Natural selection
As per my last post, I wrote 31 new game ideas and selected three possible games. Mayble I'll do all three (yeah, sure). Maybe I'll START both three and then dich all three until a new thing comes along.
The selected games are:
- a broody, ambiental, horror game in first person about being stuck in an unknown apartment building. Let's call it building.
- a dark humor job simulator game where the grim reaper works from home. Let's call it reaper.
- a funny physics puzzle game where you are a wizard trapped in a dungeon and your spells let you create and modify your environment. Let's call it wizard.
If I had to choose one of those, It would be wizard. Creative use of the spells to solve the dungeon get me hyped up. I've been thinking about different spells, like "web": you create a web. The web is bouncy so you can jump higher from it. But it's sticky, so enemies walk really slow over it. Also you can use it to climb vertically like a ladder. And if it touches fire, it's engulfed on flames. Or you can use it to block a corridor. The problem with a game like this is I need to tweak a lot of things to get the mechanics / physics right. As a plus, it can work in several ways: FPS, 3rd person view, etc. I was even thinking about a game where the environment is all blocky 3d and the characters are superdeformed 2d sprites with a thick border. It was cool. Might steal.
Next, I would choose reaper. I like dark humor and the whole "kill the guy by suggesting a course of action" also gets me hyped. The main challenge for this game is graphics. While in "wizard" the graphics can be super blocky because the main fun is in the physics / magical system, here the fun must be how the decisions made by the soon-to-be dead people are depicted. Pacman doesn't just dissappears when he dies, y'know. I know there can be lots of fun in this game, but how I depict it is crucial. Cutesy art style? medieval woodblock prints? no, those are reserved for another one. Crude and rudimentary pixel art? I don't know. The best part is I can get to do all the game without any art at all, just menus. See how it goes.
Last, it's building. It's an over-done idea. A cliché. Another backrooms game. The thing is... I worked a LOT with the first 3 Quake games, Half-Life and Counterstrike 1.4 to 1.6 so I'm really proficient with 3D games about a gloomy building in a first person view game. So I know EXACTLY what to do here. Bad thing? How do I get people to be engaged in "just another spooky backrooms game"?
Tags: plans