/gameideas/reborn.txt

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Mechanical Ape
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Apr 05, 2022 8:04 pm

Pocket wrote:
Tue Apr 05, 2022 5:28 pm
A first-person action game where there are no movement controls at all; you just have a hookshot and have to get around that way.
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Jill (?) » Tue Apr 12, 2022 9:21 pm

Pocket wrote:
Tue Apr 05, 2022 5:28 pm
A first-person action game where there are no movement controls at all; you just have a hookshot and have to get around that way.
Risk of Rain 2 almost has this


the recent DLC added an item that doubles your health but halves your movement speed, and at 2+ stacks your WASD movement becomes impractically slow. Loader's playstyle involves mostly getting around with a grappling hook and rocket punch anyway, which makes stacking the item uniquely advantageous to her. (she also gets a temporary barrier when punching enemies relative to her max HP, which affords her a lot of extra tankiness)

one quirk of this though is that slower movement speed means less traction when landing from a grapple or punch, which means your horizontal momentum makes you slide across the terrain more, which makes it trickier to not overshoot your mobility skills

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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Wed Apr 27, 2022 1:32 pm

Base builder game where you are a witch managing your deep forest cottage. Grow herbs in your garden, research spells, befriend the woodland animals (and use them as spies). Gradually make the whole wood your home, using your power to both protect and be rejuvenated by it.

Deal with visitors to your wood as you please; help the lost children get home, or lead them to your cottage and eat them. You can be a good witch or a bad witch or anything in between; the game does not judge, a witch’s morals are her own. But the local villagers may have an opinion (not always accurate).
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Pocket (?) » Mon May 23, 2022 11:30 pm

Pocket wrote:
Thu Dec 03, 2020 11:38 pm
A game where you have no weapons but your enemies are trigger-happy and very much not immune to friendly fire, so your goal is to bait them into killing each other. My initial thought was for it to be a first-person shooter with a vaguely DOOM-inspired feel, but it could work as third person or top-down 2D. In the latter case, it could even be a sort of bullet-hell where you die in one hit, although bullet-hell is a niche enough genre already that it might not feel like a unique enough spin.
Been thinking about this some more, and I realize that if I didn't mind being super-derivative, the premise kind of writes itself. You've been given a gun and sent to deal with a demon infestation after some idiots opened a portal to Hell, except this isn't actually the DOOM universe so conventional weapons are literally useless against demons. What the gun can do is draw aggro, giving you a way to bait distant enemies into chasing and attacking you even if you've already baited them into infighting.

The one thing I'm still unclear on is how to deal with the inevitable last enemy. Maybe every level has at least one environmental hazard that every enemy can be baited into, a la Attack of the PETSCII Robots, or maybe there's a demon that summons an infinite supply of minions and is conveniently invulnerable to everything but them... :pinkieshrug:
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Jill (?) » Wed May 25, 2022 8:50 pm

Pocket wrote:
Mon May 23, 2022 11:30 pm
The one thing I'm still unclear on is how to deal with the inevitable last enemy. Maybe every level has at least one environmental hazard that every enemy can be baited into, a la Attack of the PETSCII Robots, or maybe there's a demon that summons an infinite supply of minions and is conveniently invulnerable to everything but them... :pinkieshrug:
i don't see a problem as long as you ditch the underlying assumption that the player should be able to clear a stage down to the last enemy

...but assuming you want them to be able to do so for any reason, I would probably go with some sort of parry/reflect mechanic that is not easy to use but lets you send enemy attacks back at them. or maybe the player could have access to some kind of effigy or voodoo doll that was reverse-engineered from demonic rituals. any time one of these decoys receives damage, the attacker takes that damage as well

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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Pocket (?) » Sun Jun 05, 2022 3:27 pm

Jill wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 8:50 pm
i don't see a problem as long as you ditch the underlying assumption that the player should be able to clear a stage down to the last enemy
I've been thinking about this, and it's less that the player needs to clear the stage and more that any enemies that aren't dealt with are just going to keep pursuing the player until they are. In classic shooters, "not clearing the stage" means bypassing parts of the level and leaving any enemies in it un-aggro'd, which is perfectly valid and happens all the time, especially if they're behind hidden wall panels. But being unable to deal with the last enemy even in a given room means having to let it chase you into the next one... which I just realized is going to turn every level into a nonstop mad dash to the exit without the downtime between encounters you'd normally expect. That's not the kind of pacing I had in mind when I first thought of this.

