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[null & void]

Idea thread, as seen by Inanimate. Here I list ideas, likelihood of me EVER working on them, etc. Feel free to steal ideas which are never going to be worked on by me. The others, well, I'll probably use them because they're pretty developed. Steal if you want, but beware the Qlippothic Avatars...

1: Journey to the Center of the Butter Tub
Ideas: Deformable terrain, platformer/shooter. One goddamn big tub of butter.
Likelihood of being worked on: none.
Reason: No programming skill, little care for the concept. (It just popped into my head.)

2: 0 (Said: null)
Idea: RISG. (Reduced Instruction Set Game.) Two buttons. Maze/shmup, top down.
Likelihood of being worked on: Great.
Reason: My main hurdle is the engine and the art. The concept and style is FIRMLY rooted in my mind, I only need to implement it. Could be a good start for me learning how to program... (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no.)

3: "maru"
Idea: Open-Ended sandbox horror. I have pieces of the design-doc-in-making for this laying around.
Likelihood of being worked on: Low-Medium.
Reason: I got ambitious and ignored the demands of the engine. My computer could never run this beast. On top of that I neglected to detail the limits of the nascent engine, had no programmer willing to work on it, and the game was psychologically dangerous (I to this day have nightmares about some of the ideas that could have been used and NEVER sleep around water). Despite this, I'd love to have a second go at it with the idea a bit more firmly grasped.

4: Valence
Idea: Rez off rails with a real-time in-game constantly-in-effect map editor. Would have been SO MUCH fun and so easy to work on, but...
Likelihood of being worked on: Medium-High
Reason: ...once more I neglected the graphical demands of the engine. To use the Rez aesthetic (something I very much wanted to do) would have destroyed my computer. Otherwise, the engine was very simple and easy to make, even though it was 3D and had the maps being edited in real time by the player. The gameplay would have been fun. Ambitions kill (ideas), kids. Ambitions kill.

5: Qlippoth
Idea: Horror RTS set in a ghostly otherworld.
Likelihood of being worked on: 100%
Reason: I've got a lot of work on this, 2D isometric RTSs are easy on graphics requirements, I have loads of support and I'm pretty sure I can find a programmer. Plus, I learned my lesson about using what-you-want-at-the-time as your basis for the engine, instead of everything-you-may-want-in-the-future for the basis. Programmers will love me: the only updates I'll ever request will be bugfixes.

[Arne]

Cool thread! Here's my list list of ideas, but please don't steal.

1: The Ghi'Nertakk Legacy
Idea: MMO with GUI (Graphical User Interface) sliders controlling all the characters.
Likelihood of being worked on: Low.
Reason: I don't have any arms or legs, I had to sell them to afford my gymnastics classes. At any rate I don't think I can find a coder competent enough to implement my slider idea, and the art would at least have to be Blizzard level, but ingame. I would also have to buy Games Workshop since I'm using some of their characters.

2: Princess 39 and the planet of cheese-buttocks
Idea: I don't know what I was thinking here, but... well. Could be cool.
Reason: I just took the biggest dump and I think I'm bleeding to death from my anus. I may only have minutes left to live. *flails stumps about*
Likelihood of being worked on: Extremely low.

3:gffgfddssssssssssssssssssss

...

Actually I should be working on Zerberk. Damn you procrastination!

[null & void]

I'm not sure whether to be offended by this or not. It's like, someone broke into your museum, took a dump on an empty pedestal and then left.

I am so confused.

[Chris Whitman]

Here is one of mine. I would invite you to steal it since it is currently being guarded by a hungry tiger.

Name: Jason and the Cosmonauts.
Idea: an adaptation of Greek mythology only in space and everyone is a robot... a sexy girl robot!
Likelihood of being worked on: very low.
Reason: I had a coder, but I lost him. I swear to god, he was right here a second ago. Okay, let me retrace my steps. I had him when I was in the kitchen -- I remember that much. Then I grabbed some orange juice from the fridge and... I think he was still around. I think I might have looked up some news on the internet. Maybe I left him in the living room? But I looked everywhere, even under the stack of books on the coffee table, and he wasn't there.

