next »

[Bree]

Ooh, that'd be really cool- if nothing else, it'd be an awesome mechanic to implement in a co-op shooter. Like, you have to get your friend to a health station, so you have to pick him up and let him cover for you while you run.

[Cymon]

I had an idea before about a dungeon crawling RPG where you play as a merchant. The game was half about exploration and discovery and half about enterprising. At first you start off by just collecting random loot from animals such as leather and ivory and peddling them in a public bazaar. People would walk by and buy certain things depending on their interests and professions. For example a blacksmith may buy some ore or a noblewoman may buy a necklace. Eventually you work your way through dungeons and once you clear a dungeon you "own" it and it produces resources for you. You can hire third party craftsmen to make products from your resources for you to sell. Eventually you can purchase shops and hire employees to run them (or man them yourself). Depending on the town's demographic certain items/products sell better than others.

After a while monsters would creep back into dungeons and take over. You can clear them out yourself or post bounties for other adventurers to go in and clear it for you.

There would be a lot of third party hires that would help you in your entreprenual domination, such as an explorers guild that will discover new dungeons for you or find items you missed in old ones.

Of course this was all way too ambitious.. Maybe one day.

I had a remarkably similar idea recently. Of course I was going to do a roguelike, except that after ASCIIpOrtal I'm done with text-as-graphics. But kind of a trading sim on top and a hack and slash roguelike on the bottom. It'd be a real good idea, except that, yeah, your essentially creating 2 games there.

At this point I kinda go on a stream of consciousness thing. Stop at the above paragraph is you don't want to hear me rambling like an idiot.

And why stop at just 2 possibilities. What about a farming sim, or any number of other trades? So you could be a tradesman, a trader who buys from the tradesmen and sells for profit, an adventurer, and whatever you choose you could end up building an empire.

Hmm, only a hop away from an MMORPG at this point.

At which point I decide that this idea needs to be scaled back. 2 levels. Traider or adventurer, pick and choose from those two courses, but design the game to be short. No more than a couple of hours.

If I ever did do this game.

[Bree]

My nigh-impossible dream MMO would be able to combine various games and styles into one arena. Imagine a universe where your character is a merchant, selling goods, when someone playing a thieving MMO steals from your cart. You call for the police, which sends in a player playing a high-level cop. Maybe when you start the game, you begin as a child and go through a basic tutorial of sorts, developing your character's skills and interests, and as an endgame, you pick your career path, which determines what game you play within the meta-MMO.

[Cymon]

My nigh-impossible dream MMO would be able to combine various games and styles into one arena. Imagine a universe where your character is a merchant, selling goods, when someone playing a thieving MMO steals from your cart. You call for the police, which sends in a player playing a high-level cop. Maybe when you start the game, you begin as a child and go through a basic tutorial of sorts, developing your character's skills and interests, and as an endgame, you pick your career path, which determines what game you play within the meta-MMO.

At which point you should just shut off the game and get a real job.

[Starflier]

I've already started a thread about this, but something that would be cool that hasn't really be done is using the gps on the iphone to track the player's movements in the real world and use them to control their character in the game world. So if you want to go ten steps north, you literately need to go ten steps north.

[poorwill]

I had an idea - almost a decade ago now - for a MMOG where you start out as a microscopic 8-bit character running all over the body of a higher level player.  They are basically your boss, and you have to crawl all over them repairing wounds/armour, manning turrets and raiding other players killing their microbes and sucking their blood/taking over their brain etc.  If you're a good microbe you can work your way up the ladder until you're a full-fledged player with your own bunch of 8-bit microbe players.  Then you can keep climbing higher up the rankings, becoming a leader of a player community and eventually a god.  Gods are put into power democratically and can change stuff like weather/gravity/game rules etc.

Too bad I hate MMOGs now.

[rob]

I like that idea. A lot.

[Kekskiller]

I would play a virus in this game.

[Bree]

I would play a virus in this game.

How about a game like that? An asynchronous mutliplayer game, where one player plays a creature infected with a bunch of viruses controlled by another player, and a third controls the antibodies within the first player's system?

[Kekskiller]

This virus stuff makes think of using the player's harddrive as RAM. I somehow want to play such a game

[Lukas]

OKAY GET THIS:


IN A NUTSHELL: Asteroids Roguelike.

