The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
I want a game based around the cabin section of RE4.
It should be set up like RE4 meets desktop tower defence/rampart. So you have ever increasing waves of zombies and in between the waves you have limited time to set up defences, barricades and re-arm yourself.
ive always thought a head to head fighting game would be neat if it was controlled by a huge insanely byzantine series of pulleys, cranks, killswitches and so forth. it would be like the machines in frankensteins lab in the old movies crossed with the huge banks of blinking lights that pass for computers in old sci fi movies. steam would vented.
My game ideas never get off the ground because I have a wonderful imagination (I can visualize everything), no grasp of math for programming and no real art skills.
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.
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.
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.
I've always wanted to see a rogue-like translated into a modern 3d game.
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 started a weird discussion in another thread (and perhaps killed the thread). It's a massive wall of text, though, so I'll post it here under a spoiler tag.
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.
Can I ask why bioware never try to do full interaction, but always rely on a cutscene-dialogue mechanic. The dialogue wheel is a wonderful step in the right direction, and I understand that their games are few, and thus significant changes are many game "steps" away, but I'd love to see a bioware take on a half life or gta style environment or game world, but with their classic storytelling flair. See how they'd meld the two very different and interesting situations, and try to acheive a middle ground.
This is an AWESOME thing to bring up. I had a similar discussion with one of the Storytelling In Games panelists at PAX 07, and my points went something like:
1) traditional game storytelling seems to be analogous to a choose-your-own-adventure book, where each page written equals some content and time and money. You can make a really branchy story where a 300 page book nets about 15 pages of gameplay with each attempt, and its replayability is legendary among games. Or make a really linear story where a 100 page book nets about 40 pages of gameplay.
2) game development is new product development and profits need to be made, and it can be hard to justify putting money in things that half your player base (and 90% of your reviewers) will never see
3) my proposed wacky-idea-solution-that-will-never-work involves open world gameplay (think GTA 3) which tracks virtual relationships, emotions, feelings, etc. Each NPC, even the disposable ones, is a brilliantly-crafted form of a-life, using awesome technology that doesn't yet exist. What could we do if we had that? I imagine true boundless choice for characters. Do something crazy and unexpected, and realistic (if predictable) reactions follow.
4) players will always figure out the mechanisms behind any game AI, and will have fun gaming the system to achieve the results they want. They will eventually find things predictable and will tire of this world populated with predictable cookie-cutter social stereotypes, with hundreds of jilted lovers and suicidal overworked fathers and vengeful children. So one could further refine this 'society simulator' by building a huge set of well-developed character templates (with dialog and plot info carefully designed by humans, to match a large variety of random NPC's as needed) and a set of plot templates. Constantly watch the game world and the player's interactions with NPC's. Does an NPC or a set of NPC's match a "drama template" you have scripted events and dialog trees built for? Substitute them in! Suddenly that random NPC the player has been wooing, to see how it'll react, begins to show signs of life and humanity.
I know I didn't explain #4 quite so well standing outside the doors of the satellite theater I was assigned to, but this particular game developer seemed interested enough to give me his business card and want to talk more about it. (In a brilliant show of "wow I fail at networking" I then proceeded to never ever send him any email. Crap.)
What do you think? More like that?
I also have my own "games are this" opinion, and I don't want to detract from anybody else's, but: games are learning opportunities, little black boxes we can run experiments in, we can try things and fail in, and learn from. Sex as the physical act of mating certainly contains opportunities for success and failure, but debatably not enough to make a game out of. Sex as a collection of interpersonal dramas building toward emotional and then physical intimacy includes LOTS of ways to go wrong. (For a crude example, see Japanese dating sims, both H and non-H. BAD END indeed.) Physical intimacy includes hugging and holding hands and sobbing on shoulders as much as it includes sexual intercourse.
Games can also just be games with thematically-related plots and story lines which are revealed slowly as you complete the game. Advancing the plot is a reward for playing more of the game successfully. Sex can work there just as well as any other reward can -- but I'm not sure that's an interesting (art-advancing) discussion. So you use your paddle to break this wall of bricks, and underneath is a nudie picture. Yay. Or you complete the next part of the game and the next cutscene includes a gratuitous sex scene. Yay. Or the character you've grown to love could live or die based on your actions, so you next see cutscene A or cutscene B. I just feel there's more to discuss than this kind of scripted sexual drama.
Sorry for adding even more bricks to my wall of text, but I just had a thought:
Much of a game story author's challenge, when building a character to represent the player, is obviously in figuring out what the player wants their character to do next. How receptive do you think people would be to just cheating, breaking the fourth wall and asking the player some questions?
How to ask these questions is still a mystery, and I'm a poor champion for this idea because I have no idea how to make it work. But suppose periodically, like a GM leading a bunch of tabletop game players, the game were to just ask the player how he/she felt about recent developments? Is the player developing a romantic interest in so-and-so, or not? Annoyed? Frustrated? Filled with murderous rage? This is not necessarily to give the player exactly what he/she is craving, but more information is certainly helpful.
If a game were to do this, and actually had the rich story framework and thousands of hours of spoken dialog to back it up, do you think players would tolerate it?
Think back to, what was it, Daggerfall? Morrowwind? One of those games, if I remember, had you answer a series of questions for character creation. Then in Oblivion they stopped doing that and tried to learn from observation, with debatable success. So what if a game did that answering-questions thing, but periodically throughout the plot?