Well, I guess I'll go check again. Let me know if you find him, okay?

[null & void]

I know there's some joke here I'm not getting. What is it? Seriously. I wasn't expecting this, it didn't happen in Inanimate's.

[policedanceclub]

Whats wrong here Qelippot?

[null & void]

Nothing's wrong. I'm just wondering why Arne and Chris are clearly mocking the idea list. Did I inadvertently reference something? What's going on?!

Seriously, I'm so confused.

[Arne]

New project!

Name: Nasoj and the Krazy Kosmonauts.
Idea: A space opera set in space and everyone is a robot... a sexy girl robot!
Likelihood of being worked on: Extremely high.
Reason: I just found a stray coder that appears to have been thrown out with the trash, because he was carrying an empty orange juice package and some torn notes with game ideas around. I put him right to work. I'm going out to look for stray artists now.

[Gr.Viper]

I think you shouldn't have called the thread Dump. The guys are obviously incontinent.

[WiL]

bear with me here this is going to be a wild ride:

1. I have a special place in my heart for JRPGs.  I love the old games, the beautiful sopophoric feeling of slipping away an afternoon acquiring Chrono Trigger endings, dabbling a bit in mazes and magick, and buying the best gear in town, only to find better gear for sale 5 minutes later.  And only 30g more to boot!

All I know is that I will make a JRPG someday.  And it will be better than "Hoosier goes berserk: in SPACE" but not as good as "Zombies ate my motherfuckin NEIGHBORS, BITCH!" and it will tell 'my story', whatever the fuck that is.  Moving on:

2. I want to gain favor with the Gods by making Revealotastic, the Eschatonic game of the 20th century!  This game features vishnu, buddha, odin, frigg, quan yin, ameratsu, and david koresh as playable characters.  It's a single-player cooperative puzzler in the spirit of "The Lost Vikings," with the more lemmings-like goal of "sacrifice everyone to get Vishnu to the exit before he lets out the curry-fart that ends the universe."

3. I love a good masochistic, don't you?  THE MANOR is the story of a tweening heiress and her brother, the latter with an insatiable sexual appetite that does not balk at bisexuality, incest, necrophilia, laying with succubi, poisoning himself with ox blood to sustain an erection or even the occasional cat.  You play the doctor trying to save his life.  My wife will provide photographs of all characters involved.  Also this is very loosely based on her story.

4. I really want to remake SUNSET YEARS, a top-down cooperative man-versus-zombies shooter with some mild RPG elements and a completely open-ended gameplay path.  I made this before L4D was even a gleam in gordon freeman's eye.  You were in an old folks home when the zombpocalypse hit; at first you all have to share the same shotgun, but then you acquire more weapons.  You have to conserve ammo, keep healing each other (there was a 'health gun' that you couldn't use on yourself; a partner had to heal you) and clear out swaths of the city in order to scrounge up enough resources to make an escape.  Sounds good, eh?  And it was; I put a lot of work into it.  Its fate?  even on a LAN, everyone's lag was so bad it was never fully realized as an enduring gameplay experience.

5. Oprah Murders the Ancient Baby was an idea I'd been kicking around a while.  It's sort of 'the E.T. that never was' and I intended it to be a sidescroller, very 'Now' oriented with most of your attention focused on safe passage from screen to screen without getting arsed in the face by a couple flying goons.  Not to mention pictures of oprah are not public domain.

6. You play Oprah, by the way, in that game I described above.  

7. Rococo Shoulder - A 'soothing' solitaire, Rococo Shoulder involves rolling balls of different weights to try and score 21 points on the Shoulderboard.  You don't know the weight beforehand and are given, simply, a range of velocities at which you are allowed to throw the ball.  You are given a random number of balls, and given them in the same order each time, and the trick to the game is how quickly can you recognize the pattern in the ball weights in order to achieve a score of 21 points.

