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Indie game ideas and such
UncleSporky
Registered User regular
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EDIT: I guess this thread is now for ideas relating to any sort of indie game project. Got cool ideas you'd like to see, or something you're working on? Feel free to post it here.
I'm not really considering this too seriously, I was just thinking about this stuff recently and I thought I'd share it. If anyone else can or will use ideas generated by this thread in designing a game, by all means, go ahead.
Someone in a different forum mentioned that they want a free-roaming CV game with a big overworld sort of like CV2 (Simon's Quest), but also the focal point of the massive castle like SotN. This is my dream also: a sidescroller with these features, so huge that it takes at least as long as a sizable RPG to finish it (40, 50, 60 hours).
I know that the concept of Castlevania is far from realistic, but at the same time the series/style feels above the platforms suspended in midair you might see in something like Sonic the Hedgehog. In other words, a slightly more reasonable suspension of disbelief. :P There's usually a back wall to the castle where we can assume the "floating" platforms are anchored, etc. A lot of the vertical motion comes from moving up and down floors in buildings (primarily the building).
But if we want a massive outdoor overworld and don't want floating platforms, how are we to expand except for left and right? Admittedly I haven't examined Simon's Quest to see how they did it, but having thought about it myself I think this would be interesting to try:
Sort of a 3D sidescroller, in a way. A traditional Castlevania uses one blue layer for the whole game, but I'd like to see a system with doors in the walls (or paths leading off into the distance) where your orientation changes to a purple layer. From there you can go through a door back to a blue layer in a different plane. In this way you could not only simulate a castle with more room depth per floor, but also have a more detailed overworld than just sprawling off right and left. You could also not only walk right through the castle, but around it on all sides, maybe looking for a side door or way up the outer wall. This applies to the overworld, too: you could switch from walking alongside a river to trying to find a way to cross it, etc.
I don't know how many layers there'd need to be. Obviously less would be less confusing to the player and also less work for the creator, but I think it'd also be somewhat less satisfying. At the least, I'd want a front and a back to the whole game with several main connecting cooridors (and some secret ones!).
When moving between the world orientations it'd be important to keep the same point of view of the world as before to avoid confusion, so in this example the player is always either playing from the south or the east. I'd also want a nifty rotating effect so that the player has some cohesion to all these plane changes.
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I was also thinking about nifty ways to extend the gameplay and work it into the story. SotN did this with the upside-down castle. What I was thinking was along the lines of a big cataclysm that affects the whole castle. There could be an earthquake after a certain point in the game, but I think it'd be more interesting if the cataclysm was something you could help bring about.
So let's say the nearby town is going to launch a big assault on Drac's castle and they're building this massive catapult/cannon. One of the early game goals would be to help assemble the cannon by bringing back parts you can find. Once you assemble it, you help launch the assault and fire it off and large sections of the castle crumble away, making it worthwhile to re-explore the place. (This'd be a big deal in the story, maybe the villagers fail in their assault as demons pour out of the hole you just made and set the village ablaze.)
Naturally just before finishing the cannon, I'd want the player to hit a brick wall in terms of exploration, so that breaking up the castle opens up new routes through it etc.
A really ambitious design would allow the player to also aim the cannon, localizing the damage to a specific part of the castle. All paths would eventually lead to the end of the game, but it'd be incentive to play through it again. Do you attack the base and go under it, or somewhere in the middle and open new routes through it, or the top where Drac's lair is and hope to take him out in one well-placed hit?
Anyway, that's my long ramble for today. Maybe it sounded better in my head. Just thought I'd shit out some ideas onto your heads and see what you think could be done with them, if anything.
I'm not really considering this too seriously, I was just thinking about this stuff recently and I thought I'd share it. If anyone else can or will use ideas generated by this thread in designing a game, by all means, go ahead.
Someone in a different forum mentioned that they want a free-roaming CV game with a big overworld sort of like CV2 (Simon's Quest), but also the focal point of the massive castle like SotN. This is my dream also: a sidescroller with these features, so huge that it takes at least as long as a sizable RPG to finish it (40, 50, 60 hours).
