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i would play it anyway.
AND SHE WOULDN'T GIVE IT TO ME
I can kind of draw, and I could definitely learn to code if I learned the math involved -- but I haven't been in a class since high school and god damn the teachers were terrible.
Gameplay would be real time, perspective would be top down. Your character would face your cursor position on the screen, and character movement would be controlled by with a WASD scheme. As gameplay is top down your player would mostly resemble whatever it's wearing on it's head and body, along with whatever the character has in his or her hands, and you'd see the occasional glint from jewelery if appropriate.
Play mechanics would be as follows:
-If your character is facing an enemy that gets close enough, he will swing his weapon and attack it. The character will automatically block with shields or parry with and against appropriate weaponry.
-The character loses health if hit.
-The player can increase the tempo of attacks by clicking the left mouse button, at the expense of vigor.
-The player can increase the tempo of shield blocks or parrying by clicking the right mouse button at the expense of vigor.
-The player can hold shift to sprint, also at the expense of vigor.
-Spells are learned individually in books.
-The player can view learned spells and put shortcuts onto a toolbar for quick casting and/or assign a keyboard shortcut.
-Spells are cast by clicking the icon, or pressing the chosen key, and clicking at the desired target with the cursor.
-Spells have a cast time, usually minor, which begins when the key is pressed or icon is clicked.
-Spells cost mana.
-The character has strength, intelligence, and constitution as stats that can be increased upon leveling up.
-Increased intelligence will decrease casting time and increase the mana pool.
-Increased strength will improve the innate fighting ability of your character (described above) and increase his health pool.
-Increased constitution will improve the health and mana pool of the player.
There is no 'class', even a player who's dumped points into nothing but intelligence can wear great armor and wield great equipment as they find it, but without improved fighting ability the character will soon be in trouble with hand to hand combat against more than one or two foes regardless.
Likewise even the most brutish of fighters can learn to send a wall of fire hurtling down a corridor, but without improved casting ability that character will find that he can't really cast spells as fast or as often as he needs to for that to be the way he really gets the dirty work done.
Randomly generated levels, 'quests' given in a town above, underground cities (some safe, some deadly hazards) and lakes and... dragons!
I could go on.
This was posted in the 'sex in games' thread, when the discussion started to move toward 'emotional and physical intimacy in games' and 'what games do emotional bonds well and why?'. (So don't be afraid of that thread -- it didn't degrade into the lowest-common-denominator discussion you might think it would.) My idea was a repeat of something I brought up with one of the Storytelling in Games panelists after their panel at PAX 07, and it met with some interesting replies that make me think the idea isn't complete crap.
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK
QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
So you want to make a diablo 2 mod?
Story?
Something epic. I have a design document, but want to change it up so it seems less contrived, which is difficult when the Hero has been transported 1,000 years later in time by a geomancer who will eventually come back as your nemesis. Commentary on numerous themes, but no real explicit answers, as to encourage audience reflection. Silent protagonist so as to not foist motivations and a personality on the player.
Gameplay?
The fluid 3rd person style of acrobatic, high flying jumping and close combat, but from a 1st person perspective. Maximum emphasis on tight controls. The main character will be almost totally incapable of firing a weapon accurately, so his weapons are a sword and a sawed off shotgun (since they need minimal aiming) while his opponents are armed almost entirely with guns. So, you play to your character's strengths and jump all over the place to close the distance to your enemies. There will be a couple of gags where you will try and fire a pistol at someone, completely missing with every shot.
No enemy grinds. Every encounter will be equivalent to a boss fight. Rather than stretching out endless corridors and rectangles populated with power ups and enemies, each fight must be a carefully crafted showpiece. So it'd average about two showpiece battles per episode.
Lots of ideas - ambitious to be sure, but I think I could get it done if I can recruit just the barest amount of helpers to get me started. Then produce a "pilot" episode to get more people interested, and slowly grow it from there. Probably Half Life 2 engine based because convincing facial animation will be key to the story I want to tell.
I never asked for this!
A super-dramatized version of just a normal week of someone's life would be a great premise for just about any kind of game.
One boss would be a red traffic light, which tries to whittle down your will to care about getting to work while you try and use your Glare ability to try and make it turn green.
Let me tell you about video games. Let me tell you about Homestuck
My ideal football/soccer/basketball game would take long enough to explain that I'm not gonna go into too much of it here, but the new game "football manager live" is getting close.