8. Dude Meets a Partridge - This is the first in the 'Oracle' series of games I want to create.  I was in the middle of creating the prequel to this game, "Some Octopus Thing", when my right leg collapsed and they had to do CPR on my leg and it didn't work and it died.  So I stopped work on it.  I also did work on the second game in the series, "The Attic Army", but I lost that to a hard drive crash.  I have never attempted the first game in the series, because I want to establish a context that if I have to explain it in the future games in the series, it would ruin them.

9. The whole Oracle Sequence, in chronological order:

5th. Some Octopus Thing
1st. Dude Meets a Partridge
2nd. The Attic Army
3rd. Hombre! Hombre! Hombre!
4th. Dinner with Fallenstone Freaks
6th. Madmen
*. Dream beam rowboat adventure

Think of them more as installments in the same game, since I intend them to be quite short (45m-1hr play time) and each employ the same gameplay mechanics, with possibly some refinements and slight differences as the series progresses toward finished.  The only exception is "Dream beam rowboat adventure", which is a very gentle and slow-paced canoe racer starring the characters from "The Attic Army" (also your canoe has cannons after level 4, and the rowers all get handguns on level 7)

10. Valley Among the Rocks - I have always wanted to create some kind of rules for navigating a large body of text, generating challenges and obstacles correct for an adventure game using the randomization provided by the source text, and let people 'play' the Bible, the Urantia Book, or any other text they wanted to play.  Also, they could compare different versions of the Bible, with a hope (on my part) that I design it so that similar texts play similarly.

11. Phineas Figglestein Fights GhostBaby
An interactive play in three acts:
I.   Die, GhostBaby, Die!
II.  Why won't you die, GhostBaby?
III. Son of Ghostbaby

You play Phineas Figglestein, an ugly but otherwise serviceable adolescent boy on a mission from the Planet Jesus to destroy GhostBaby.  Think the original Duke Nukem sidescroller games with less of a focus on puzzles involving breakable blocks and more firepower and a ghostly baby floating through the walls, its middle finger extended toward you always, always mocking, and you can never kill him!  (In fact, why are you rampaging around town shooting shit when you're supposed to be killing GhostBaby, which you so obviously cannot do?)

12. Cranium Nation
I want to do a management/simulation game, too.  In "Cranium Nation", you are a meme whose goal is to dominate the whole world.  You start out a little fish in a sea of memes, but through careful management of your growing population of 'Infected', you can eventually grow to control everything, life, all plant matter, eventually inorganic matter and you start to spread through the walls of known space, until you fill the Entirety with the voice left by your departed ancestors, the Hoo-Mahns!

(Based on the Fritz Lieber's classic short story, Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee)

[Inane]

Sorry, I think you're just a victim of Arne and Chris being in less than savory moods.

The only reason I can see behind their actions is that you spend more time describing why you aren't making these games than you do describing what the games are. Beyond that they're just vultures.

[Chris Whitman]

I know there's some joke here I'm not getting. What is it? Seriously. I wasn't expecting this, it didn't happen in Inanimate's.

Nothing wrong with your ideas -- I'm just having a bit of a laugh about how they were presented. How can we steal your idea from a one sentence description?

Seriously, though, it does sound a bit like you've already got completed ideas (at least in the last one you listed) and you're just looking for programmers to implement them. Unless you're looking to hire people to paid positions, you might consider looking for someone to collaborate with on more even footing, where they also have creative control over what you are working on, etc.

Or, if you have your heart set on a particular design, you could always learn to code yourself: there are lots of helpful tutorials and knowledgeable folks around here who you can bug for assistance.

[increpare]

Nothing wrong with your ideas -- I'm just having a bit of a laugh about how they were presented. How can we steal your idea from a one sentence description?

