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[Loren Schmidt]

Oh, ha! That would be fun. Along those lines, I once worked on a project where the parallax scrolling, wind, etc. were all controlled by actual physical objects in the level. They were just little animated objects, but it would be fun if they were somehow interactive, or could be destroyed or something.

Or what if the level were made out of prefabricated areas on pieces of paper, but you could pause the game and rearrange the pieces in relation to each other? For instance you could put a piece with a pushable block on it next to a piece with a pressure activated switch on it, and then use the block with the switch. Or you could put a black hole piece underneath an area to increase the gravity temporarily.

[Noel Berry]

I love games that let you somehow "break" the game. For example, I tried once creating a platformer where you could cut out pieces from the background and replace them. Would be quite cooley.

That would be really cool. It would be interesting in attempting to make it too...

I once attempted making a text controlled platformer. Basically, you type in the command, like "jump" to make the player jump. It actually turned out to be really interesting, and kinda fun. Although, in some levels, you had to type pretty fast.

I think ideas that are completely different from what people are used to could scare them away from playing the game. But, by adding small, original things, it can make the game feel unique, but not completely abstract.. if that makes sense.

[Kneecaps]

How about a game where you're a zombie, but you can only attack things with weapons.  The problem is, weapons are pretty scarce and there's a bunch of enemies.  So, you have to rip off your own limbs to use as weapons against the enemies.  The limbs you rip off could have different effects.  For example, ripping off your legs causes you to crawl around with your arms, making you much slower.  You could also tear off your head to use as a projectile.  Maybe you could use the limbs of others as well?

[Pishtaco]

How about a game where you're a zombie, but you can only attack things with weapons.  The problem is, weapons are pretty scarce and there's a bunch of enemies.  So, you have to rip off your own limbs to use as weapons against the enemies.  The limbs you rip off could have different effects.  For example, ripping off your legs causes you to crawl around with your arms, making you much slower.  You could also tear off your head to use as a projectile.  Maybe you could use the limbs of others as well?

Sounds like Stubbs the Zombie.

[Loren Schmidt]

I once attempted making a text controlled platformer. Basically, you type in the command, like "jump" to make the player jump. It actually turned out to be really interesting, and kinda fun. Although, in some levels, you had to type pretty fast.

Do you still have that somewhere? It sounds really fun. I wonder if a voice activated version would work.

[Kneecaps]

Sounds like Stubbs the Zombie.

*Goes to Wikipedia*

Yeah, you're right.  I need to play more games, I guess. :/

[Noel Berry]

I once attempted making a text controlled platformer. Basically, you type in the command, like "jump" to make the player jump. It actually turned out to be really interesting, and kinda fun. Although, in some levels, you had to type pretty fast.

Do you still have that somewhere? It sounds really fun. I wonder if a voice activated version would work.

Sure do. And, voice activated would be very interesting indeed.

As a note, though, it is a bit buggy. I made the game quite a while ago, and was not the best programmer at the time...

Anyways, link: http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/26371

Tell me what you think of it..

I'm thinking of remaking it with better graphics+gameplay in the future, after some other projects I'm working on.

[Ninja Disguise]

I was actually thinking of writing a short story where a man is told by Destiny (manifested in physcial form, similar to Death) that he has to save the world, but the man doesn't want to. As a short story it would end with the man and Destiny playing a game of chess; if the man wins he can continue on with his life and the world will be destroyed, but if Destiny wins he has to do whatever it is Destiny has planned for him and the world will be saved.

Just a little twist on the "Chosen One" idea where the Chosen One isn't interested in his so-called 'destiny.'

[Loren Schmidt]

Tell me what you think of it..
I'm thinking of remaking it with better graphics+gameplay in the future, after some other projects I'm working on.

Hey, that's pretty fun. I think it would be worth revisiting.


I wrote a quick design summary for the 'pieces of paper' idea- I'm pretty excited about it, and I think I might make this in the future.

Paper Pieces Game

We are a simple line drawing of a character who runs and jumps through a set of hand drawn environments. The world is divided into discrete areas, each drawn on its own scrap of paper. We can run around in the game world, leaping or walking between neighboring paper scraps and discovering new areas. The world starts with a relatively small number of areas accessible. Each time a new area is discovered, it is added to the world map.

At any time we can pause, zooming the camera way out, and freely rearrange the paper scraps we have discovered. Here are a few of the ways rearranging the paper pieces can be used.

• move an obstacle out of the way, and turn it into a useful platform.
  
