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[Halmie]

I think the important stuff is variety. Make the player adapt.

An assault on an alien base where you hide behind crates then shoot the shit out of some aliens.

A car chase with alien planes chasing a humvee with you either driving or shooting rockets and guns out the back.

A train is leaving with some stuff you need. Raid the train working your way up.

Which would you rather? A repeat of the first three times or the first then the seccond then the third?

[HideousBeing]

Ah epic games. Then we want something futuristic and possibly something with a brownish filter over it (please use a full or brighter color palette). Seems like over the top and varied weaponry is a must though, so I'm happy.

Defending our home planet from some sort of evil race of aliens that has ESP. Elegant but sinister appearance. Obviously they can have some limited form of mind controlled thralls of various species; mind control is always really really evil (your friends screaming horribly and crying while they attack you). The main characters are manly and heroic, but take joy in slaughter.

Enemy variety, gun variety and environment variety always help games IMO.

EDIT: let me inject molten iron into my enemies please

[Shaostoul]

Seeing as I'm working on the graphics department mostly, I'll do my best to make it look great, but also be manageable on lower end systems, at least on lowest graphics. Variety is what makes games better, it gets boring seeing the same thing over and over. Also, the whole having a chance to affect the story to some degree seems like a great idea.

[Zai]

No 'witty' one-liners please.

"I like to kick ass and reticulate splines, and I'm all out of splines."

Only thing I have to actually add is to not make it too mini-game-y (extreme variety in "missions" is what I'm talking about here, pretty much). But a game about alien war should be easy to limit that with.

Do you know yet whether you are going with a cartoony feel to the graphics (like Team Fortress 2), or a more realistic looking approach (like most FPSes)?

[HideousBeing]

Also, the whole having a chance to affect the story to some degree seems like a great idea.

In an fps it's probably not particularly necessary unless you have an elaborate story like in deus ex. However, having some cool things show up later as you make choices would be interesting as long as it's' not blocking off any content. These choices probably shouldn't be do either X or Y, but rather sub-objectives. Having these at fairly regular intervals is important, you don't want to have only one every 5 areas. Every effect should also be fairly obvious as to what caused it without NPCs directly telling you "OMG you blew up our warehouse so our new robots are made from rusty spare parts"

[Shaostoul]

@Zai - Well I'd probably want to go with a more "realistic" feel to it. After playing Borderlands I wasn't too fond of the way it felt after a while, it was a good game, but the cartoony feel of "light" cell-shading killed some aspects of it. Straight up cell-shading is completely out of the question. I'll have to talk to the other head guys to figure out what it is we're going with exactly, but realistic is probably the best IMO.

@HideousBeing - Not sure how it's all going to work out with being in the beginning stages of game making/planning, but I think that...

Having basic storyline presented, gets the whole point across is going to be best. Having extra missions or w/e to allow for extra content (whatever it may be.)

[Reasonableman]

As much as it'd be a blatant rip-off, an FPS in the vein of X-Com: UFO Defense would be incredible. Although I doubt you're interested in any such thing, the idea of hybrid tactical FPS action, base and resource management, and first-person co-op missions would be pretty astoundingly awesome.

I think I just really like X-Com.

Also, about co-op: for a proper cooperative game, you have to have a system for dealing with player death. Borderlands had the slightly absurd New-U stations, most games have a revive system, and some games have wave-based respawns. If you're going for a cooperative campaign experience, respawning seems pretty implausible; the problem is, so does reviving constantly. Realism takes a big hit. Must thinks some more about this.

EDITS: If handled well, player death could be sort of interesting; suppose when your buddy is shot, you can grab him, drag him to cover, and then have to perform a sort of field-medic minigame. To really retain any sense of realism, though, it'll have to be done with a fairly miraculous advance in medical technology; Battlefield 2's annoyingly magical defibrillators come to mind.

[Aqizzar]

Actually, that's pretty much what that Battlezone game tried to be.  It's a lot harder to pull off FPS+RTS than it sounds, and it even sounds hard.  Of course, if you segregated them, then maybe, but I don't know.

[Reasonableman]

I've played Battlezone (shame it doesn't work on modern computers) and I was talking more about the X-Com route; in X-Com, actually, the global and tactical views are two entirely different programs.

More thoughts on death mechanics: persistent character development is an interesting possibility. Or, more precisely, punishing player death with some sort of detriment to that character development. One could revoke the sorts of things you get as your character progresses: CoD had perks and weapon upgrades; Borderlands had weapons and items and a skill tree. Since, in a co-op scenario, it's usually far more difficult to take away progress in the campaign, it may be better to build in a reward-punishment system with some sort of character advancing mechanism as well.

[Shaostoul]

Yeah, the death thing is going to be a tough one to get together well. I would say something along the lines of halo 2 legendary, but that pissed everyone off immensely.

[Shaostoul]

Alright well a lot of mechanics of the game, the storyline and concept art is coming together... What type of guns do you want to see? If you're curious there is an article about our company in the Olympic College paper here in Kitsap County, Washington.

http://www.ocolympian.com/news/local-gaming-group-say-they-re-the-next-underdogs-rising-1.1008824

After reading it again, it's a little off. We've got the storyline bit mostly figured out. Our artists are doing a lot of work. We're hammering out the rest of the mechanics.

All that we're at now really is getting ideas for guns. Feel free to be as elaborate as you want.... however the gun has to be able to be held by a human.

[Halmie]

Please try to make sure there is atleast one gun that interacts with the evironment.

Something similar to:
The Portal Gun from Portal
The Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2
A grappling hook.

Other than that I'm not sure.
An insanely powerful gun that uses your life as ammo?

The medic minigame suggested earlier would have to be handled well. Something like that could get very tedious very quickly.

[Shaostoul]

Yeah, we're still debating about the "medic" role... I like the way Crysis handles it, it's simple and somewhat makes sense.

I'm really pushing for environmental affecting weaponry/machinery/etc...

[Jakkarra]

What would be best is actual ENVIRON changing weapons.

Such as digging implements, and terraforming items or something, probably would be hard to code though, but it'd be pretty sweet.

[beorn080]

For player death, you get demoted. Now what this means is that your choices for weaponry increase between levels, though you can still pick up any gun and use it. Essentially, you do a good job and get to use the alien prototype the army found, or you do a bad job and shoot your buddy with a sniper rifle, lets not let you have another until you can prove yourself. Now, if said buddy starts with a sniper rifle, you could still kill him and take it, but that would result in further problems. At no point should it get to the "Here's a knife, since you've proven yourself too stupid to use anything else" level, perhaps with enough deaths, at least in single player, the Army breaks down and goes, "Here, we JUST found this alien rocket launcher. Since the last three subjects exploded while testing it, we figured you could give it a whirl."