I think the butter one could have novelty potential sucked from it by someone else pretty easily.

[null & void]

I think the one sentence description's enough, unless someone nuked my old website and Google fails to find it anymore (If that's the case, tell me so I can fix the first post.)

I have mostly-complete ideas for Qlippoth, 0, "maru" and Valence. The Butter Tub I don't care for at all. Fun as it sounds, I do not want to shoot my way through buttery hordes of SOMETHING, because I'll never be able to eat anything made with butter again afterward.

Qlippoth is, in the words of a friend of mine, a "turn based real time tactical strategy RPG" with strong horror elements. It's heavily inspired by White Wolf's Wraith: the Oblivion. It's going to be multiplayer oriented (though I'll probably have a single player campaign, kinda like Starcraft) and I'm currently working on the design doc for it.

"maru" is SERIOUSLY messed-up survival horror. It had a story to follow for awhile, then it would transition to open-world sandbox play somewhere between Morrowind and Silent Hill 2. I had started on an algorithm for generating a realistic abandoned city (I can do math but programming is beyond me) when I realised just how much video memory it would take even if I cropped the draw distance short due to a common, required screen-wide hue-shift. (And no, the ever-so-common transparent overlay wouldn't work for this.) At the time, I had a RIVA TNT2. I am CERTAIN it would not run on that. Now, I have a GeForce2 MX. I don't think it'd work on this, either.

0 -IS- complete. I just need an engine and assets. I could probably make the engine myself if I had a program like Game Maker or MMF to do it with. Ditto assets (and I can probably do those anyway). It's a VERY simple game.

Valence is unbelievably simple gameplay wise (I was just going to use one of the various versions of the Quake 3 engine with the gravity turned off, seriously), even the assets are things I could handle -- hell, the gameplay, deep as it was, was amateur's stuff to implement. My roadblocks were the graphics and music. I was going to have a programmer add something so that I could use bass.dll to have all of the walls (which were going to be roughly 12-poly cubes suspended in space, each level would have about 5000 of these) work like spectrum analysers and oscilloscopes, a friend with some experience in game design (and programming) told me that'd be easy with a simple script. I was also going to have it analyze the current tempo of the track so that shots and "spells" would be forced to go on the steps of the current tempo instead of being more-or-less completely random, similar to Rez though the result would sound different. But it never happened: the programmer who was going to add it ditched before he even downloaded the engine variant I was going to use. Last, the graphics -- I just wanted bloom. I had no idea that bloom required such a terribly up to date graphics card, and once I learned, I pretty much killed Valence. Maybe when I get a GeForce 3.

More or less, yeah, my block is the engines. I have the ideas fairly solidified. I don't think I'll ever be able to do coding. (I was going to try XNA since C# seems fairly simple, but it turns out you need at least a GeForce 3 for that even.) So I'm stuck at "engine." Once I get that, the games will pretty much make themselves.

[Gr.Viper]

It had a story to follow for awhile, then it would transition to open-world sandbox play somewhere between Morrowind and Silent Hill 2. I had started on an algorithm for generating a realistic abandoned city

Have you played Survival Crisis Z?

[null & void]

This would be ENTIRELY different.

Enemies would be completely unkillable. There would be a total of 8 of them. The game would be huge, the enemies would be slow. There'd be a massive, randomly generated underground tunnel system under the city. As soon as you leave the sight of one branch of the corridors, they can change.

The game began as a rip-off of the J-horror film Marebito without the cannibal girl, but I made it into something insidious. It might even be a good thing it got canned.

[William Broom]

You know, I'm not sure it's a good idea for everyone to start their own 'ideas threads'. It could result in a rather cluttered Art and Design forum. We already have this thread which basically served as an output for ideas, but recently it's dropped off the first few pages and not been seen. I think it might be a good idea to move such discussions back to that thread again.