Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Posts
It could affect gameplay in other ways too. If you play one character as a huge robust dude, he can get past obstacles more easily. In contrast, playing as a child would mean you COULDN'T rip because you don't have the physical strength, and you would need to find a knife or something. You may not be able to reach places if you're short, so you could go and grab a stool and climb up on it. Hand to hand combat would be clumsy - which is pretty accurate, considering the types of characters you play in Eternal Darkness.
Oathkeeper - Updates Monday/Wednesday/Friday
Buy Issue One! >< Two! >< Three!
NEW! >< Four!
Okay, this is a really vague idea, but, imagine all humans are dead!
The game is basicly a screensaver.
You can watch a city like Paris or Chicago or anywhere really turn into a wilderness. You can interact with the city by changing the weather, popping a bunch of animals into existance and throwing some seeds down, thats it.
:!:
A Space Sim/Stragtegy/OpenExploration game. You start off with a template ship, one empty deck broken apart into a grid. You can travel the galaxy to mine ores and other matrials to add rooms to your open deck. Science Labs, Marine bunkers, Wepon emplacements, navigation computers, etc. As you add sectors to your decks you can research ship enhancements (like research in civilization) and depending on what kind of ratio you have going on with the amount of science, exploration, military rooms and sectors you've built it unlocks trees of total ship upgrades. So if you put a ton of marine bunkers into your ship and lots of weapon emplacements you would slowly become a war-ship as your continue to travel the galaxy.
As your ship you would be able to explore an open galaxy with worlds to explore (you wouldn't actually travel to the world ala FPS, but you would orbit the world and send crews down. And could transport materials or bombard areas with cannons.)
You would fund your ship kind of like EVE where you could take contracts from various 3rd parites or simply mine and sell your materials. You could even make your ship into a giant manufacturing plant where you mill out tons of vehicles/weapons/food/etc. and sell them across the stars.
I think it would be fun.
This neo-feudalism would be more tolerable if our betters had fancy titles.
Wasn't this a Discovery Channel or Nat Geo special not too long ago?
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
360
Bayonetta
Fable 3
DS
FF: 4 heroes of light
I have no idea!
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
I lol'd
Do you remember the original Ghost Recon, which did very well at slow-paced incursions into a variety of outdoor areas, both urban and wilderness and how you creept through the woods or between ruined buildings and through narrow alleyways with hesitence and care because a single bullet could end all your plans?
Do you remember Dark Forces, where you had all the same weapons as nearly every Star Wars shooter since, but the weapons had power and when you fired your weapon, they had real kick and then slammed into their target with a meaty blast, both in sound and in graphics?
Well, I want a Star Wars tactical shooter set during the Galactic Civil War casting you in the role of a stormtrooper. But not just any Imperial Stormtrooper. In the movies, we see the Stormtroopers used as the standard foot soldiers of the Empire, but you'd be one of the elite. Much like the Storm Commandos (and I shy away from them because I think they look stupid and they're stupid EU shit), you undertake special operations both alongside other Imperial forces and by yourselves.
You'd operate against enemies of the Empire both from within and without in extended campaigns across the galaxy.
And there would be a real sense of progress during the campaigns. In your first mission upon landing on a jungle world, your armor is pristine. As some time has passed, you may have removed your helmet, wearing a simple radio headset instead and removed the armor from your forearms and hands and cut your bodysuit's sleeves above the elbow to help deal with the heat and smeared your pretty white armor with mud so it doesn't shine quite so brightly and you can blend in better.
And you and your squad move and shoot far more realistically than the stormtroopers of the movies. I'm sure everyone here has probably seen special forces operatives move somehow. And I'm sure everyone realizes that they don't generally hold their weapons at their hips and shoot wildly inaccurately all over the place while they get picked off one by one.
Well, the stormtrooper's E-11 blaster rifle doesn't have to be! You and your squad would move with their blaster rifles' stocks extended and shouldered in the ready position. Oh, yes, the E-11 does have a folding stock.