I know that the concept of Castlevania is far from realistic, but at the same time the series/style feels above the platforms suspended in midair you might see in something like Sonic the Hedgehog. In other words, a slightly more reasonable suspension of disbelief. :P There's usually a back wall to the castle where we can assume the "floating" platforms are anchored, etc. A lot of the vertical motion comes from moving up and down floors in buildings (primarily the building).
But if we want a massive outdoor overworld and don't want floating platforms, how are we to expand except for left and right? Admittedly I haven't examined Simon's Quest to see how they did it, but having thought about it myself I think this would be interesting to try:
Sort of a 3D sidescroller, in a way. A traditional Castlevania uses one blue layer for the whole game, but I'd like to see a system with doors in the walls (or paths leading off into the distance) where your orientation changes to a purple layer. From there you can go through a door back to a blue layer in a different plane. In this way you could not only simulate a castle with more room depth per floor, but also have a more detailed overworld than just sprawling off right and left. You could also not only walk right through the castle, but around it on all sides, maybe looking for a side door or way up the outer wall. This applies to the overworld, too: you could switch from walking alongside a river to trying to find a way to cross it, etc.
I don't know how many layers there'd need to be. Obviously less would be less confusing to the player and also less work for the creator, but I think it'd also be somewhat less satisfying. At the least, I'd want a front and a back to the whole game with several main connecting cooridors (and some secret ones!).
When moving between the world orientations it'd be important to keep the same point of view of the world as before to avoid confusion, so in this example the player is always either playing from the south or the east. I'd also want a nifty rotating effect so that the player has some cohesion to all these plane changes.
---
I was also thinking about nifty ways to extend the gameplay and work it into the story. SotN did this with the upside-down castle. What I was thinking was along the lines of a big cataclysm that affects the whole castle. There could be an earthquake after a certain point in the game, but I think it'd be more interesting if the cataclysm was something you could help bring about.
So let's say the nearby town is going to launch a big assault on Drac's castle and they're building this massive catapult/cannon. One of the early game goals would be to help assemble the cannon by bringing back parts you can find. Once you assemble it, you help launch the assault and fire it off and large sections of the castle crumble away, making it worthwhile to re-explore the place. (This'd be a big deal in the story, maybe the villagers fail in their assault as demons pour out of the hole you just made and set the village ablaze.)
Naturally just before finishing the cannon, I'd want the player to hit a brick wall in terms of exploration, so that breaking up the castle opens up new routes through it etc.
A really ambitious design would allow the player to also aim the cannon, localizing the damage to a specific part of the castle. All paths would eventually lead to the end of the game, but it'd be incentive to play through it again. Do you attack the base and go under it, or somewhere in the middle and open new routes through it, or the top where Drac's lair is and hope to take him out in one well-placed hit?
Anyway, that's my long ramble for today. Maybe it sounded better in my head. Just thought I'd shit out some ideas onto your heads and see what you think could be done with them, if anything.
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Your method seems very sound though for an action game.
In Simon's Quest they simply had stairs/platforms in the outdoor areas. The implication was that you were hiking up hills and on ridges in mountains and such. They used doors in the walls leading to another layer, but not very ambitiously, just for entering homes in the various towns.
A few NES games are structured this way and worth checking out. Dirty Harry as an example has a pretty well constructed world of streets, with a perpendicular layer for alleyways that intersect them. Gets even more interesting when you enter buildings. It's pretty interesting to check out.
The cannon idea is rad. You'd need many pre-set points of impact for it that would be hit regardless of where a person aims though. So to make it still seem convincing the castle would have to be pretty far in the distance. Much further than would actually be a viable target for any artillery from that time period. I just bring this up since you mention wanting it to seem a little more realistic. Just make it a magic cannon.
You'd need an Outer Wall type level and a catacombs type area that fit around the castle entry points like a "skin." That way you can still maintain a flow of events within the castle itself but still give the feel of many different paths in and different ways to explore.