And speaking of pacing, having to end every level by rushing for the exit with an enemy still on your tail feels weird to me. It worked for the Left 4 Dead games, but those all had a theme of "there are literally millions more of these zombies out there than you'll ever encounter; this is just about survival, with killing them being a means to that end". If survival was all that mattered here, just sprinting past them rather than wasting time baiting them into killing each other would not only be just as valid of a playstyle, it would probably make more sense from the character's perspective. Ideally the player's motivation and the character's motivation should be the same.
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Thu Aug 11, 2022 5:59 pm

You are a factory worker for a totalitarian regime during wartime. Your goal is to sabotage the factory’s production as much as possible without raising suspicion or getting the place entirely shut down. The regime is naturally highly dysfunctional and stretched thin, so exploit that to ensure they never make a quota.
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Durandal (?) » Fri Aug 12, 2022 3:52 pm

Sort of a Papers Please meets Factorio style then?

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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sat Aug 13, 2022 1:42 pm

Yes! Exactly. You’d check in to work each day and have (limited, based on your job) ability to roam the factory floor. To minimize output you’ll need to understand the workflow, the better to throw a, possibly literal, wrench in the works.

You might work your way up to team leader, foreman, shift supervisor and even manager. With each promotion you’re able to control more factory operations and un-optimize things in subtler ways (e.g. assigning the worst workers to crucial tasks). However, promotions come from performance, which means you have to choose strategically between your actual goal of sabotage, or doing your job well in exchange for a promotion and more control in the future.

I think we’d want to simulate the names, skills and jobs of each worker in the factory, with different levels of job skill and traits such as bribeability, drunkenness, laziness. and even trustworthiness to your goal. Job assignments and HR would be above your pay grade, at least at first, but you can sabotage things in such a way that a particular person gets blamed. That might be a good way to open a vacancy or get rid of someone you’re concerned might snitch. But it also brings a human cost to what you’re doing. Are you okay with getting an innocent man sent to the gulag so you can take his foreman job? It’s for the greater good, right?
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Thu Oct 13, 2022 3:32 pm

Imagine an RPG where every item in your inventory — down to each individual silver coin in your purse — has an individual bespoke description. You could look at functionally identical items and drill down to see that this coin is partially tarnished, is dated 1294, is worn near featureless on one side and scratched on the other. Another coin has gum on it. So in one sense you have 50 silver coins, all of which are totally interchangeable; but in another sense you have 50 uniquely detailed items.

My hypothesis is, in a game with this much individual detail, some players will act in accordance to this detail even if they absolutely do not need to. They will try to spend the crummy-looking coins first. They will keep the arrows with turkey-feather fletching separate from the ones with goose feathers. One of their whetstones will become their lucky whetstone. My hypothesis is that some players will do this because the game makes it possible for them to do this.
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Pocket (?) » Thu Oct 13, 2022 7:20 pm

I thought you were going to say "They're going to go through every single one and read all of the descriptions, wasting as much time as they spend actually playing the game." Based on my experience with Dark Souls LPs, anyway.
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sat Feb 18, 2023 12:55 pm

Not my post, but saw it on SA and wanted to share:
We need a mascot horror game where the gimmick is you can't let yourself directly look at or hear sounds made by the monster because it's intellectual property owned by Disney.

I've got a title: DEMONitizer
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Re: /gameideas/reborn.txt

Post by Durandal (?) » Fri Dec 22, 2023 9:38 pm

Lore-accurate Myst game: you play as a D'ni scholar who is scribing new Ages. The words you write in the linking books are used as prompts for a series of AI generators to virtually generate the worlds you describe, which you then explore in-game. The antagonist of the game is a character backed by another AI which is corrupting your Ages by secretly changing the words around and inserting enemies / obstacles and stuff and otherwise making them unstable.

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