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[TheSnidr]

Very few of you know me.
Yet, I think I'm starting to know the forums - I like lurking a little while before I start posting.

I am TheSnidr, a semi-active member of the game maker community. I mostly deal with special effects like fake 3d and view distortions, and my current project is heavily based on the latter. It's really early in progress though, I mainly made this topic to showcase the effect (which I hope goes under "design"?)
Basically, you're moving around on a weird sphere - it looks like a sphere at first eyesight, but proves to be something else once you notice its flaws (or rather, its unique potential gameplay elements).
I don't have any ideas as to what to make of this, but well, hopefully I come up with something!



You can try it for yourself here:
http://www.yoyogames.com/games/146619-spheroid

Or see it on youtube (this shows a few of the vague gameplay ideas I have):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfzCMUzsJ6k

[man of doom]

Just watched the video.
So it only looks like a sphere when in fact it's more of a looping box thing? Looks pretty cool to me, although I can't really imagine any specific effects on gameplay right now, other than a really funky projection style.

[TheLastBanana]

That's kind of a neat effect, assuming I'm understanding it right - essentially, it's a flat plane projected onto a sphere, and it has more area than the actual sphere. In terms of gameplay I'm not all too sure what it would be used for, but it does look cool.

[FishyBoy]

I'd like to see this used as an overworld for an XCOM style global view before zooming into smaller events. It would make it possible to have persistent tiles around the globe much easier and accessible.

[RCIX]

It's not that it's not interesting, just that this isn't quite the spot for it. Try the Art section

[John Sandoval]

No, the Technical section would be better... or the Tutorial.

[Xion]

I think it's interesting but I'm not sure what sort of response you were expecting?

[brog]

It's not very clear what's going on from the video.  It looks like you're taking a rectangle and joining opposite ends up (i.e. making a topological torus), but just drawing part of it bulged out to give the illusion of it being a sphere?  This is not uninteresting, but it's not a new discovery - we've had games on tori since Asteroids,  if not even earlier.  Rendering it deceptively to look locally like a sphere is something different, but isn't going to introduce any new gameplay.  Sorry that this is less cool than you'd hoped.

If you make this into a game, could you make it very very clear to the player that this is not a sphere?  I worry that if people don't have very well-developed geometric intuition already, that this could hurt their notion of what a sphere is shaped like.  It might seem silly, but I've had to teach people geometry sometimes, and I recall one occasion where I had the hardest time convincing someone that the shape you get when you join opposite ends of a piece of paper is a TORUS, not a SPHERE (even after showing them a video like what I linked above).  There's certainly a place for games fucking with you by deceiving you about the geometry of the space you're in, but if someone doesn't already have an intuition of what a sphere is like and what a torus is like, showing them a torus disguised as a sphere will just mislead them rather than surprise them.
edit: I mean, make what you like, just be aware of what it might be teaching players.

[TheSnidr]

Yay, replies ^^
Excuse the emo comment from yesterday, I tend to get like that when my work isn't noticed.

As for the gameplay, I didn't really expect you to feed me with ideas, and I probably won't end up using the effect as a main gameplay feature - I just want it to add to the game as a whole.

And it's correct as you say, Brog, it's made by connecting opposite sides, and as TheLastBana said, draw the flat view onto a bulging shape.
This lets me use a normal square grid when placing objects (such as the game maker room editor), and the size of the room isn't limited by the area of the sphere.
And Brog, thanks for the warning - When (if) I release the game, I'll add a "Player discretion is adviced"

[Josiah Tobin]

A bit of a different comment... I actually found the video quite inspiring/weirdly haunting -- something about the music combined with the strange effect struck a chord with me. So, if nothing else, you've given me some ideas

~Josiah

[Danmark]

For now I've only watched the video, but it looks like you're playing with something along the lines of a stereographic projection. It would only really affect 3D gameplay.

The only game I know of to ever use it was some canned iteration of the Sonic series.