I always did wish SotN and beyond had doors you could hit up to enter like Simon's Quest. That way save rooms and teleporters could be put behind them along with level transition screens. So the flow of the game is never broken while you're just exploring like how on the GBA/DS games you KNOW you reached the bottom/end of an area when you go through multiple single screens of special item/save point/teleporter.
As for other games structured this way, I didn't doubt the idea hadn't been done before but I certainly haven't seen it recently. Possibly because it is a terrible idea. :P I think recent technology could make it more cohesive, like I mentioned with the rotating world effect (unless Dirty Harry does this!). I'll definitely have to check out Dirty Harry and see how easy it is to keep track of where you are, which is my primary concern. Otherwise it'd just feel like a lot of disconnected mini-levels instead of one big castle.
My reasoning is that it has the same flaws as most games that did this (no map, very confusing due to repetitive graphics), but it felt the most cohesive. I think mostly because it was set in a real world environment so you could easily see that one path lead to an apartment building, or another street, etc. The game also had an entire sewer system under the entire game world you could navigate.
Not a fantastic game but fun and has some good ideas in it.
The notion in general of having intersecting 2D levels is one that I feel needs to be, heh, explored more. Mega Man ZX did this actually, their problem is that they used a 2D map to represent 3D level transitions. Wrapping that thing around into a rotatable dodecahedron would have made a world of difference.
A rotating effect would be great. That's something I'm always surprised isn't used more today as it's prevalent in many early 3D games that have 2D gameplay.
Speaking of which, this looks pretty rad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIkKiT2ExBQ
I played games like this, except there was no rotation, and I couldn't tell one plane apart from another. There was even a terrible detective game for Atari that tried this, and I couldn't finish it because I never knew where I was.
it definitely can't be sprite-based 2D. It would have to be 2d with 3d models, in order to support the turning animation on the cheap. A good example of this style is Mischief Makers for N64. EDIT: Klonoa! Duh!
Personally, I'd prefer a 3d castlevania-style game that just doesn't suck. I'm not holding my breath, so this may be the next best thing.
EDIT: templewulf, exactly. It seems like kind of a nitpicky detail at first but I think it means a lot in the end.
In terms of 2D vs. 3D, I think this is a big argument for 3D since animating this sort of rotation by hand would be a nightmare. However, I'd want it to look as 2D as possible even if it wasn't, mostly because of personal preference (I prefer detailed art to complex geometry). Certainly I'd want the game to have an individuality apart from Konami's Castlevania, but I don't think this sort of game fits well with a design like Viewtiful Joe or Kim Possible...although that game does look awesome. But with that much 3D, I have to ask why you didn't just make it a 3D game like Jak and Daxter and be done with it.
Another random thought I just had: being set in a castle, of course it's got a lot of round towers, but we never get to explore them as if they're actually round with a spiral staircase etc. And thinking of that in terms of multiple planes, we could explore the towers both inside and out.
And I also just realized that the multi-plane thing may actually be addressed somewhat in the upcoming Paper Mario. :P
Nice ideas with the planes though, reminds me a bit of Paper Mario 2. I'm not sure how you'd make a decent map over it though once you start stacking places on top of eachother.
As for story/level design, I had this idea that the castle... uh, Castlevania, could shatter and the parts would end up in various places around the countryside. The inside is still connected though, so with the right abilities you could enter a section, go up some stairs, exit and be in some different place. Would help with the backtracking.
On a sidenote, there needs to be grappling with the whip because grappling hooks make any game better.
Also: Having a map on the upper DS screen that'd rotate as you change planes would help.
Let's check out the church, oh hey it's eyepatch wearing Road Warrior mercenary pig. Let's go down to the potion shop and chill with tuxedo lush crocodile.
The proper way to have an in-game map for this type of game is to have two maps. One being an overall 3D grid where the "grid" lines are the levels themselves. The second is a flat map of each individual area that you can cycle through.