The weapons would be very, very powerful. One shot to most body parts would kill a person, and that includes you and members of your squad, though perhaps there could be some sort of revive mechanic like in Republic Commando. Either way, the weapons would need sounds and graphics to match their power, just like Dark Forces did.
The members of your squad and your character would be very well-defined and rich characters that you'd hopefully get attached to to some degree at least and that you'd hopefully find interesting. I'd think that between missions there could even be non-combat portions of the game where you could interact with your squad and other Imperial personel around the Star Destroyer you're based on or around the base of operations while on an extended operation.
In the end, it would play a lot like the old R6 games (without the planning) and the old Ghost Recon, though perhaps from a third-person perspective. The one thing that always bothered me about FPS games is that I can see my squad doing all sorts of cool things, but I can't see myself doing similar things. And you and your squad would be moving like they know what they're doing. Unlike their movie counter-parts, these stormtroopers are utterly competent.
The very best games do one thing and they do them well. In Super Mario Brothers, everything is pretty crap except jumping, but jumping is a hell of a lot of fun. In Sonic the Hedgehog, it's running. Metal Gear Solid focuses on sneaking.
Figure out one thing in your game that's fun, and make it kickass. Everything else comes second.
No, the best thing you can do is take every game you've ever loved and smash them into one game!
Like Universal Combat!
forget story and plot and characters, I'd love a tactical team combat game that's thematically more like chess, in that each level is a puzzle and you are trying to defeat the other team because it's fun, not because you're saving the world. You could even make it a tactical paintball game for all I care, with paint grenades and flashbangs and "you now have to pretend your left leg is useless because it's been hit by a paintball" and all that. With Raving Rabbids for soldiers.
The most significant innovation, though, would be enemy and teammate AI that's actually good, and an after-action replay/review feature that will show you what each person is thinking at any given time, so you can see why they acted the way they did.
What does "actually good" mean? Second-order and third-order reasoning. Games like FEAR had good AI but still used first-order reasoning: the character knows its own plan, in the context of the player's current position and recent past, and a character director executes actions based on that plan.
Second-order reasoning would require each AI character collect what it observes about the player and consider a set of possible next player moves, both short- and long- term. It would then consider possible actions in that context.
Third-order reasoning goes a step farther: the AI is also aware of the situational picture it's presenting to the player (and also what it's probably not presenting -- what is probably hidden from the player) and tries to consider what the player will likely do in response to this.
Higher-order reasoning is easy to implement in chess, where the set of available moves is so limited, but not quite as easy to implement in a real-time squad-based tactical combat simulation. This would be a significant technical challenge, but the new gameplay experiences would be interesting to some players. Probably not enough players to attract a publisher with a budget, though.
One of the biggest problems with this kind of reasoning in a tactical shooter is it messes with the feedback the player receives. Games are exercises in rapid low-cost failure for players, and fun games refine the player process of trying something, failing, learning from that failure, and trying something new.
The problem, then, is that this kind of AI encourages more real-world responses. In a traditional game you're walking along trying to stay out of sight, an AI character sees you, and the AI starts shooting. With this kind of reasoning, you're walking along, an AI character sees you, the AI character hides, tries to contact his peers and coordinate an armed response -- and if you suck you don't see any enemies for several minutes, when suddenly a surprise explosion decimates your team, and twenty enemies pop out of cover on all sides and clean up the survivors.
If that happens and all you get is "you are dead! retry?" you don't learn much. You may never know who spotted you and what happened next. Controllers get thrown. That's why the replay-with-thought-bubbles feature is so critical to this idea working well.
Thoughts?
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 )
Well to be fair this entire thread is in part dedicated to pipe dreams that'd be possible only with GTA-esque funding and a team of monstrously talented developers. Assuming they're even possible at all, really.
Although we have had a few MMORTSFPSRPGS, I'll admit. Massive gestalts are jacks of all trades and masters of none!
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 )
Fair enough. If every proposal had ASCII graphics, no voice acting and MIDI sounds, I'd concede they'd all be a lot more realistic
A dodgeball game for the Wii using the Dodgeball movie rules and mechanics?
