Game Ideas

Hi Guys. So normally you have a game idea before you start with a game. It may change as it goes along.
I made this prototype to Learn a few things and ended up with a semi good looking created thing.

The problem I have got no Idea where to take this. Gameplay Ideas. Objectives etc.

This is how it looks. It a bit of Noita meets Terraria

Ideas are welcome.

Be Good!

 

I'm the one who encouraged @Dark_Seth to post here for game design ideas. The framework he's made here, with the lighting and weather and terrain digging, is too gorgeous and unique to not become a real game!

So let's see, the first thought would be to make a sort of Terraria type game, where monsters come out at night (or during storms?). You have to explore and dig for resources, with which you can improve your gear or build shelter. (Perhaps your flashlight/gun has a "spew" mode in addition to the "dig" mode, that sprays shotcrete so you can make walls and platforms.)

Or it could be more of a level platformer, like Super Mario Bros 3 meets Megaman meets Dig-Dug. Your gear in this case would be fairly constant, and the point would be to get through the level, while collecting as many collectibles as you can, and avoiding or squishing the baddies. It'd be nice if the main way you have to squish them would be via the environment, e.g. digging out from under rocks so they fall on them. Call this a sandbox platformer, I guess.

Just a couple ideas off the top of my head. What does everyone else think?

 

like start maybe use metrovania style game with lemmings for pixel destructor

 

Yes, actually metroidvania is a better model than Mario — it's still level-based, but instead of just getting through each level and going on to the next, you work your way back and forth through just a handful of carefully-designed levels, collecting gear that increases your capabilities and enable you to reach new areas.

This general approach has a lot to recommend it! Starting off with simple gear means you don't overwhelm the user with too much at once. So initially maybe all you can do is run and little jumps, and use a flashlight where it's dark. Later you get the jump pack (perhaps a couple different strengths), digger beam (ditto), shotcrete function. Maybe you could also get extra armor/health, missiles, etc. Don't go too crazy with all this inventory — half a dozen different powerups is probably enough.

Then you need a story that explains what you're doing here, what your objective is, etc. But don't throw words at the player any more than you have to — you have got the tools here for some amazing environmental storytelling, which is what made Metroid great in the first place.

EDIT: Here's a nice analysis of game design principles in Super Metroid that may spur some ideas for you.

 

That's a nice-looking 2D side scroller. The whole universe of ideas is available. What about challenging yourself to think further out of the box? I like to use the Video Game Name Generator to spark my creativity. It generates some really off the wall names, but the ones that are less obvious are usually better from a creative standpoint. I'll run it a few times:

Deranged Quiz Gone Wild: The player has to survive a deadly game show like The Running Man in a dystopic or post-apocalyptic near future. Action side-scroller.

Happy Beat Overdrive: Destroy the environment to the beat in order to mine fuel to power your Beatmobile. Rhythm-based shooting and driving game.

Legendary Fighter Preacher: Wander the land teaching the gospel of kapow! Side-scrolling beat-em-up with explosives.

Rock'n'Roll Caveman Kid: A rebellious teen Neaderthal wanders the Ice Age to find members for his rock band.

Iron Gnome Unleashed: Bullet hell shooter to defend the land from the mad Iron Gnome and his army of automata.

 

good sir, I also posted this here which maybe of interest
https://forum.unity.com/threads/hey...oposal-game-for-vali-day.824769/#post-5498023

 

Your an intrepid space explorer. Your ship crash landed on a strange alien world. It's ruled by gigantic pterodactyl monsters in the sky, and killer graboid monsters in the ground. There is a race of intelligent humanoids who can help you repair your ship, but seeing that you are a gun-toting monster slaying badass they force you to make a deal. You destroy the monsters, they repair your ship.

The only way to fight the pterosaurs is to leap onto one and then use it as a platform to gun down the others from. But it's a matter of time before you get dumped, so you got to stay mobile and not miss your chance to leap onto another beast (or kill the one you should jump on). Eventually you work your way up the sky to the mother beast.

For the graboids you have to dig maze like tunnels. You can't kill them with gunfire so you got to dig your tunnels in a way so that you always have an escape route to flee to when they come barreling through. It could be like a maze of underground tunnels, and you have to find the den of evil and destroy the big boss.

To power the equipment you need to fight in the sky you'll need resources you can only get from underground. And vice versa. SO you'll hit emergent roadblocks and have to make interesting decisions in how to manage your resources and plan your attacks so that you can make progress to a checkpoint without having to turn back. Think about it like a hub world with two main levels. One goes up, the other down. And you can get to checkpoints on each.