Animating the rotational scrolling by "hand" isn't too impossible. It can be accomplished via various scaling and parallax scrolling as seen on Super Spy on the Neo Geo or any Doom/earlier FPS. The technology exists now to do it but the actual required combination of artistic ability and financial resources to do it true justice are lacking.
Didn't they release a 2D megaman with 3D graphics at some point?
I basically say that because, as a Castlevania fan, I'd love to hear "Bloody Tears" used as an overworld theme, just as I love hearing takes on the classic Zelda march as the overworld theme in those games. But, from a more practical standpoint, it'd definitely open up new gameplay avenues that we don't really get to see in most CV's.
Honestly, since out of most of the "classic" franchises we have, CV is the one most people want to remain in 2D, I'd just love to see Konami blaze new trails in 2D technology and game design, and use each game as a means of introducing new ideas, new gameplay methods, new features, etc. I understand its actually quite an expensive undertaking, but I'm talking from a pipe dream perspective.
Also, that clip Rasa posted; damn, I'm almost surprised it took this long to get an interesting looking Kim Possible game. Not everyone might be in love with the concept, but gameplay-wise, c'mon, it's based on a show about a girl who "can do anything"...how could you not be intrigued by some of the possibilities there?
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cut this down to, let's say, 10-15 hours at the very best, if you're really considering to make this idea into a game. Also, come up with something different then a castle setting, be creative.
Why aim for 10-15 hours when that's where all the existing games like this hover around? Like I said, it's a dream. I always wish these great sidescrollers were longer.
And the castle setting is presupposed here because that's what I'd want to play. I don't want to attack a massive space station or a japanese temple, I want to play Castlevania.
I also dislike the implication that a castle is not "creative," since it's quite possible to be creative within a castle setting. See my cannon idea, which I haven't seen done before. There's also a lot of leeway in terms of architecture and design.
Because I've been (publicly) working on a Sonic game for about 9 months now.
Man, if there was a 40-hour long platformer, I would play the fuck out of that thing day and night, with a huge-ass grin on my face the entire time.
In case you can't tell, the platformer is my favorite type of game.
People don't seem to interested in Sporky's ideas, which is a shame since this sort of game should be celebrated at every oppurtunity. If your game has purely 2D gameplay then yes, show it off here.
I have WL 1, 2, 4, and VB Wario Land.
I hate 2 and 4, but 1 and VB are among my favorite platformers
Awesome. Let me type out a post...
I think that Kim-possible game looks fantastic animation-wise, and there seems to be some pretty fun mechanics in there too, reminded me a little of Megaman Zero 2.
Can I make a suggestion for your platformer? Reward the player for falling down pits that most games would make the player think they died, for example, miss a jump, fall down a long pit you didn't intend to go down but you end up sliding all the way down a ramp into a basement area of the castle that you wouldn't of been otherwise able to acsess. Don't make it obvious that the player should jump on the chandelier to activate a switch that opens a secret door, just give them to freedom to navigate the levels as they wish, for example, leting them simply walk through that chandelier room, but if they decide to go chandelier swinging for the heck of it make sure they find something unexpected.
What I'm trying to get at is to let the player find their own way around your castle, if they want to just walk from a to b, thats cool, but entice them to start thinking outside the regular platformer mechanics of 'if I run into those spikes i'll die'. If they run into those spikes on the wall, they automatically trigger a switch on the floor that dispels the illusion of spikes on the wall, leading to a new area. Personally I'd make it so the player would not die much, if all while exploring so they have no real fear of doing things like diving down pits or running into spikes, although you may need some subtle clues as to if those spikes are real or not or that pit will indeed kill you because it would negate their drive to do unothodox things, then die for trying them. Mabe even have nothing in the castle actually able to kill you aside from the actual, living or sentient enemies roaming it. They provide the challenge of trying to defeat the player, but the player could overcome this challenge by finding another route around them, coming across an altrnate method of defeating/tricking them via exploration (eg, finding a new weapon or trap trigger to use on the enemy).