• recursively move two staircases (or even simple blocks!) so they form an ascending chain, unpausing to jump up one step after each move.
  
• place a staircase next to a tower without an entrance
• put a stone block within pushing distance of the appropriate pressure plate lock.

Paper scraps we have not yet reached in person cannot be rearranged (and appear only faintly in the map view, or not at all). The scrap of paper we are currently standing on cannot be moved, so though the environment is rearrangeable, we still end up physically travelling from one part of space to another.

Graphics- hand drawn, rough scribbles on textured white paper. The game has a slightly desolate, lonely feel. Use several frames for everything, even static objects, so the game jiggles slightly, like a low framerate animation done in heavy graphite. Each scrap is hand drawn as a set piece, with no tiling. Scraps are torn  at edges. The main character can move between scraps, so how does he look when over the background?

For a totally free world, allow movement of any scrap of paper anywhere, provided it doesn't overlap another piece.
For a more limited world, have some scraps tacked, taped, or otherwise fastened down. We can reach these areas by arranging the pieces that are movable into runways, horizontal or vertical chains of islands, etc.
For an even more limited world, scraps can only be arranged along a horizontal strip, like railroad cars.

[William Broom]

That sounds awesome. The only thing I would do differently is make it so that rather than having more pieces unlocked by travelling to them, you would find them in the game world. For example you might open a treasure chest and be rewarded with a scrunched up ball of paper. You then unroll it and you have a new piece of paper to move around wherever you like.

The reason I would do it like this would be because it would break up the concept of space even more. On the other hand this would remove some of the possible mechanics, such as stacking platforms to reach a distant, immovable paper piece.

[Hempuli‽]

Tell me what you think of it..
I'm thinking of remaking it with better graphics+gameplay in the future, after some other projects I'm working on.

Hey, that's pretty fun. I think it would be worth revisiting.


I wrote a quick design summary for the 'pieces of paper' idea- I'm pretty excited about it, and I think I might make this in the future.

Paper Pieces Game

We are a simple line drawing of a character who runs and jumps through a set of hand drawn environments. The world is divided into discrete areas, each drawn on its own scrap of paper. We can run around in the game world, leaping or walking between neighboring paper scraps and discovering new areas. The world starts with a relatively small number of areas accessible. Each time a new area is discovered, it is added to the world map.

At any time we can pause, zooming the camera way out, and freely rearrange the paper scraps we have discovered. Here are a few of the ways rearranging the paper pieces can be used.

• move an obstacle out of the way, and turn it into a useful platform.
  
• recursively move two staircases (or even simple blocks!) so they form an ascending chain, unpausing to jump up one step after each move.
  
• place a staircase next to a tower without an entrance
• put a stone block within pushing distance of the appropriate pressure plate lock.

Paper scraps we have not yet reached in person cannot be rearranged (and appear only faintly in the map view, or not at all). The scrap of paper we are currently standing on cannot be moved, so though the environment is rearrangeable, we still end up physically travelling from one part of space to another.

Graphics- hand drawn, rough scribbles on textured white paper. The game has a slightly desolate, lonely feel. Use several frames for everything, even static objects, so the game jiggles slightly, like a low framerate animation done in heavy graphite. Each scrap is hand drawn as a set piece, with no tiling. Scraps are torn  at edges. The main character can move between scraps, so how does he look when over the background?

For a totally free world, allow movement of any scrap of paper anywhere, provided it doesn't overlap another piece.
For a more limited world, have some scraps tacked, taped, or otherwise fastened down. We can reach these areas by arranging the pieces that are movable into runways, horizontal or vertical chains of islands, etc.
For an even more limited world, scraps can only be arranged along a horizontal strip, like railroad cars.

Awesome idea. I've tried to do almost the same thing by myself earlier (and actually it worked quite well), but it was in a single level. The idea of having several, larger areas and such sounds cooley. I'd love to try that out, but apparently the program I use doesnt' allow such zooming. Or at least it's pretty awkward thing to do.

[postlogic]

- A turn based strategy game where all players set up your turns by giving orders, and then they play out for maybe thirty seconds in real-time with no input as you watch (and scream as your carefully laid plans turn to custard).

RoboStrike beat you to that...

Which is stolen from Robo Rally  I love that game. In fact, I'm gonna call some friends and play it next week.

[Noel Berry]

I wrote a quick design summary for the 'pieces of paper' idea- I'm pretty excited about it, and I think I might make this in the future.