 

Check out the Clonk games.

 

I'm extremely impressed with what you've created given that you "have got no Idea where to take this". Looks unusually polished for such an early stage.

I think it looks ripe for a story driven game, where you're doing more searching and solving than fighting. Here's my stab at a story:

The last thing you remember it was the year 2435. The year of the great disaster. (insert natural or made made disaster) made the earth uninhabitable. The survivors went underground, but as supplies dwindled their outlook was bleak. Using the latest advances in cryogenics the survivors went to sleep in their pods, all programmed to wake up in 500 years where they would rebuild what was lost. But something went wrong. No one woke up. Who knows how many millennia passed before a fortunate random failure woke you alone from your pod to a somewhat familiar yet far different world than you remember.

Now you need to save the rest of humanity still locked in their pods, figure out what went wrong, fight or run from creatures which evolved far different than anything you have ever seen, and eventually wake everyone else up. Along the way you'll need to find now ancient repair parts, access codes, tools, weapons, and eventually uncover you're not actually alone in this world and that there is a conspiracy to keep most of humanity asleep for good which you must defeat.

 

Dear gods that's brilliant. @Dark_Seth, I already wanted to spend time in the world you've crafted. If @Joe-Censored's story resonates with you, make that game! It will be awe-inspiring.

 

Thanks to all for the idead. @Joe-Censored . Like the idead. Me and a friend spoke about a similiar thing. Ended up being close to fallout shelter.

 

If your destruction algorithm is speedy enough, it might be worth also looking into older multiplayer shooters like Liero Extreme. You could maybe procedurally generate a map, dump the players in there, and sprinkle around weapon upgrades with various effects so that players can destroy the environment as they hunt each other down.

 

Ok, so what are interesting activities that involve one or more of those factors?

Lighting
- Night time means it's harder to see because it's darker.
- Could also do a "monsters come out at night" thing, but that's done a lot.
- Could flip that and have positive stuff that only happens at night, eg: glowing creatures that hibernate during the day and come out at night? So instead of good/bad it's just different between day and night.

Weather
- If digging is a thing, how easy is it to make the holes fill up with water? Could that be a source of danger? This is a way to integrate the weather on the surface with what players are doing underground.
- Could have puzzle elements where you need weather interaction with things underground. Eg: getting water from rain into a buried chamber to float a platform up to where you can run across it.
- Could water erode certain materials, making certain digs harder?
- Playing with the idea of day / night creatures, could you also have weather-specific creatures or behaviours?
- Could you have dangers associated with weather? Eg: acid rain, radioactive fog, dangerously strong wind, or dangerous stuff blown around by the wind.

Digging
- Underground chambers / buried ruins. What other things would players want to dig for?
- Needing to maintain structural integrity as you dig, which can be messed with by weather events. Eg: rock is hard to dig (maybe damaging your tools?) but is waterproof and retains water. Dirt is easy to dig and slowly absorbs water, but easily erodes when rained on, and needs supports otherwise tunnels can collapse.
- Underground rivers, lava, etc. These could be either dangers or puzzle elements. Eg: redirect lava to melt a metal wall to get into a buried chamber.

Another way to attack this would be to come up with the most interesting answers you can for the following question: why are you running around digging holes in bad weather? Come up with a few interesting scenarios and see where they lead you.

Of course, I assume games like Terraria have already done a bunch of this stuff.

 

Ooh, I like this approach. Very systematic, and quickly generated some interesting ideas. I will try to riff on some of them.

I like this. As you said, the "monsters come out at night and in the rain" thing is a bit hackneyed by now. This is better. You could have collectibles that only appear at certain times: blooming flowers during the day, glowing mushrooms (have to be harvested when they glow!) at night, frogs/ducklings/water-loving plants that only appear in the rain.

There could be important gems/ores which glow in the dark, but in light they look just like ordinary rocks. So they are just much easier to find at night.

Some of your gear (jetpack? digging tools?) could require power, which recharges in sunlight. So at night or underground you have to be more cautious about how fast you spend it, or else get yourself set up with on alternate power source.

Your navigation system (mini-map) could work by the stars, i.e., only outside on clear nights. During the day, rainstorms, or underground, you just don't get a mini-map, or your position is not marked on it or something.

Yeah, water physics is a little scary but there are certainly ways to do it (and I would have classified what @Dark_Seth has already done as "crazy hard" so I wouldn't put anything past him).

And yes, it'd be easy enough to have the rain dissolve certain materials when it hits. And of course don't forget about possible lightning strikes... and again, if we want to buck the usual tropes, these could be good things which instantly recharge your power to full.

