next »

[Acid]

One player controls the top half of a body.
The second controls the bottom.
Both players are stuggling to reach orbs that give points and powerups.
If they pull to hard in the wrong direction, they rip the character in half, killing both and ending the game. (Both fail.)
It's a race to see who can get the most points without killing each other in the process.

Edit: New Idea!

"Chaos Theory"
There are scattered pixels all over the screen.
One player tries to collect them all in the "home base" while the other tries to keep the first player from achieving this goal by rescattering them.

[FK in the Coffee]

One player controls the top half of a body.
The second controls the bottom.
Both players are stuggling to reach orbs that give points and powerups.
If they pull to hard in the wrong direction, they rip the character in half, killing both and ending the game. (Both fail.)
It's a race to see who can get the most points without killing each other in the process.

Oooh, I really like this one.  Hope it gets made into something.  I would, if I wasn't still heavily into learning GML.

[Paint by Numbers]

Tom Cruise and Jerry Seinfeld's big soccer showdown

This and

One player controls the top half of a body.
The second controls the bottom.
Both players are stuggling to reach orbs that give points and powerups.

this are both good. They must be done.

[mcc]

Someone should also make a remake of

.  (Think top-down smash bros.)

Fake Bop Louie is inferior!

[J. R. Hill]

I like the bird slightly better, but only because he is a lovable drunkard.

[ChevyRay]

Some interesting take on Tug-o-War could be pretty cool, too.

[Wilson Saunders]

Since I am already working on another idea, I am just going to share openly.

Competitive Vampire tower defense.

Two Vampire brothers live in the same gloomy tower. They are bound by a curse that neither vampire can kill the other, yet one will gain infinite power should the other vampire die of "natural" causes. So naturally the vampires start hording treasure in their castle to attract vampire slayers and other heroes to kill their brother.

The vampires set up magic booby traps to defend their side of the castle while dumping valuable items on their brother's side to attract heroes. The set up phase is turn based and without timer. Once the setup is done the players hide in their coffins and let the day's raiding commence.

Some traps will drain the blood of adventurers to feed the mana reserve of the vampires in the next night's setup phase. Other traps will insta kill a victim without draining any blood. The type of heroes that invade the castle will depend on the type of treasure the vampires leave out. Holy relics will attract priests, princesses will attract knights, food will attract starving peasants, and magic tombs will attract wizards. Different traps will be stronger against different hero types.

[idoru]

Gladiator vs. Colosseum

The first player controls a gladiator with the keyboard. The second player controls the colosseum, i.e. everything trying to defeat the gladiator, with the mouse. The gladiator has a set of basic moves (kick, punch, dodge) and gains special moves and other benefits by picking up objects thrown into the colosseum by spectators. The colosseum has a stable of enemies (giant insects, large animals, hordes of small animals, other gladiators), of which there are a limited amount per battle. This stable is represented by a grid of icons depicting each enemy and the number of each remaining. By clicking on an icon, the player in control of the colosseum sends enemies toward the gladiator. Once enemies are in the play area, they move and attack according to their own AI.

Doing well as the gladiator unlocks benefits when playing as the colosseum. New enemies, more handlers to allow a faster rate of releasing enemies, etc. The set of enemies for each battle may be randomized or chosen from pre-determined sets of enemies that work well together. Doing well as the gladiator also increases the amount of spectators and therefore the variety of power-ups that may be thrown into the colosseum.

Play style is similar to that of NES-era beat-em-ups (Double Dragon, River City Ransom, etc.) but on a non-scrolling play area; the entire colosseum is visible at once. Because of the keyboard vs. mouse control scheme, the game could be played by two players on the same computer or via network.

[Captain_404]

A Symmetric Asymmetric Game

Every thirty seconds player switch off between attacking and defending roles. Imagine a procedural platformer like spelunky. One player is the shopkeeper, the other is the hapless explorer-thief who must venture rapidly into the cavernous depths before that angry shopkeeper kills him. Once the thirty seconds are up, the explorer suddenly has the shotgun via magic and the shopkeeper is empty handed. The chase is on! Time for revenge! The balance of power keeps shifting between the two at regular intervals.