GRAPHICAL STYLE: Like the original Asteroids. only LINES. (maybe colors)

CONTROLS: Left/Right: rotate ship   boost: accelerate  shoot: shoot.

THE WORLD: BIG. PROCEDURALLY GENERATED. TOP DOWN SCROLLING. If you pass the world's border at one side you come out at the other side. Levels have a difficulty from 1 to 10. The higher the difficulty, the more multiplyers/powerups and the more enemies are generated.

ENTITIES:
(enemies)
Big slow Asteroid (indestructible);
medium fast Asteroid (shootable, split into 2-3 tiny asteroids) (50score) ;
tiny fast Asteroid (shootable, vaporize when hit)(50score);
Alien Ship (fly around, shoot player with dots, die when shot) (200score);

(pickups)
EXTRA SHIP (grants 1 extra life) (100score);
score multiplier (grants additional x2 score multiplayer for 30 seconds);
SUPER score multiplayer (grants additional x4 multiplyer for 30 seconds);
ULTRA score multiplayer (grants additioanl x10 multiplyer for 20 seconds);

(powerups)
ACCELERATOR (improves ship accerelation on a level between 1 and 3);
COOLER (improves fire rate on a level between 1 and 3);
STEERING DRIVES (improves rotation speed on a level between 1 and 3);

(gates)
DIMENSION GATE (immediately generates new level (harder) and teleports player there);


GAMEPLAY:
Player tries to achieve HIGH SCORE.

If player ship touches any other object, one life is lost and the player is teleported into a new level of the same difficulty.

Once LIFE-count is below 0, GAME OVER. -> High Score Table.






what do you think? 

[X3N]

To my knowledge nobody's ever done a game where you play the endless minions who are pitted against the all-powerful hero, although playing the zombies in Left 4 Dead could be close to that - I haven't played it. But imagine, let's take Doom as an example, there's an AI playing the DOOMguy hero, and you are put into the body of the nearest enemy and have to whittle down his health or whatever as best you can. If you die, not too much of a problem as there are tons more enemies in the level for you to take over. It could also work like an RTS.

I also want to see more games about scale - some games are good with that (Shadow of the Colossus, for example) and the best I've seen are Sins of a Solar Empire and Katamari Damacy, which actually have multiple powers of ten in their game scale. How about using this concept in RTS in terms of teams rather than the overall game - one player plays entities the size of ants, another plays the size of small animals like rats, another team could be human-sized. Obviously you'd have different numbers of units depending on the team to compensate for scale, and all the balancing would be pretty interesting. Like the human-sized team could have 3 big units, whereas the ant-sized team could have 10,000 units.

Or how about an RTS team with no units at all, something like the Creep from Starcraft's Zerg.

I've heard about a pencil-paper game where one player controls a giant Tank and player 2 controls buncha small infantry deciding where to shoot and move and such.

[Squiggly_P]

An RPG with no numbers.  None.  No health, no mana, no str, dex or agi, no skill points, no levels.  The only numbers visible to the player would be the amount of money and items they have.  Everything would be visual, aural and descriptive cues.

-----

MMORPG which starts your character off as a child and basically as defenseless and dependent on others as children are.

-----

A game that uses nothing at all but 3D positional audio and motion-tracking (eye-toy-like maybe?) that could be playable by a blind person.

-----

MMO games that can assign PVP or Guild vs Guild quests.  In the same vein, could also assign coop quests.

[BlueSweatshirt]

A MMO where you, in the beginning, take the role of a soldier-in-training. You suck.

Every other member of the army you're part of is another player.

You're nothing special, just a simple grunt.

Players must work together effectively to win large battles against other armies.(of other players.)

Well, I mean I guess you could have 100 players running in spamming the attack key. But the idea of the game is that the other army would basically win.


Basically, a war game where communication and strategy actually matter. I know some games try to go as team-based, but in all honestly, communication between other plays is almost always entirely unnecessary, and it's much easier and effective playing the "lone badass". The idea of this game is to contradict that entirely to force players to work together in creative ways.
(also, a large-scale war game. Not this 16/32 player crap.)

