very small audience and successes like Dwarf Fortress are extremely rare. I'd also suggest you have the entire game mechanics fully mapped out before even beginning coding.

Attack of the Killer Robots- There are a lot of survival style games, but not nearly enough. I think this is the best idea of the lot. There are tons of ways within this basic idea to innovate and make some really unique gameplay elements. I would recommend putting a strong emphasis on the following:

-Macro/overall player strategy
-Resource managements (food, ammo, water, medical supplies, etc)
-Base building/fortification (make it more complicated than just boarding up windows and doors)
-Fun MacGuyver style item improvisation and combination
-A large amount of different skills/character classes

I think the game could work as a simple tile based roguelike just as much as it could with the x-com overland map & mission map combo. I'd probably prefer the x-com way as it allows you more creative and coding leeway. If this is a tile based roguelike it seems a bit too similar to the Zombie Survival roguelike though.

Multiplayer thief game- I'd wait until Monaco and Subversion come out or have more information released before starting your own. It's very possible one of these might end up being very similar to your idea. This also hugely depends on how the player plays. Is it overhead/tile based? Plaform/SideScroller? FPS (Definitely not worth doing, especially with the existence of ThieveryUT)?

Voice modifier tool - Too many professional tools and plug-ins for sound software already. Even my mic has built in voice modulation stuff.

Other questions that really apply to all of your ideas....

Where will you get your graphical assets? Are you an artist?
Will any of these ideas be 3D?

Stuff like this really makes a huge impact. You can't count on having an artist, or at least one that will stay with you throughout the entire development so unless you are an artist yourself you need to think very carefully about how reliant your game should be on graphics. You don't want your progress stalling or having your product not get recognition just because it is too reliant of graphics it doesn't have.

[Muz]

Combatant and CRPG do have their unique feature lists. They're both sort of the same thing, the CRPG idea branched out because I got too many ideas on how to develop a plot for the game, and found out that you don't really need detailed combat to make a great game from it. Both share the same RPG system I planned to build from scratch to get as much realism as possible without overwhelming the player.

Honestly, a feature list would take half an hour to read. There's so much of it that I still haven't written a proper design document, so I'll just give a very high level idea of the design philosophy.

The idea behind Combatant was to give the player the feel of fighting like in the combat movies. A guy swinging a chair onto a goblin's head, who dodges rolls under a table, breaks a bottle and lunges at the guy. The guy punches away the goblin's arm in a textbook martial arts block and knees the goblin in the stomach. Then some zombie dwarf storms in, berserkly swinging an axe and a mace at the two combatants. The game should be able to simulate all this without more than half a minute pause, allow the player to act instinctively, and give believability. The axe and mace should be imbalanced, the block shouldn't be possible if the defendant wasn't ready, the undead dwarf wouldn't feel a dagger through his arm, etc, etc.

Toribash doesn't get anywhere near cinematic, it's too choppy and takes too much practice. Combatant would abstract out the mechanics to try to get the feel. The system is built to handle any kind of melee combat - multiple combatants, mounted and flight, size differences, positioning, crowds, physical damage and injury, armor, equipment wear and tear, and to a lesser extent, magic and ranged weapons.

Tough to do? Heck yeah, I predict that 60% of it is in design, mostly getting the formulas down on paper, testing, and trying to break the system. The bulk of coding would just be tossing those formulas in, writing tools to test them, and making a pretty interface for them.


I had some of the features you mentioned for Attack of the Killer Robots, but didn't consider overall strategy or item improvisation. Thinking of even doing destructible environments and a research aspect. Detailed classes were sort of cut off the list because it adds a bit of work to learning curve and design.. it's split to scientists/commoners/soldiers, but customized items. It'd play sort of like a top-down squad shooter. Pick a guy, move him around, tell him to guard a door, switch to another guy. Move that guy around, shoot some robots, then watch as your other guys automatically dodge for cover when under fire or flee when a giant robot stomps near.

It's not turn-based strategy, though. Come to think of it, I should probably have a way to let players to decide the strategy of the rest of the players.. assign weak points of the base for the soldiers to guard, let them set traps, etc.


I used to do my own sprites a few years back, but got rusty. I can probably pick up the habit again or learn given the time. But so far, I haven't had trouble getting very skilled graphics artists for most of my games, even the vaporware ones. I think a good game prototype will attract some good artists, so I'm not so worried about it. I'm also used to not working without graphics for a large portion of the development time, so it's not really going to break anything.

And no, it won't be in 3D. 2D lets me tell a good enough story, without worrying about crap like modelling and 3D vectors. Combatant has a bit of simulated 3D positioning system to calculate/estimate movements, but is text based in output. 3D tends to be a lot uglier anyway; I can't see it as being effective, unless I really needed something to be 3D.