Another one: a multiplayer sensible soccer. 11 players to a team. The problem with my game ideas is I have to concede that I might be the only person who would like them.
Aliens have invaded earth, and to avoid domination the leaders of the earth decide to nuke the planet, sacrificing 80% of the worlds population while destroying 98% of the alien invaders. However somehow the global AI in charge of the coordination alters the order to destroy 95% of the worlds population and 99,9% of the aliens. Society utterly collapses.
A few years later, the player (a mental patient freed by the invasion) is making a living through looting and mercenary work. During a trip into the outskirts of a city he finds a young mysterious girl, and decides to help her try to track down her parents. And thus, he gets drawn into the story.
Gameplay somewhere between STALKER and resident evil but with teamplay elements, where you explore environments like ruined cities, alien hives, mutaded jungles and military bases. A combination of story and mission based gameplay lets you choose to rush ahead in the story or stick around and explore the world and your place in it fully. 10+ unique characters may join with you, ranging from Olivia the mystery girl and Gerhard the alien with a human mind to Samwise the hippie sniper, each with their own multi-ended storyline. And a long main storyline, where character interactions, the order of events and the players own choices will affect multiple aspects of the ultimate end.
I have the basic storyline down, and it could be pretty awesome.
Yeah, I'd really love something like that. I mean I love God Hand, but I'd really like a beat em up as cinematic as Jackie Chan/Jet Li movie. I would have no idea how to make it work, though. Maybe something like Stranglehold but with less guns and more kicking?
Dominions: Total War
Dominions being the small-budget fantasy strategy game by Illwinter. So basically the setting, depth and gameplay elements of Dominons combined with the fantastic real-time combat engine of the Total War series of games.
Another game cross-over idea I had was a zombie apocolypse RTS game that resembled Dwarf Fortress in how you played it. Instead of customizing a plucky band of Dwarves and setting them loose on a mountain, you guide a small group of survivors as they try to carve out a living by capturing and fortifying buildings to form a sort of Safe Zone.
Long, drawn out explanation within:
The objective in the game is to expand from your starting building, and establish a "safe zone" by barricading off streets and fortifying buildings. Adding certain buildings to your safe zone gives you advantages or huge stockpiles of resources. For instance, if you can capture the radio station, the number of survivors that seek you out will go up (survivors would show up from time to time like Dwarven refugees). So you'd want to expand to hospitals, police stations and the like ASAP.
And much like the dreaded "first winter" in Dwarf Fortress, the utilities start out working for the start of the game, but eventually shut off - giving the players a limited amount of time to stock up on generators, fuel, etc. One of the big achievments in the game would be to take back the town's power plant and other buildings that control utilities and have enough appropriately skilled survivors to turn them back on.
Another thing I'd borrow from Dwarf Fortress is the sieges. But instead of goblins and prissy elves, you'd get maurading bands of biker gangs and rogue, ex-military units.
The game would play in pausible real-time, but with a variable speed. At the start of the game you'd be playing primarily in real time as you direct your small numbers of survivors to do very specific tasks. But as your safe zone expanded things would become more stable and you could speed up time so days passed by really fast - setting the game to automatically go to real-time/pause whenever a breach in your safe zone is detected or one of your manz is in trouble.
I'd also like if you could zoom way the hell out like Supreme Commander/Sins to see the entire city and then zoom in close enough to watch your survivors try and weld a cattle pusher onto a monster truck they've salvaged and generally get that whole "ant-farm" feel. Did I mention vehicles? In addition to capturing buildings, you could capture vehicles, fix them (if you have survivors skilled to do that) and retrofit them to fight zombies. But fuel is scarce.
Controlling your units would be like Dwarf Fortress in that you can just give them objectives, and they'll do their best to complete the task on their own. Like I'd be able to right-click a builiding and get a dropdown where I can pick "Clear and Fortify" or "Demolish" or "Scavange", etc. I would still like the opportunity to micro-manage my manz though - including picking their equipment piece by piece, or having them equip themselves automatically from "squad templates" the player designs.
I'd also borrow the insanely detailed item creation/economic system that Dwarf Fort has. Also, the whole Dwarven Nobles premise with survivors rising the ranks to become leaders. And also survivors going berzerk and flipping out.
Holy shit this is way longer than I intended. But one last idea to throw in there, maybe it starts out with easy things like zombies being the only monsters, but as time goes on, worse things show up that your survivors will have to deal with.
I was more thinking about random ninjas attacking, but this idea works as well.