My obscenely overly ambitious game concept that will never happen

I've always been into making games and levels and mods, but the one game that REALLY got me hooked was Bushido Blade.



If you've never played, Bushido Blade is a 3d fighting game on the PSX. But what set it apart was that you pick a character in a list lined up from strongest to fastest, pick a weapon for (and yes, you can pick a bad combination), then fought a match that can literally be one hit.

The game had realistic damage. If you got hit on the head, that was it. You're dead. If you got hit on the arm, it became limp. If you got hit on the leg you hobbled. If you got hit on both legs you would flail about on the ground.

This completely blew my young mind.

I have NEVER seen a game come anything close to this and want to make a straight up nuked version of it where joints break, muscles get slashed, organs are damage, and wrap it all in armor per body part.

And the whole thing would have a sophisticated system that accounts for weight, blood loss, broken bones, equipment deterioration, exhaustion, pain, and blindness.

Lastly the whole thing would have no HUD. Just feedback from the character model and camera. Like if you get a concussion you stagger and the camera over saturates. If you loss too much blood the camera dims. If you break a bone the limb bends wrong and it effects your attacks.

This idea was wrapped up around a fighting game, but then Dark Souls happened.



A LOT of the general ideas I had made over the years were all in Dark Souls, but they really nailed how to make a fighting game that wasn't a fighting game (if that makes sense).

There's actually a lot of Street Fighter III in Dark Souls, if you can believe it.

But there is also A LOT I don't like about Dark Souls.

For one, you're pigeon holed and are forced down a class role.

Also, you practically HAVE to use online tutorials to figure out the systems.

And I was never crazy about how punitive it could be towards failure.

And collision detection was TERRIBLE at times. It was, deal with it.

And enemies did that temper tantrum move that was complete bull.

But most of all, I could not stand the fact that every single thing was wrapped up in animations rather than physics.


Yeah, I know that conjures things like "Get Over It" into a lot of people's minds, but it IS possible to do a hybrid of animations and physics to have the snappiness and avoid floatiness.


Opinions?

 

I'm with you on Bushido Blade. Superb game, one of a kind. I also think I remember one level though where a guy had a gun, lol.

I never used online tutorials for any Dark Souls stuff though. What systems are you referring to? I did feel like I was fumbling through the dark at times, but I kinda liked it that way. In fact, I played Dark Souls all the way to the Four Kings, without ever realising what Humanity was used for, and I had a ton of it in my inventory. When I finally figured it out it was revelatory, as I used it to heal during the Four Kings fight once my Estus Flasks ran out. The embarrassing thing is though, the game actually tells you this anyway - but I somehow missed it!

 

I probably wouldn't try to gauge here whether a game of this type would be of interest to people. The answer is, probably/sure/of course. This type of game would almost certainly have a decent audience.

For the actual mechanics you describe, most of those features seem reasonably doable to me, having never done most of them. I can imagine how most of them would work, in specific Unity features, roughly. To me, the real complexity of this sort or thing would be getting all of the animations working properly. On the one hand, perfecting the animations might seem like polish later on, but on the other hand, it seems pretty integral to your concept, where the specific direction and range of a sword swipe needs to be highly accurate.

If I were going to try making a game like this, I'd start with some ultra simple boxy models, where each "box" in the models is one of the specific hitboxes you want to be able to target. (Chest, arms, legs, hands, etc). Just make a character model out of those boxes, stick a human rig on it, and go from there. Detecting that a given hitbox was hit is trivial, and changing the functionality of the player due to damage taken seems pretty straightforward. Getting the character to cleanly do a backflip animation, then follow up with some killing blow animation, all while retaining proper hitbox location, sounds like the hard part to me. But who knows. Maybe someone else thinks that's the easy part.

 

Have you played Kingdom Come: Deliverance?

 

I will say, I would suggest you add some type of indicator that a limb has been damaged - in the real world, we have pain to tell us that an arm doesn't work. In a game, if I hit my "swing right arm" button, and nothing happens, it'll take me 3 or 4 attempts to realize it's not because the button is broken or there isn't input lag.

But otherwise, yes, it's all just a matter of making the mathematical model. From a game standpoint, it's not even especially complex - just very detailed.

 

I was looking for someone with an idea that had anything in common with mine. Your combat system is basically what I imagine for a realistic mmorpg game. I really enjoy MMOs and recently stopped to think about what I would want in a perfect version of one for me. Putting it in a simple way, the movement and handling would be like Skyrim, when in single target fights, would have a mechanic similar to For Honor but going for that realism where a hit on the head is a kill and so on. I would probably add a survival sort of theme where food would keep your energy restored and there wouldn't be health potions. There wouldn't even be Mana, only stamina and fatigue.

I think that there is a game already that kinda goes towards that idea, its called Life is Feudal but I didn't really get to play it. Anyway, I think that your idea is really cool and would really enjoy playing if it happened to come out.

 

Yeah, that Bushido Blade game is really interesting. Especially all of the mechanics in it.