Should not literally be spelunky though.

[jabbawocky]

Highlander. There can be only one! 

[dontkickpenguins]

You know the

That. Maybe each player has some skills that are hidden from the other players that are needed to break into the bank? So you have to keep players alive to get the money and you need to work out what skills other players have so that you can kill them off.

Maybe it would work more as a card game? Then you have the whole social aspect.

[Arne]

Coincidentally to this contest I was looking at Nether Earth again, and it lead me to investigate Cytron Masters and Galactic Gladiators/Adventures.

Galactic Gladiators and Galactic Adventures (SSI, Tom Reamy)
@ my blog

Cytron Masters (SSI, Dan Bunten)



@ Wikipedia

Also, RoboSport
@ Wikipedia

I've thought a bit about doing a gfx set, isometric, but it seems like another thing which I wouldn't finish.

[Nugsy]

I've thought a bit about doing a gfx set, isometric, but it seems like another thing which I wouldn't finish.

Do it anyway!

[FinalSin]

I'd like to see some Game Theory situations played out in these games somehow. In particular, the $1 split game (Player A has a buck, and can make an offer to Player B as how to split it. If B refuses, both get nothing.) and the game of Chicken (Two players drive cars at each other at high speed. First to swerve away loses; if neither swerve then both lose).

They're classic 'versus' scenarios, would love to see either mixed in with other mechanics somehow.

[FinalSin]

Also; I couldn't quite get this idea to work, but:

Tetrewelled

Two player puzzle mashups. In particular, I envisaged one player playing Tetris with the rules inverted (attempt to stack blocks up to the top) and another player playing Bejewelled (the blocks that the Tetris player drops are all different colours, match three to win).

Naturally, you'd need to fiddle with the physics of the blocks - probably, when they drop, the individual blocks slide down into place. The challenge would be trying to avoid creating matches for the second player... or something? Maybe someone can expand and tweak that a bit.

[mcc]

Also; I couldn't quite get this idea to work, but:

Tetrewelled

Two player puzzle mashups. In particular, I envisaged one player playing Tetris with the rules inverted (attempt to stack blocks up to the top) and another player playing Bejewelled (the blocks that the Tetris player drops are all different colours, match three to win).

Naturally, you'd need to fiddle with the physics of the blocks - probably, when they drop, the individual blocks slide down into place. The challenge would be trying to avoid creating matches for the second player... or something? Maybe someone can expand and tweak that a bit.

Did you ever play Tetris DS? They had this interesting concept called "Push Mode" that might give you ideas here.

[FinalSin]

Thoughts, then: we're going to make a lot of Versus games. Would a mini-comp be possible later, for people to design AI for the open-sourced games made during Versus? That way, we'd get longetivity out of the ones that are online-only (or for the friendless!).

EDIT - Push mode sounds cool. That's the kind of thing I'd love to see!

[Fluff]

Game idea: kind of a combination of this and this -- what about a 3-way fencing game? What would that look like? I'm thinking something that could handle a 2-on-1 situation or an every-man-for-himself type deal.

Or what about an arbitrary number of people? You could get a Three-Musketeer-5-on-4 thing going. But I'm having a hard time imagining what the specifics would even look like... maybe a kind of Zelda Z-targeting system?

Thoughts, then: we're going to make a lot of Versus games. Would a mini-comp be possible later, for people to design AI for the open-sourced games made during Versus?

Ooo nice idea -- that would be very interesting.

[LiquidAsh]

Thoughts, then: we're going to make a lot of Versus games. Would a mini-comp be possible later, for people to design AI for the open-sourced games made during Versus? That way, we'd get longetivity out of the ones that are online-only (or for the friendless!).

Or your versus game could pit players to write ai against eachother(?).  It could either play against their opponent's AI, or against their opponent/player.

I do like this suggestion, but am not sure how many people would feel up to digging through month-long-competition code, and hacking ai on top of it(?).

[cpuguy89]

Some sort of deathmatch game where you can't see your opponents. The only way to find them would be to watch bullets, items being taken, bombs going off, etc.