I can picture it. Move with the nunchuck, throw the ball away with the remote, raise both the nunchuck and remote at the exact right moment to catch the ball, swing the remote sideways when not in possession of a ball to dodge...
It'd be awesome. You could even have 4 players co-op. Why not add some online play?
Perfect for non-gamers too, as almost all the moves are doable with the waggle. It doesn't need to be complex in its execution, but with mechanics deep enough for "hardcore" players to compete. Also, the matches in the movie are very short due to the rules, so it'd be good for quick gaming sessions.
You could make it either a liscenced movie-to-game game, or go the Tecmo route and use the Riki & Kunio cast.
Also don't forget "levels made of simple collision meshes splattered by orange paint"
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 )
He has a fair point though, getting full blown war to run would be probably too intense to program. Still, I'd like a way for the peasants that you turn into militia to fight. Maybe a sort of total war-lite mode for the large scale battles, your knight acting more as a leader than an individual combatant.
It would make an interesting expansion, at least.
That's why the focus shouldn't be on believability but on "oh holy crap that'd be awesome", ala Corporate MMO or that crazy ED game Cass wants on the Wii.
Because we'll just get our robot overlords to craft these titles to keep us subdued in 2050.
To be fair, my idea is fairly viable if you had a good, professional team. It basically just takes previous concepts(Age of conan, WWIIOL, EVE) and wraps them in a different setting with some of the better parts of each.
Hey, uh...
Ever play Republic Commando? Because that's pretty close. Unfortunately, the only weapons with real power are the anti-armor and sniper attachments.
The pistol ranks a close third.
But the only people you interact with are the other three squad members.
And since my idea is pretty much just a realistic Katamari minus the ball and plus a combat system, I don't think it'd be super hard to do.
Let me tell you about video games. Let me tell you about Homestuck
Yeah, uh, did you see me mention it?
And it was good. One of my favorite shooters of last console generation even though I played it on the PC. It was more of a tactical shooter than other Star Wars games, but I don't think it went nearly far enough with the idea.
That is to say that the type of game it was trying to be was not the kind of game my post was about. Or was supposed to be about. I went on about aesthetics a lot, but I also mentioned Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon more than once and those are a far cry from the sort of game Republic Commando was.
SE++ Forum Battle Archive | PST = Pacific Standard Time | DRUNKSTUCK: A Homestuck recap
I guess I missed it then. Oooooops.
Oh man. You and your opponents start off building a large city with near-photo realistic graphics. You build up your cities until they're sprawling, and then World War III breaks out and it's every man for himself. I'm terrible at Sim City, Defcon, and any form of RTS, but I would buy that game THREE TIMES.
You stole my idea from the first page!
Battle Room!
Yeesss. I really would love that, it wouldn't matter if it was Wii or DS or PC, it just works. :^:
I guess this would basically be the RE people doing a Rainbow 6 game.
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
But I do have two game ideas, both of which came to me in dreams. Without revealing too much:
NINJA vs PIRATES
A modern Earthworm Jim. gameplay wise it'd be Shinobi (16-bit) meets Ninja Gaiden (8-bit), but with all the seriousness and tone of earthworm jim. It'd have a contra Hardcorps style branching path system.
SCUBA DANCING
My secret project for about 7 or 8 years now.
The shining moment would be the completely zero-gee Delta Sector of the colony, and how the controls would change to reflect the character's limbs -- trying to sneak around your enemies since discharging a weapon would shift your weight and send you spinning.
I wonder how well Dead Space is gonna do the zero-gee.
Its not going very well.
猿も木から落ちる
So I don't even know where I'd fit into game development.
You're pretty much like me and I don't think we fit anywhere.
Let me tell you about video games. Let me tell you about Homestuck
Money. If you have money, you can start your own company and be that guy.
People have to plan, right? We have to fit in somewhere.
I'm pretty sure they get people with other talents to do the planning.
Let me tell you about video games. Let me tell you about Homestuck