I've been trying to spend my limited spare time on more serious stuff, but this idea has been nagging at me pretty consistently for the last five months and keeps trying to turn into a fully-fleshed-out design, so I thought I'd share it and see what people think...
A third-person six-degree-of-freedom action-adventure where you explore an abstract garden/circulatory system and fight disease. Grow and shrink your shark-like medical bot to progress from tiny capillaries to giant arteries and back again.
The core mechanic is that you shrink when you expend energy (by shooting energy bolts) and you grow when you absorb energy (from getting hit or by performing surgery with your sharp pectoral fins, which generates static electricity or something). You get killed by energy blasts which are too big to absorb, or by getting too big and getting stuck (then your cutting fins continuously generate energy and you expand exponentially, exploding your host organism). If you're too big you can't get into the smaller tunnels, but if you're too small you can't take on the big enemies and you can't fight the current in larger tunnels.
The object is to kill the disease organisms and then navigate to a capillary just below the skin where you can cut through and exit the host organism without causing too much damage.
I'm picturing an abstract mix between blood vessels/tunnels with bacteria and disease and a forest/garden with plants growing in the tunnel walls, in a simplistic painterly art style along the lines of ktch's
Places. Well, brighter and more colorful, but still somewhat muted.
My idea for the first world is a sort of blood disease: Tomato "trees" grow red blood cells. Giant moths (think B2 stealth bombers) lay tiny green eggs on the bottom of the leaves, which hatch into tiny worms which quickly grow to enormous proportions, devouring the plants. In the side tunnels are dandelions, which grow "seed" heads containing hordes of bacteriophages which attack the blood cells. You have to cut the plants off below the surface to kill them: if you just mow down the leaves they'll grow back. And then there would be some helpful native immune system organisms: spiders or predatory wasps which prey on the worms and phages, and some sort of critter which eats the dandelions. And...probably one more level of enemies as you go smaller.
I dunno. Descent was just so much fun. And I love natural history: I've been a small farmer for the last eight years, so I'm always surrounded by it, and I've always wanted to try putting it into a game in a semi-abstract form. Lots of ideas for more worlds/environments: I'm thinking that when you exit one host you find yourself inside another, larger organism. But I think I could keep the art/mechanics simple enough to make it a viable project, at least to get one world built.
Thoughts?
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