Paper Pieces Game

We are a simple line drawing of a character who runs and jumps through a set of hand drawn environments. The world is divided into discrete areas, each drawn on its own scrap of paper. We can run around in the game world, leaping or walking between neighboring paper scraps and discovering new areas. The world starts with a relatively small number of areas accessible. Each time a new area is discovered, it is added to the world map.

At any time we can pause, zooming the camera way out, and freely rearrange the paper scraps we have discovered. Here are a few of the ways rearranging the paper pieces can be used.

• move an obstacle out of the way, and turn it into a useful platform.
  
• recursively move two staircases (or even simple blocks!) so they form an ascending chain, unpausing to jump up one step after each move.
  
• place a staircase next to a tower without an entrance
• put a stone block within pushing distance of the appropriate pressure plate lock.

Paper scraps we have not yet reached in person cannot be rearranged (and appear only faintly in the map view, or not at all). The scrap of paper we are currently standing on cannot be moved, so though the environment is rearrangeable, we still end up physically travelling from one part of space to another.

Graphics- hand drawn, rough scribbles on textured white paper. The game has a slightly desolate, lonely feel. Use several frames for everything, even static objects, so the game jiggles slightly, like a low framerate animation done in heavy graphite. Each scrap is hand drawn as a set piece, with no tiling. Scraps are torn  at edges. The main character can move between scraps, so how does he look when over the background?

For a totally free world, allow movement of any scrap of paper anywhere, provided it doesn't overlap another piece.
For a more limited world, have some scraps tacked, taped, or otherwise fastened down. We can reach these areas by arranging the pieces that are movable into runways, horizontal or vertical chains of islands, etc.
For an even more limited world, scraps can only be arranged along a horizontal strip, like railroad cars.

That's a really interesting idea, I think it could make quite an enjoyable game! I definitely think you should use the taped/fastened down idea too, to make the game a bit harder. I could see it becoming a little easy if you were able to move every piece of paper.

I agree with chutup's idea on finding new map pieces. I think having treasure chests and stuff on different pieces of paper could make the game a bit more fun, aswell as add to the exploration part of the game.

Also, I think you should make sure that the piece of paper the player is currently on cannot be moved. Otherwise you could move the person wherever you wanted.

[Loren Schmidt]

...rather than having more pieces unlocked by travelling to them, you would find them in the game world. For example you might open a treasure chest and be rewarded with a scrunched up ball of paper. You then unroll it and you have a new piece of paper to move around wherever you like.

I definitely think you should use the taped/fastened down idea too, to make the game a bit harder. I could see it becoming a little easy if you were able to move every piece of paper.

These are good ideas. The crumpled up paper pieces would help add variety. And it's true, the game wouldn't be very interesting if everything were movable. Some care would need to be taken to make sure the rules didn't break the game.

I've tried to do almost the same thing by myself earlier (and actually it worked quite well), but it was in a single level.

Oh, neat! What sort of game were you working on? I'd love to hear more about where you went with the idea.

Sounds like Stubbs the Zombie.

*Goes to Wikipedia*

Yeah, you're right.  I need to play more games, I guess. :/

In my book, it doesn't matter how much an idea has been used, as long as it's good. And you thought it up on your own, anyway! For instance Braid used ideas that were previously in the Sands of Time games and Blinx (shudder), but I still think it was right to make it.

[Cheater‽]

Bird-flight sims (as realistic as possible).

Except the "realistic" part: http://www.tunneldodge.com/

[Lukas]

Hi.

Funny. I had the idea Xion mentioned and Sparky supported on page 1 some months ago: The bird-flight thing.

I was really excited aswell. I mean... none ever really did this, but it can still be a simple yet deep and absolutely fun game.

I even started to "develop" it with a friend but we kinda failed. We just didn't invest the time and my friend (who was the one who actually had to program all the functions and physics-simulation-principles I came up with and changed over the time wasn't very motivated to finish the game). We developed without any animations or graphics. We did it with a simple "cross made up of lines" at first. (representing the bird with spread wings). We called the prototype "Bird of Prey", by the way.


