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[rfgamedesigner]

Hi, fellow devs, I am new and that's my first topic here.

A really silly idea occured to me few days ago. What if I combine TDS and arkanoid game genres? To answer this question I made a realy quick prototype (few hours) and now want to ask you, how do you like the idea. To visualize it I provide a .gif.

So how do you think, is it worth continuing?  

[BentMyWookiee]

I think it's a really clever idea and I could see it making a very intense and frantic game! I would love to see what interesting ways you end up using the mechanic.

[PirateFish]

Looks like a good idea. Maybe the player should have a slow but powerful weapon - like a laser so there's more incentive to use the reflection "shield".

[rfgamedesigner]

Sounds interesting. Maybe it's better to use a low amount of ammo to encourage the player to reflect shots instead of shooting into the targets (enemies)?

[valrus]

I see potentially the opposite problem as well (that in games where players' own shots play a danger to themselves, there's a pressure to play very conservatively, running around without shooting until you've got a guaranteed shot).

Maybe a way out is to take the players' guns away and have all bullets come from turrets and other environmental hazards.  That gives you both helzapoppin action and the requirement to use your shield as your primary means of world interaction.

[rfgamedesigner]

Didn't think of that. Well, both theories requires protoyping, so I'll try to prototype each of them.

Now, after I've coded all the basic mechanics, I am creating a simple tileset to build a test level of it. Never worked on top down prototypes or games before, so it takes some time to create/gather resourses.

[s0]

Here's an idea: Make the player's weapon an extremely powerful AOE that has to be charged before it can be used, so basically a special attack. Make the weapon charge up by hitting targets with reflected bullets or bouncing them off things. You could introduce pinball-style combo bonuses (remember that arkanoid/breakout games are a derivative of pinball).

[rfgamedesigner]

Wow, sounds like a super cool idea. I paused prototyping for a bit, because of a crunch, that I am facing working on the other project, but I'll 100% try it and show the gameplay video in a week or so. Thank you, man)