I suppose this falls under GE discussion…
Anyway, over the years using and not using the bge II came up with a lot of ideas for games or mechanics in games that I may or may not make.
This list is here for me to remember them, and perhaps inspire some ^^
Mechanics:
Combat system: (inspired by DS) most action games have combos involved, heavy slow, and light fast.
Though they are the same for fighting a single enemy or an entire army. The combat moves don’t change on the number of enemies being faught.
So, say you have a game that is fully or at least nearly fully controled by the mouse, clicking an enemy will make you character do a move against it, left click for light, right click for heavy.
Click multiple times on that enemy and you’ll perform a combo.
Differant combo’s by mixing light and heavy attacks etc etc etc basic stuff.
Now there are two enemies; clicking one enemy will only damage one enemy, but clicking the second enemy right after clicking the one would make your character do a move that hurts both in the second combo attack.
Clicking back to the first will do another both-hurting attack.
One enemy in front and one behind will also change the move; click on one enemy to do the basic first move and then click on the enemy behind you and your character would, say, sling the enemy behind into the enemy infront.
Very complex but sophisticated and I believe very fun.
RTS: (Inspired by what I thought was lacking/unrealistic about other rts games): In any normal RTS game you have tech trees; researching one tech unlocks the abilty to research the other.
Nice and all but thats actually really unrealistic.
I had an idea on having levels of experience on all resources (stone, metal, wood, herbs etc) and skills (mathematics, engineering, construction, metalworking etc).
You’d fill up an xp bar of that resource depending on how much resource you give to your scientists, alchamists, natural philosophers or anyone that does work with that material to study besides to your population to use (i.e. giving 500 wood each second to a scientist will make the knowledge of wood increase faster than giving 50, but then your population requirs wood to build houses and keep warm).
Then technology breakthroughs happen when knowledge of a certain material or skill has reached a certain level (sword at metal lv 10 and metal working lv 3, spear at metal lv 3 and wood lv 1 etc).
Also, you’d always have a hero/leader that you can control, not traditionally by point and click, but as a third person action game.
Considering the power of good gaming pc’s now, and how they would be when I would have the skill to start something like this I think it can be done.
Combo system: I consider most combo system, as varied as they are in moves always repetetive.
This combo system I could actually make with my current skills.
You have over 10/15 light fast moves, and the same amount of heavy slower moves that can be mixed and matched in any way you want.
Any time in a combo chain you choose to switch over from light to heavy, efectively building your own preferred set of moves. I have currently no plans on implementing this into anything, though I’m considering trying it on the more serious arena project I plan on making after my ninja game.
Actual game ideas:
Nach: (Inspired by Crash Bandicoot and Rachet’n’Clank style games) I was actually busy making Nach, though now the hard-drive its on is inside a dead Macbook Pro, so I had decided to do something else till I can get back to it or start over. I had fully planned out one game, largely planned a second game and roughly had an idea for a third.
In the first game its pretty straight foreward; your an insectanoid tribal race, you the player is a character called Nach and is one of the 5 nominated to become the tribehead daughter’s mate. (Technically Nach already knows the outcome of the choosing ceremony, Nach and the Chicha, the daughter, have been secretly romantic for some time now).
Just when the ceremony starts the village gets attacked by lost of Skull-Warriors capturing most of the village including Chicha. Not strong enough to stop everybody you get K.O’d.
You wake up and start your adventure to save Chicha.
The reason why this happend is that a masked villan of the same race wants to be the supreme ruler of everything (duh) through is crystal generated Skull-Warriors… though he has only two of the three by ransacking other tribe villages, and this village supposedly holds the secrets of the wherabouts to the third and final crystal.
After obtaining the leaders staff halfway the game and defeating Warral (the villan) Nach seals him in a minuscular jail-sell of a pocket dimension and he gets forgotten about. (this game would contain linear levels that would’ve included climbing, ledge grabbing and rope swinging).
Second game: Nach is now the new tribehead and is married/mated to Chicha.
Warral is stuck in his tiny prison trying to amuse himself with the few Skull-Warriors he could generate without much power or space in there when his pocket dimension jail shatters.
He finds himself on a wasteland with his few warriors confronted by a huge clockwork drone that nearly steps on him.
When he jumps out of the way he notices he’s in the middle of a huge marching clockwork army of drone in multiple sizes.
The village gets attacked and destroyed by clockwork drones, and captures Nach (and only Nach).
When the villagers regroup and find shelter Chicha decides to after the clockwork drones and save Nach (like the first game, but in reverse). You eventually meat Warral closeby in your jungel. He joins the you as a playable character that can summon and command Skull-Warriors out of crystal transport pads using the few meager powered crystal he collected and the crystals collected out of clockwork power cells from defeated enemies.
The villan is this time an Italian guy from earth looking for power (again, the three crystals) that Nach is now the gaurdian of.
In the end the Italian guy gets killed trying to escape in his rocket and Warral dissappears with one of the three powerful chrystals.
Third game: Not sure, but I’m going for an alien invasion and moving the game into sci-fi.
TF/SW battlefront style game (no name yet, though its from the same universe my comic is in): Far too advanced to even wag a thin dry twig at it, though the idea is still there.
This game would be pretty much like Star Wars Battlefront with the differance being that the map isn’t a piece of terrain of a planet but whole star systems with at least one planet per system.
The idea is to start of on the ground, fly up into space and (depending on the rank achieved by playing the campain, play-time or kills) take a ship from classes fighter to dreadnaught and warp it to other enemy controled star systems, have a space battle, fly to the ground and try to capture the capitol city(s) of the planet in order to make that system yours, then defend it or fly to the next system.
Istead of of having a whole bunch of capturable control points you’d just have millitary bases where armies spawn out of.
The bases could then be captured or destroyed by overriding or destroying the command station of the base to make life easier capturing the capitol.
Invading forces will have to place flares on the ground to recieve re-enforcements from shuttles that land.
The defending force is limited in re-enforcements by the planets population, invading forces are limited to the amount of re-enforcements brought with them in ships (so bring A LOT of ships) and the amount of re-enforcements the ships bring is in turn limited by the population of the planet they come from, and the manufacturing speed (of the exsistance of a manufacturer) of the shipyard.
(Again, computers may not be powerful enough to do this yet, but by the time I have the skill…)