You ever seen 'The Goonies'? Remeber the bit where the kid falls down the pit, saves himself from being splattered and it turns out that was actually the correct route to go to get to the pirate treasure room? Or Resident Evil 4 when Salazar activates a trapdoor, Leon falls down it, stops himself from getting impaled by the spikes below via using a grappling hook then starts roaming the sewer system whilst fighting Salazar's right hand man? If he avoided that trap door he could of taken a completley different route in the game. For example, he could of avoided the trap, but may og had to fight Salazar's right hand man in that chamber as Salazar escaped. He could of fought the right hand man there, or if the player thought it was too tough, dove down through the trap door to avoid him, unwittingly finding this was actually an alternate route through the castle and not just a death trap.
How many times in action movies have you seen this happen? Indiana Jones? Maybe there was another way out of the Temple of Doom, but Indy and co decided to dive into a mine cart in a split second descision and make an exciting escape. I'll bet there could of been countless ways the last 15 munites of that movie could of unfolded if they made different descisions in terms of what to do, where to go, etc.
I'd suggest giving the player plenty of oppertunity to find their way around your castle based on split-second discison making, taking chances in dangerous situations, etc, then reward them for doing this by giving them alternate routes, finding new things, battling new enemies, finding new ways to avoid/deal with other various situations, etc. This would require some finesse in terms of design and plenty of imagination to pull off but I bet it could be done.
He suggested that the environment should rarely if ever kill the player. It would be easy to do; make spike damage pretty low and when the player falls in a pit, respot them with a small health loss (as in Link to the Past).
Like say some sort of differance in the background of a pit you can jump down.
And something odd about the spikes that are actually switches.
I suggested maybe even having nothing in the envorioment that can kill you. Possibly a real spike trap could be avoided because your character is nimble and automatically lands perfectly in such a position that you don't get impaled. Maybe the 'price' for testing if this spike pit is real or not is the time taken to prepare before you jump down. Give the player character a second to aynalise it and work out where he needs to land, then dive into it. If it was real, he would of landed fine and safe inbetwen the spikes, if it was fake, hey, he's safe. If they dive in without preperation they may land awkwardly and get impaled if it was real, but if they had tested similar traps and obstacles before, the player could spot slight clues as to wether this is a real trap or not, eg, scratch marks on the walls indicating the spikes have moved in a sliding dooor like fashion.
I, of course, knew a lot about the inside engine workings of sonic the hedgehog, but even with all that knowledge, making a game from scratch was going to be tough. I didn't want to simply use the Torque engine or some other engine, I wanted to build a sonic game from scratch.
So, I began by writing my own engine.
I sat down and looked at the specs for the sega genesis, super NES, and Turbo Grafx 16 and made a list of how they worked, and what I wanted. My goal was to create a graphics engine robust enough to behave exactly like a sega genesis, SNES, or turbo Grafx (or all 3 mixed together if I needed to).
So, I began by creating my own image format - .TSR.
My graphics format works very similarly to the way the C64 graphics format works. Inside my engine, I have 5 palettes - an object palette (for things like rings, monitors, etc), a player palette, 2 seperate background palettes, and a general "other" palette. Each palette can hold 64 colors, and 3 rotating colors (colors 1-64 are constant, colors 65, 66, and 67 rotate around, so one second 65 will be blue, 66 will be red, and 67 will be green, then the next 65 will be green, 66 will be blue, 67 will be red, and so forth).
In addition to being able to work with .tsr files, my engine can also straight up blit a bmp or png to the screen to get around the 64 color barrier, thus enabling me to achieve SNES-like graphics.
After I created the graphics format, I went about adding specific quirks that the genesis, TG16, and SNES have. First, the genesis has the ability to apply a sin-wave transformation to the screen on any given surface. I improved upon this by allowing my graphics engine to apply a sin-wave transformation across a single surface, multiple times. So, say you have a background layer and a front sprite layer - you can have different sin-wave transformations on both layers.
Next, the SNES has the ability to cycle through an entire palette with a rainbow effect. That is, all objects will cycle through all the colors of the rainbow, creating a trippy effect. Again, I improved upon this by allowing my engine to do a rainbow bloom (as it's referred to in my engine) and adjust the contrast between different parts of sprites.