Anyway, I'm still absolutely doped to develop that game sometime, somehow. I have pretty thought-through concepts already. (I wrote down a german design document back then. :/ )


If you like me to, I can roll out my ideas a little bit:
The game would show the bird from a 3rd-person perspective (the camera follows the bird and also tilts with him).
The focus lies on big, majestic birds like falcons, eagles, vultures but it could also support birds like pigeons, gulls, ravens etc.
The birds should (of course) all feel a bit different, like cars in motorsport simulators like Gran Turismo and Forza.
The controls should be intuitive and innovative. This means that the game shouldn't feel like an aircraft-simulator. The player should just be able to control the wing/tail feather-angles and the flapping (closed/spread wings) in order to navigate through the air.
(I thought one could map the angles to the dual-analog-sticks of the Xbox360-controller while the flapping is controled by the left and right trigger)
The game-modes could differ: There could be a simple "fly around in a beautiful landscape" -mode, (competitive) races through more-or-less tight chasms and also nature-like scenarios like... hunting smaller birds, fish etc.

The games main feature should be the sensation induced by flying. Since we humans always dreamed of flying, this seems natural.
The sound-design could support that (the noise of the wind mapped to the height and speed) aswell as camera-effects. (motion-blur?)
The main development steps are a.) the flying-engine and b.) the graphics/animation build around it.
I came to the point that the flying engine should rest on 4 columns:
- The bird gains speed (main direction: downwards) by moving downwards, ergo by accomodating gravity.
- The bird gains speed in a chosen direction by flapping and facing towards the direction.
- The birds movement is altered (always slowed down in a certain direction) by his body-position (the angles of his wings/feathers). (the engine could actually treat the bird as one)
- The birds movement is altered (accelerated in a certain direction) by the wind direction and strenght.

Those columns are being altered by parameters like the bird's mass, the area of its wings etc.. So you could basically create new birds by simply altering some parameters.

This should create a basic framework, which can always be tweaked. (e.g. with details like a function that connects the wing-angles to the wind-strenght (concerning the wind-direction ... but thats all fancy stuff)

 
The graphics and animation are a pretty big factor aswell, of course.
One could build the bird-model and add some joints for the wings and tail feather and than map the control-input to the joint-positions. Things like downs and feathers could maybe be displayed with particles.
The game should feel relatively realistic but could also have a more expressionist-look.

Those are just some of my basic ideas...

I had numerous additional ideas like... I could tell you one I really like:
The birds and landscapes could all also count as distinctive musical instruments! This might seem a bit odd but it is actually simple:
Every landscape has its own "canvas"-sound consisting of wind and maybe some very ambient and backgroundish flute-sounds.
Whenever a bird flaps its wings, a chime/rattel-sound of some sort is played.
Whenever a bird steers in a certain direction (left, right, straight ahead etc.) a flute-ish sound alters it's frequency so flying actually creates melodies.
The sounds and harmonies are different for every bird and every landscape.


Anyway... I guess it's pretty hard to develop but that pretty much depends on how high you put your goals concerning the production values.
I think that such a game could appeal both to "hardcore"-gamers and "casuals" (moms and dads) if its pulled off well. (controls, feel, graphical style and graphics overall).



I still wonder if this whole thing is SOMEHOW developable by indies. :/

It's also one of the games I want to develop because I want to play it.



My two cents...

[Hempuli‽]

I've tried to do almost the same thing by myself earlier (and actually it worked quite well), but it was in a single level.

Oh, neat! What sort of game were you working on? I'd love to hear more about where you went with the idea.

Well, I had a level with several different-looking rooms floating around. You could turn them 90 degrees, and move them around. Then you used WSAD to move and jump around with the player. You couldn't move the pieces over each other nor over the player. I made it quite quickly, so it was a lot more rubbish than it could be with it's full potential.

[Loren Schmidt]

Hempuli- I like way you used rotation. That sounds like it would make for some creative reuse of rooms. Thanks for sharing, I really enjoy hearing other people's game ideas.

BaronCid- That sounds like a fun project. I can tell you put a lot of love into it. I can see how it would become overwhelming, though! It's one of those games ideas that invites a ridiculous level of detail. I would have trouble making it without giving in and trying to add a bunch of crazy features.

[Willows]

Mostly on the bird-flight strain, but I've always wondered how fun it would be to see something from something else's eyes and have to re-learn navigation from that.

Obvious examples would be birds, who if I understand correctly have a much higher peripheral range than humans do. People have near 180 degree view-cones or whatev' you'd call em, but birds, because their eyes are on the sides of their heads, have much more. Hawks also see much further and clearer than people, and flies have hundreds of tiny eyes.

You get the idea. Many different creatures see in different ways, I think games that used atypical camera views would be interesting 'nuff to keep a player playing.

[El Moppo]

That is actually a very good idea. although I can imagine it having a strain on some peoples eyes though. I would play it wether it did or not though!
Rabbit Sim!