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[DrPoo]

Greetings dwarfs and (the few) dwarfesses.

I wanted to make a thread for us who likes to discuss/design and share game ideas, wether they are something to be or just ideas.
Its always interesting to talk about game mechanics, if you talk about it with people who know what fun game mechanics are.

I am currently planning to make this game were you explore a world left behind, exploring the leftovers of your civilisation, underground secrets, alien technology, space and eventually, yourself, meanwhile you must fullfill your physical needs as well as your mental, each game has a character of random attributes, theese cannot be changed, you cannot become a big buffed muscle guy or a genious, but you can get smarter, and stronger, but not much, you gotta live with what you get, and adapt to that.

[Deadmeat1471]

Sounds interesting.

[Lord Dullard]

I am currently planning to make this game were you explore a world left behind, exploring the leftovers of your civilisation, underground secrets, alien technology, space and eventually, yourself, meanwhile you must fullfill your physical needs as well as your mental, each game has a character of random attributes, theese cannot be changed, you cannot become a big buffed muscle guy or a genious, but you can get smarter, and stronger, but not much, you gotta live with what you get, and adapt to that.

So if you roll a crappy character you're stuck with crappy attributes?

Yep... I sense it's time for lots of (tedious) rerolling... 

(Not to crap on your idea - for the most part it sounds very interesting/good - but I wanted to point out a flaw with trying to force people to adapt to less-than-good characters... as a reference, Unreal World does this, and I always inevitably end up rolling ten thousand times for a decent character as a result. It sucks.)

[Normandy]

Perhaps a better system would be having a default template character which you apply perks/penalties to which award/detract various things (awards? achievements? points?) so you'd have interesting self-imposed challenges.

I actually have a little codebase on my (old) computer for a game like that (I wanted to make a roguelike, but I decided otherwise). My idea was for a "massively singleplayer game" (people use that buzzword enough, so I figure I could use it too). There was a game out a few months ago that had only singleplayer gameplay but allowed people to post comments in the form of a ghost message or something that would be viewable to all. A similar gameplay mechanic could be exploited in a large free-form exploration game like that by allowing people to scratch messages into floors or walls (nethack anyone?) that could either communicate a narrative or otherwise enrichen the exploration experience both by adding a shared discovery component (i.e. you can track the progress of others who came before you in a certain dungeon) and by adding a sort of 'first' discovery component (i.e. finding a pristine room or room nobody has written in before can be a very satisfying experience).

There would need to be some sort of dynamic content generation on a large scale in order for this first mechanic to succeed, IMO. This sort of limits the types of narrative you can put into the game, so there is a definite tradeoff. To offset the loss of narrative, I thought adding a high score component to the game would be an interesting way to improve replay value, where adventurers could search ever deeper into dungeons or jungles for more valuable and more powerful randomly generated loot (both functional and not). Although I do admit, my game idea lacked any sort of end or narrative direction (there was backstory, actually similar to your idea, except in a fantasy setting), finding artifacts that point towards what happened to civilization might be a good way to give a sense of completion for finishing the game.

[Virex]

I am currently planning to make this game were you explore a world left behind, exploring the leftovers of your civilisation, underground secrets, alien technology, space and eventually, yourself, meanwhile you must fullfill your physical needs as well as your mental, each game has a character of random attributes, theese cannot be changed, you cannot become a big buffed muscle guy or a genious, but you can get smarter, and stronger, but not much, you gotta live with what you get, and adapt to that.

So if you roll a crappy character you're stuck with crappy attributes?

Yep... I sense it's time for lots of (tedious) rerolling... 

(Not to crap on your idea - for the most part it sounds very interesting/good - but I wanted to point out a flaw with trying to force people to adapt to less-than-good characters... as a reference, Unreal World does this, and I always inevitably end up rolling ten thousand times for a decent character as a result. It sucks.)

There are two easy ways to handle that problem. First of all, one could apply level scaling, so that characters with crappy stats will have a relatively easier time. For example, as a repayment for having lower stats, the starting skills or equipment could start on a higher level, or the area one starts in could be relatively easier.


Alternatively, make sure that the total attribute level is constant. This means that if you roll crappy on your strength then you will have a higher then average score on some other stats. Thereby you don't realy have crappy stats, but instead have a spread in the kuind of characters you can get.

[Svarte Troner]

I've always wanted to make a game that "accurately" portrays the Norse colonization of Greenland and Vinland. In DF style of course.

edit: I've also always wanted to make a survival game in the vein of UnReal World, but much more in depth, kind of how I hope that game will eventually turn out.

[DrPoo]

The game would be a prologue to a bigger, multiplayer game where you play as small humanoids on little planets, developing and eventually travelling space, other than nonn sentient critters, the only NPC's are robots of ancient technology wich is far more advanced than player created technology, fragile and inreplicable. So each player represents a political influence of the speices, the creatures can be directly controlled both platformer and RTS style, but when unfocused they will return to their normal business, building private property, breeding, etc. Each humanoid has a personality so they cope with some and fight others, so when two players merges their land, union, colony/whatever thye choosed to label their political structure, some of them would be racistic and fight each other, making the player have to keep up the peace within, when someone in an alliance teamkills, they are broken off the structure, making a structure of their own. Also when all heads of a polstruct are killed/captured all citizens of the loosing polstruct will assimilate and become part of of the winning polstruct. Beaten players can exploit internal conflicts to create a new polstruct from anothers, such as if you destroy a republic and assimilate citizens into your communist regime, another could exploit the political disagreements and make a new polstruct, essentially putting them back into the game. Other than destroying each other, you design technology, explore and colonise. Everything would be physical objects wich can be constrained, so you could for example launch a captured cofee mill into space with fart driven rockets. When a civilisation dies, it will still stay on the list, so one can join as the last member of say, the green was wiped out by red's fusion bomb, or a rogue precursor robot, you join, you see a beaten up planet, possibly inhabitable, lots of debris flowing around in orbit and the place is infested by wild shoggoths, as a last attempt to save the greenkind, another green dug down a precursor artifact, the Shoggoth Domesticator, wich you can then power up to domesticate the shoggoths, then you insert greenkin DNA into a shoggoth, making it grow greenkins, tadaa, race restored.