Well there's mining, but yeah, that's again pretty overdone. There's the classic Dig-Dug of digging down to catch underground monsters. Um... you could have Lemming-like aliens that you need to dig paths for?

I mean sort of, but firstly, not as well as @Dark_Seth's demo; and secondly, we've come up with a lot of things here that AFAIK have not been done this way before. I think this could definitely be a unique game.

 

Thanks for all the input here guys!! A lot to think about here

 

thinking about this for a couple of days, it's a really beautiful world you got there..
shame that noone has made a "god game" in a while.
would be nice to see the Player as a floating cloud there, making it rain, transforming a barren rock to a lush green world full of life..

 

One thing that might be an interesting variation for this type of game would be if the alien planet was covered with dense, giant, fast-growing vegetation, so every time it rains the landscape would change significantly- with giant stems and vines forming new landmasses or digging through dirt and crushing rock to remove existing structures. There would be rules to the plants growth behavior so that the player could learn to anticipate and take-advantage of it.

 

That could give rise to neat platforming gameplay. You could move plants and/or seeds, which then need water and grow toward or away from sunlight, etc, and die under certain situations.

 

I was actually thinking about that. A god game. Where you start with a desert. Get grass growing. People move in. Hunt maybe. Dig for oil. Etc

 

It could be an interesting twist on the crash-landed backstory. Your ship crash-landed on a primitive alien planet, but you can't repair it yourself. You need to improve the world and educate the primitive natives (introduce agriculture, etc.) to build up an industrial base sophisticated enough to make the parts you need to build a new ship.

It'd be sort of like Factorio, but instead of polluting the world and killing the (quite reasonably perturbed) natives, you're trying to improve the world and help the natives (so they can ultimately help you). Plus, side-view and with digging. Good fun!

 

Hmm, I give you my two cents.

perhaps the player has to walk around this hostile environment and natural disasters happen like acid rain and meteorites, and dinosaurs. But then you find this teleportation gun and you get teleported into this other dimension to get some resources he needs to survive in the first one, but then he needs resources from dimension 1 to survive in dimension 3 which is only accessible through dimension 2, so the player has to go back and forth building up his shelter kinda in various dimensions, and each dimension has its own twist, like crazy vegetation, the other one has insanely aggressive creatures, the other ones has random floods, each with a distinct art style and colour pallet. And once you fill up all the tasks, you get to access another place which is closer to where the long term objective is.

 

I know this may be a little obvious, but maybe a modernized Liero?

Just make a randomly generating maps then keep programming more and more hazards, weapons, game modes, vehicles, and unlockable cosmetics.

Also, a Battle Royal mode.

EDIT: Also, maybe do a dark mode where players use lights tactically. You can turn on a flashlight to see, but people can see you. Laser sights would also be very cool. I could see the background being lit so the players make silhouettes, but there are also things to blend into like grass. OH, and have the player get a small bubble of light that they only see.

 

@Dark_Seth Theres a ton of good ideas and information in this thread, theres no way you cant make a great game based on your current build. Now get back to work!

 

Can't argue with that!.

 

I personally love the idea of the terrane being you biggest enemy like randomly walking into lose ground and S*** starts to rumble and loosen up, but your enticed because you have already passed thru this particular section and it was never lose before, because over so many night and days everywhere you have dug and maybe the weather or something kind of plays a part on the entire planet your on. So you decide to let the ground fall in and try to jump your way back out of the whole and depending on your jump pack level and how far along in the game you are, some sudden mine collapses can be very rewarding....as long as you make it out alive.. or be very set backing if you dont….haha I'm off the top with this stuff but, Make it Out Alive? Idk but with the graphics I'm seeing in this post there's no reason it wouldn't generate an income. I love Unity thank god I decided to look into it...you could even add in app purchases and I promise if this game is released I would not only play but it I would spend money in it too. Thanks for listening.

 

Maybe even allow the player to make certain decisions that lead to different outcomes. like creating their own back story as the story unfolds maybe like fable good or evil type play. But one thing is for sure I wouldn't want to convolute the beautify of this environment with tons of enemies and intense graphics the best part about this scene is the simplicity and environment interaction in my opinion at least.

 

Man, I forgot about this awesome thread. Since it's been necro'd already... @Dark_Seth, did you ever do anything more with this game?

 

Yeah, I'm also curious if this project went anywhere.

 

@Dark_Seth
Wow! That prototype you made looks really nice. Great work there.

 

HI All. Got busy at work. Had almost no time to this. Picked up the project only in the last few weeks.