In addition to that, the genesis has the ability to do fade in and white out. My engine can do those as well.
The SNES has the ability to do true transparency. The Genesis has the ability to do faked transparency via color banking. That is, it swaps the palette mid-frame so that everything below a certain point uses a secondary palette. My engine can do both. It can do them either by themselves or at the same time. It can also do them mixed with other effects.
SNES transparency with sin-wave transformation
SNES transparency on the entire image, color banking on the sonic sprite.
The SNES has the ability to squish, squash, scale, and rotate an image. My engine can do that as well:
My engine also can do Genesis style hashing. That is, it'll automatically draw the sprite by skipping every other vertical line, horizantal line, or every other pixel to give the image a hashed effect.
Finally, I've implimented a very basic SFX chip-style 3D renderer to my engine. I've been able to recreate the arwing polygon from starfox, for example:
And thats really all there is to my graphics engine. I built it in about 3 weeks. Once I was done with that, I began work on a windows engine, so that I could create tools to work with. I created a full gui, with a console and windows to display the information I need. The windows are skinnable too.
I'm currently working on the actual game now, after 9 months of tool creation. I've created programs that allow me to edit sprites, create object, map level tiles, and create levels. I'm currently working on the physics engine.
A screen shot of the current version of the game in action. Thats the graphics engine, the windows engine, the memory mapping engine, and the actual game I've all written, from scratch.
ETA on the final version is unknown, but I still have a lot of work to do. A lot.
[spoiler:5768f59dd4]Just kidding keep on doing it we
Yeah, I've talked with Polago about it before. I basically designed a well put together 2D game engine, and now I'm making a sonic game with it.
When I finish that, I want to make an original Ninja vs Pirtates game with it.
Man thats some really awesome stuff TSR, looks real cool, good luck with it.
At the moment im doing a CS degree and one of the reasons im doing it is so i can learn to create my own game, ive planned most of it out and it seems good. Ill post the ideas for it here if anyone is intrested.
To OP that sounds like a really intresting idea and if you could implement it it would be really cool. and the cannon idea is awesome, but i imagine it would be hell to do the level design.
I was thinking of changing this to have buildings sidescrollers and the city is overhead like rygar (NES) had done.
This is still all paper though.
Maybe one day. Most of the stuff I've written, I wrote under the assumption that only I'd see it. So it's not the most intutitive stuff on earth.
(For example, to apply the sin-wave transformation, you create an HLayer, and then you create an HClock and add the HClock as a parameter to HLayer's draw function after setting the sin flag to 1).
And even though I worked a lot on creating guis, there is still some stuff that works via a command line. The sprite structure in particular would probably be most confusing, since I wrote it based on what I need.
But I have been keeping a log of everything I do, and I want to make a guide one day.
Still, I have no idea where to start and I don't have to patience to make a game, at least by myself. I tried using MMF to make things when I was younger, but without any planning and art ability I never got far, thou that's a tangent that probably is not hosted anymore
Also, TSR, that is awesome. Really, really awesome.
I want to play your game when it is finished.
I have a few ideas that have been running through my head for indie games:
#1 - An RPG with no plot or continuing characters. Instead, it will have a number of unlockable missions and at the beginning of each mission, you're given a certain number of points to build your party. Each mission will have a number of XBox style achievements that can be earned (like collecting all the treasure in the mission or finishing the mission within a certain number of turns) which will unlock character classes, equipment, spells, and other stuff for future missions.
#2 - Take a classic arcade game and add an RPG element. For example, take the gameplay of Pac-Man, and toss the player into an RPG battle every time you touch a ghost. Use magic outside of combat to avoid conflict (like teleportation spells or creating walls). Between levels, spend points to upgrade your character. Power pellets could do things like restoring your max HP/MP or temporarily increase your power. And so on.
#3 - Some sort of apocalypse zombie themed Strategy/RPG.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,