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[Doompuppet]

I hope I'm doing this correctly.

Anyway - I run a little text-based browser game called Hell Rising. In it, Vampires, Zombies, and Humans battle for control of a city.

"So what", you ask?

Well, it's been my "dream" for a while now to graduate to the 3D Multiplayer Game realm. I envisioned an adaptation/sequel/spin-off of my current project as such...

Take a city broken up into equally sized "tiles". Fill city with NPC humans, vampires, and zombies of various type. (For example, human chef, zombie chef, vampire chef, each of which can attack with a giant meat cleaver in addition to natural race attributes.)

If you're Human and you kill a Zombie or Vampire NPC, you automatically "revive" it via mysterious serum, and it rises as the Human version of itself after a timed period. If you're a Zombie, the NPC rises as a zombie version of itself, etc.

And of course players can battle each other with largely the same results.

Movement would basically consist of walking from tile to tile. Attacking would be based on where you're standing in relation to your enemy. If you're on the same tile, you can use melee attacks, shoot, whatever. If they're up to three tiles away, you'd be able to use, say, a pistol or shotgun. If they're further you'll need a sniper rifle.

Some NPCs would shamble toward you. Others would run in a bee-line right for you. Still others would be able to do things such as shimmy up walls (Vampires) and pull other such tricks. There would be various 'skills' you could unlock for each race. The ability to gain health from drinking blood as a vampire, the ability to puke infectious gore and hinder your enemy's stats as a zombie, etc.

So as you can see it's your standard tile-based game, but with undead and taking place in the city streets. The key feature is players being able to vie for control by not only killing each other, but also "turning" NPCs, in effect creating their own backup.

Ideally, the game would be really low-fi. Something you don't need a great computer to play and enjoy. A basic 3D world, a bunch of characters, a particle engine, etc.

Now me, I'm a writer. A maker-upper. A guy who pays for hosting and advertising. One of a million or more, so I'm sure this is very unlikely - but I figured I'd put it to you guys. Who'd know better? Think I'd ever be able to pull this horrible monstrocity together?

[george]

Just off the top of my head, maybe look at metaplace as a platform? It's isometric 2D only at the moment I think, but maybe close enough to what you're going for, and designed to be more usable by designer types I believe.

As for pulling it off, I would say start doing it all yourself.

[Doompuppet]

That looks interesting. I doubt I could do this with Metaplace, but maybe something else. I'm not sure about the fact that it's hosted with them, though, and would need to look at who 'owns' the resulting project.

[nihilocrat]

The game itself actually sounds fairly simple. I would suggest gunning for some sort of hotseat multiplayer with potential for AI humans first. Depending on the engine and such, it might not be too difficult to graduate to network multiplayer if the code is sufficiently loosely coupled / you're using some engine that already has multiplay.

This idea, at its heart, is a whole lot less overblown than many other pitches I've seen.

It reminds me a lot of the boffer fighting game "Minion" (more affectionately known as "Bitch"). The game starts as a free-for-all, but if you are killed by another player you have to fight alongside them and generally do what they tell you to; you are a Minion and the other player is your Master. If a "Master" is killed, their Minions are now masterless and free. The game ends when only one "Master" remains and everyone is his/her Minion. It's a tiring game but it's fun.