[Inanimate]

The large scale war game could be an MMO. Everyone joins one of, let's say, 6 sides. These sides are locked in a war. People would be like soldiers; commanded. The leaders of squads, platoons, etc. would be given orders from higher ups who were given orders by highestups. Not following orders is bad, meaning communication and strategy are important. There would be important locations to capture / destroy, and it isn't an automatic 'WIN!' condition, its either when the opponent's country is so destroyed you have no need to attack anymore, or when the opponent surrenders. But the opponent is other people, as well. Every side is a bunch of players, who listen to other players' orders, which are governed by more players, who are deciding where and why to attack. You rise up  the ranks from valid skill, because players promote players. Its basically actual war, just sped up, and with no actual fatalities.

[Bree]

Any of you gents familiar with Massive Action Game? It's a PS3 game being developed by the same guys who did SOCOM that's attempting that very same goal: matches can hold up to 256 players at a time, and according to interviews, the battles will be recorded on a persistent global map.

[Pishtaco]

A MMO where you, in the beginning, take the role of a soldier-in-training. You suck.

Every other member of the army you're part of is another player.

You're nothing special, just a simple grunt.

Players must work together effectively to win large battles against other armies.(of other players.)

Well, I mean I guess you could have 100 players running in spamming the attack key. But the idea of the game is that the other army would basically win.


Basically, a war game where communication and strategy actually matter. I know some games try to go as team-based, but in all honestly, communication between other plays is almost always entirely unnecessary, and it's much easier and effective playing the "lone badass". The idea of this game is to contradict that entirely to force players to work together in creative ways.
(also, a large-scale war game. Not this 16/32 player crap.)

Hasn't Operation Flashpoint, at least, been doing this for years? There are servers where people play using proper military tactics. It's supposed to be a blast.

[BlueSweatshirt]

I haven't heard of that game, I'll have to check it out.

The large scale war game could be an MMO. Everyone joins one of, let's say, 6 sides. These sides are locked in a war. People would be like soldiers; commanded. The leaders of squads, platoons, etc. would be given orders from higher ups who were given orders by highestups. Not following orders is bad, meaning communication and strategy are important. There would be important locations to capture / destroy, and it isn't an automatic 'WIN!' condition, its either when the opponent's country is so destroyed you have no need to attack anymore, or when the opponent surrenders. But the opponent is other people, as well. Every side is a bunch of players, who listen to other players' orders, which are governed by more players, who are deciding where and why to attack. You rise up  the ranks from valid skill, because players promote players. Its basically actual war, just sped up, and with no actual fatalities.

So in other words, what I said, but more well thought through and properly worded? 

[Inanimate]

I haven't heard of that game, I'll have to check it out.

The large scale war game could be an MMO. Everyone joins one of, let's say, 6 sides. These sides are locked in a war. People would be like soldiers; commanded. The leaders of squads, platoons, etc. would be given orders from higher ups who were given orders by highestups. Not following orders is bad, meaning communication and strategy are important. There would be important locations to capture / destroy, and it isn't an automatic 'WIN!' condition, its either when the opponent's country is so destroyed you have no need to attack anymore, or when the opponent surrenders. But the opponent is other people, as well. Every side is a bunch of players, who listen to other players' orders, which are governed by more players, who are deciding where and why to attack. You rise up  the ranks from valid skill, because players promote players. Its basically actual war, just sped up, and with no actual fatalities.

So in other words, what I said, but more well thought through and properly worded? 

I know, I was just trying to help out a bit, throw in some of my smaller ideas... sorry. 

[BlueSweatshirt]

I haven't heard of that game, I'll have to check it out.

The large scale war game could be an MMO. Everyone joins one of, let's say, 6 sides. These sides are locked in a war. People would be like soldiers; commanded. The leaders of squads, platoons, etc. would be given orders from higher ups who were given orders by highestups. Not following orders is bad, meaning communication and strategy are important. There would be important locations to capture / destroy, and it isn't an automatic 'WIN!' condition, its either when the opponent's country is so destroyed you have no need to attack anymore, or when the opponent surrenders. But the opponent is other people, as well. Every side is a bunch of players, who listen to other players' orders, which are governed by more players, who are deciding where and why to attack. You rise up  the ranks from valid skill, because players promote players. Its basically actual war, just sped up, and with no actual fatalities.

So in other words, what I said, but more well thought through and properly worded? 

I know, I was just trying to help out a bit, throw in some of my smaller ideas... sorry. 

That was partly an inordinate thank you. I sort of just scribbled down what I had been thinking, and you turned it into something that was actually readable.  :D

I liked the bit you threw in about the player ranking. My thoughts though were more along everyone was equal, but democracy is so yesterday anyway.