Alright, so by chance my brain accidentally mixed my memories of
Ecco the Dolphin and
Motherload, which then got me to thinking about exploration games.
Now, I don't like 'fantastic' exploration games, which take place in a fairy tale world which is "like Earth but different". There's a lot of fun to be had exploring, but in order to procure that fun for the player, I think it's best to introduce them to a truly alien world, where they honestly can't tell what they're going to find next. It's a mixture of curiosity and intrigue that needs to be pulled off successfully, and I feel that Motherload was an excellent exploratory experience. Now, I say that it was excellent because it had me going further and further down into the crust of Mars, and with each few hundred feet I went, my surroundings became progressively more and more alien, and I wanted to dig deeper, not only to accrue more valuable gems, but to ultimately find out what was at the bottom of this subterranean world I was diving into one block of dirt at a time.
Hell, when I tried out Minecraft, I had fun just randomly digging down and finding hidden caves!
Now, I mentioned Ecco the dolphin earlier, because I remember being
frighted by that game, just because I was so young at the time that the under sea world was so alien and frightening.
Now, I started thinking of a game which combines my love of exploring alien environments, with my natural fear of the undersea world.
And what I got was
Europa Explorer.
Now, as you may or may not know, Europa is a moon of Jupiter that is completely covered in frozen water. The world of Europa Explorer will take place in a hypothetical future where super-science has enabled humanity to terraform Europa, and transform it into a regular ocean world. The beginning of the game will take place just as humanity is just starting to colonize it, with the vast majority of Europa's depths an unexplored mystery to everyone. The main character would be a freelance undersea explorer, traveling all over Europa to suspected spots of interest, and then using his personal submarine to dive into the depths. The object of the game would be to find interesting things, and then sell the information so that you can upgrade your boat or submarine, and gain access to more areas in a metroid-esque fashion.
Due to the fact that the exploratory part of the game makes up the vast bulk of the gameplay, it's necessary that it be interesting at worst, and awe-inspiring at best. To facilitate that idea, not only would the underwater landscape need to have alot of thought put into it, with things like sunken spaceships and other vessels to explore, but impossibly deep Marianas Trench-esque features would need to be present, and active underwater volcanoes that are constantly spitting smoke and sulfur. Also, due this Europa, the game would have free license to contain as many bizarre and alien aquatic creatures as could be imagined. There could be things like giant serpents that resemble the Sandworm from Dune, or plant-like creatures that that grab anything that get near them. To make things educational, it could even contain the more outlandish real creatures, like giant jellyfish, or translucent fish that glow in the dark. No matter what though, the underwater world should always be vibrant and interesting.
I feel that the underwater world should have a great deal of mystique to it. To simulate actual diving, the submarine would encounter a great deal of life near the surface, but as the submarine descends more deeply, things gradually get more dark and more lifeless, and then eventually the sub is forced to use it's personal flood light in order to see at all (the flood light would be manually controlled by the player, of course), and while you'd encounter less typical fish, everything would become alien to the senses.
Man, I'm sorry if I'm using the same words over and over, but my internet went down AS I was writing this, and I can't access a thesaurus like I would usually when writing these gigantic things.
Also, I just thought, that in addition to the submarine, there could even be a scuba-diving mode. Where the player would be able to exit their sub and then explore the surroundings in person, or even be able to get into smaller places. For example, upon arriving at a sunken ship, the player can get out of their sub, and go in and explore it! I think that would be cool.
Now, to add to the mystique, there should also be an element of danger. Now, for the most part everything could be peace, but there could be some dangerous parts to the game that could spell game over for you if you're not careful. It doesn't have to be hostile life attacking you either, it could be unexpectedly strong currents pushing you into unknown areas, you sub not being built for extremely deep diving and slowly being crushed by water pressure, or dumbly driving into the opening of a volcano.
About the upgrade system I mentioned earlier, it could feature a whole lot of different things, to allow the player to play through the game in any order they want. For example, you could buy upgrades to your submarine so you can dive more deeply before you get other things, or you could get upgrades to your boat, like an ice-breaker so that you can travel to colder areas that would ordinarily be restricted by the ice. Things like that.
I was thinking, that if you could visit sunken vessels or even crashed spacecraft, then it would probably be pretty cool to be able to salvage things from those wrecks, like things you can use to augment your equipment, or sell for more cash.
I am mentioning stuff like "Selling" and "Upgrading", so I guess there'd have to be stores for those activities. There could be cool floating cities at certain hot spots on Europa, which would be more heavily populated, and allow you to buy, sell, gather info, or whatever.
One problem I have imagining though, is that to be scientifically accurate I'd have to include the fact that Europa's about the size of the moon, which would make some significantly less gravity everywhere, and I'm not sure how to represent that in the game world, let alone an undersea world.
Also, there's the fact that Europa's day/night pattern would be pretty different from that of Earth's, since it's not only orbiting the sun, but also orbiting Jupiter. If you were standing on a boat on Europa, how big would Jupiter in the sky be? What would the day/night cycle be like? Should my character be able to jump from one end of the boat to the other, due to the decreased gravity? These are tidbits of research I haven't done, but would be necessary to ensure greater scientific accuracy in such a game.
I just thought I'd write this stuff down, what do you guys think?
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Topic: Game Idea: Europa Explorer (Read 1268 times)