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[Parthon]

I had this game idea/concept for a while, and it's more like a game-changing idea.

The idea was game characters or worlds where increasing in size is a gameplay consideration. The world itself and the puzzles and challenges presented are solved or completely modified by the increase. An example would be Katamari Damacy where growth was the goal. There's also Spore cell stage, where each growth changed the enemies you faced. Larger enemies became targets, small enemies became food.

So where am I going with this? I just wanted to apply it to particular genres and see what people think.

The first is platformers. Like Mario when he gets the mushroom, he's twice as tall, and can break bricks, but now he can't get into small gaps. Imagine if the second one he ate also worked. Suddently he's 4 bricks high, there's more gaps he can't get into, but now he can jump over obstacles that he couldn't before. Certain enemies would be weaker. Then if he got another mushroom he would be 8 squares tall, a giant amongst goombas. Forget about entering pipes, but there's a whole new giant world to explore.

The other genre that would be interesting: Tower Defense. As the player defends against the oncoming horde, the playfield slowly zooms out. At first there's some enemies that are twice regular size, and the player has to work harder to defeat them. But he can also upgrade his towers so they are also twice the size. Soon it's an arms race, upgrade the towers fast enough while bigger and bigger enemies arrive while old, smaller towers become less and less effective. If the player can't upgrade his towers fast enough he falls behind, but he needs to place enough to kill the enemy, always knowing that the towers he places will be useless quite soon, and new, much larger towers will be needed that dwarf the old towers. The new enemies would also ignore the old barriers that limited their smaller siblings, so the path they would take would be more open, harder to defend. This is definately a concept that could be fun.

I'm also concepting up a match 3, or columns type puzzle game that could use a growth/zoom/doubling mechanic. How it would work I'm not sure on right now.

So what other genres, games or gameplay types could this concept be applied to? Anything where the increase isn't just minor, but many factors of 2, stacking on each other, perhaps even indefinately.

[Inanimate]

Actually, I toyed with an idea about size a while back! This would work very well for a 3D platformer. You could have:

Super Small, Small, Normal, Big, Super Big, Mega Big, Ultra Big, Ungodly Big, Godly Big!


Perhaps there could be gigantic monsters too, which you could even climb on, and when Super Small you can even climb up REGULAR monsters. Platforming with enemies!

It would be a very interesting look on platforming, to say the least.

[Hempuli‽]

Super Small, Small, Normal, Big, Super Big, Mega Big, Ultra Big, Ungodly Big, Godly Big!

BEYOND GODLIKE

I've thought about this idea several times. Unfortunately for me, MMF 2 which I'm using cannot handle zooming very well, so those really cool effects (like a totally new-looking world appearing as the game zooms out) are out of possibilities for me.

Another idea I had on the matter was the same thing working backwards - you could become tinier and tinier, and there could be stuff like passages so tiny you can't normally even see them, unless you become small enough and the game zooms in to show them. With good enough engine you could stuff a whole game world inside a single tile!

[gunmaggot]

There's a mutator in Unreal Tournament called fatboy where the leading player gets fatter and fatter the more dudes he kills, which makes him an easier target.  There was a recent talk or something where Keita Takahashi brought up the idea as a novel application of the get-bigger concept.  I felt bad for him, because it had already been done, and before Katamari for that matter.

[gunmaggot]

Also, I have to mention Giants Citizen Kabuto just because.
And Bubbles, because that was the first.

[SirNiko]

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Pixelante/alter

Alter is a recently released platformed that uses a shrink/grow mechanic as a basis for puzzles. When you're bigger, you can run faster and jump farther, but you're also more cramped while indoors. Small lets you fit through small passages and dodge obstacles, but pits and ledges pose problems.

One thing I liked about Katamari was that the terrain changed as your size increased: a bookshelf that posed as a series of platforms when you're small becomes a ramp when you're larger, and becomes a mere collectable when you're even bigger. I'd like to see a game that deals with the opposite: the player starts big, and you want to plan ahead as you shrink, moving and changing the terrain while you can to ensure you can still navigate later when you're tinier. It might work for a puzzle-based game, I think.

An action platformer that revolves around twitch shrink/grow mechanics could also be fun, as you pointed out. Rather than going between a huge range of sizes, I'd limit it to small/medium/large, with the player switching sizes rapidly to dodge enemies or scale obstacles.

Just some thoughts on the subject.

-SirNiko