4) players will always figure out the mechanisms behind any game AI, and will have fun gaming the system to achieve the results they want. They will eventually find things predictable and will tire of this world populated with predictable cookie-cutter social stereotypes, with hundreds of jilted lovers and suicidal overworked fathers and vengeful children. So one could further refine this 'society simulator' by building a huge set of well-developed character templates (with dialog and plot info carefully designed by humans, to match a large variety of random NPC's as needed) and a set of plot templates. Constantly watch the game world and the player's interactions with NPC's. Does an NPC or a set of NPC's match a "drama template" you have scripted events and dialog trees built for? Substitute them in! Suddenly that random NPC the player has been wooing, to see how it'll react, begins to show signs of life and humanity.
This would be the best way to scare walkthrough writers ever. Done well, I'd actually love to see this in a game. Say... a single city, filled with cutouts, or colour-drained effigies. As the game progresses, those you interact more, or around, start to take on life and personality, and go about their little lives, triggering other characters to develop. Run quests from those you interact with, and have their destinations randomly selected and characters inflated appropriately. Off the top of my head, obviously.
There needs to be a push though. Each of the templates needs some sort of conflict, be it personal, physical, emotional, or plot based. It doesn't have to be the same conflict every time, in fact that would be terrible, but a conflict of some sort needs to be included in each template, or the game has heaps of variety but ultimately lacks an indefinable substance.
The trick is to have so many that:
1). People who don't like a particular conflict don't need to do or interact with that particular template. So they can ignore that part of the game, but still have heaps and heaps to do.
2). Any reward is tied directly into the type of conflict. Don't, for example, put a tangible weapon based reward in with a highly dramatic/emotional conflict, or people feel they must complete it and will get irritated if they dislike that conflict subtype. A dramatic/emotional conflict needs a dramatic/emotional resolution/reward.
3). Market the game in a manner that avoids the backlash that result from smallminded bigmouthed idiot complaining that the game is full of "stupid" emotional conflicts if they don't like that sort of thing, or "ridiculous" plot contrivations if they don't like the driven plot templates. I have no idea how to do this, I'm not well versed in public relations.
4). Have a thick skin, because a game that tries to do a lot of things and offer a large variety of different experiences is going to have everybody hate some aspect of it and love others. This effect is going to be pronounced because of the conscious attempt to include different conflicts that would appeal to a broad range of people. Most people would only play and enjoy probably three quarters of the template pathways, just because some option will likely disagree with them. And because people aren't naturally logical, a significant fraction of the playerbase will consider this a negative feature.
mspencer on
MEMBER OF THE PARANOIA GM GUILD
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 )
0
PunkBoyThank you! And thank you again!Registered Userregular
edited May 2008
It's not really a serious game idea, but sometimes I imagine myself and the people I know as characters in a 2D fighter I think of movesets, playstyles, and even taunts and victory quotes/poses. My main debate now is whether the gameplay should be more like KOF or Melty Blood. Either that, or an RPG that gives a hugely exaggerated version of a week in my life.
PunkBoy on
Steam ID:
The Linecutters Podcast: Your weekly dose of nerd! Tune in for the live broadcast every Wednesday at 7 PM EST, only at www.non-productive.com!
I've always wanted to see a rogue-like translated into a modern 3d game.
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!
It'd be an episodic game with a platform-independent presentation (basically, something not tied to the bleeding edge of graphics) to both cut down production costs and make it possible to have all the games look cohesive. So I could string them together end to end and it would be like you are just watching episodes of your favorite TV show.
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.
It's not really a serious game idea, but sometimes I imagine myself and the people I know as characters in a 2D fighter I think of movesets, playstyles, and even taunts and victory quotes/poses. My main debate now is whether the gameplay should be more like KOF or Melty Blood. Either that, or an RPG that gives a hugely exaggerated version of a week in my life.
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.
A sports game that uses euphoria extensively. Players will actually bump into each other and such realistically. Also, remove some of the numbers. Real coaches can't look at a guy and say "he has run block ability 71." You have to watch your players in practice and games, and look at scouting reports, to guess how good they are.
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.
I had an idea for an action RPG that is basically a post-apoc final fantasy game.
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.
Vic on
0
PunkBoyThank you! And thank you again!Registered Userregular
Honestly I just want a beat em up game that emulates the fighting styles seen in Jackie Chan movies.
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?
PunkBoy on
Steam ID:
The Linecutters Podcast: Your weekly dose of nerd! Tune in for the live broadcast every Wednesday at 7 PM EST, only at www.non-productive.com!
Most of my ideas are cross-overs of existing games:
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:
You start by spending an allotment of points picking your starting survivors, their possessions, pre-apocolyps professions, a vehicle (do you start with a grocery truck full of food, or an electrician's van full of tools? A SWAT van full of weapons or an Ambulance? Different point costs, different benefits), and a building to start out in (pharmacy, residence, corner market, etc.). You then organize your starting survivors into squads based on their skills (maybe even their personalities) and set them to tasks, including fortifying your building and going on missions to look for supplies and other survivors.
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.
The Big Levinsky on
0
PunkBoyThank you! And thank you again!Registered Userregular
It's not really a serious game idea, but sometimes I imagine myself and the people I know as characters in a 2D fighter I think of movesets, playstyles, and even taunts and victory quotes/poses. My main debate now is whether the gameplay should be more like KOF or Melty Blood. Either that, or an RPG that gives a hugely exaggerated version of a week in my life.
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.
I was more thinking about random ninjas attacking, but this idea works as well.
PunkBoy on
Steam ID:
The Linecutters Podcast: Your weekly dose of nerd! Tune in for the live broadcast every Wednesday at 7 PM EST, only at www.non-productive.com!
Posts
i would play it anyway.
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?
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
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.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
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.