[Practice Your Design Skills] Design a Game From Any 3 Pictures Above You

Let's try this again, but this time in a way where the mods can't get confused.

The Objective: One person posts 3 pictures, (one of which should be a video game) which has the purpose to be combined into one "Game Idea", determined by the discussion afterwards.

The Discussion: Design a game's feature(s) based on the game idea you come up with, based on those 3 pictures.

Feel free to use only one or two of the pictures. The point is to inspire a game idea based on different combinations of pictures. then discuss a possible design implementation of said idea. It's just for fun.

Feel free to combine multiple pictures from different posts in the thread, to come up with a new combo!



For example,

"Design a game based around the three concepts you see from these pictures. Explain your design!"
(3 sentence minimum)
How will you implement this idea into a game?
How will the player FEEL like they are Picture#1 #2 or #3?
What feature(s) encourages this immersion?



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The game is about a character who creates a colony in an unexplored land. The player character starts with basic hand-tools (shovel, axe, knife), that they must use to harvest materials and craft items. These items create an implicit 'tech tree', where specific items allow the ability to create more advanced items. Basic resources include wood, which is obtained by cutting down trees, and stone, which is mined with a shovel and later a pickaxe.

There are also wild animals with varying behaviors. Some will flee the PC; others are aggressive and will attack. There is an interface of some kind to let the player know how badly they are hurt. Animals can provide meat and/or hides. Meat can be cooked for food, while hides can be tanned for other creations.

Additionally, the place where the game takes place is affected by weather, which can damage or destroy certain objects, or affect the player character's body temperature. Structures can be created to mitigate or outright prevent weather from affecting an area.

The game will run for 500 'days.' If the player survives to day 500, and have a colony consisting of two houses, a plot of farmland, and a smithy, they will win the game.

 

Wow, nice! You've definitely earned the right to submit 3 new pictures to keep it going!
This outta be fun!

Love it so far!

 

As you wish.



...plus...



...and finally...



...You guys have fun with that.

 

@Asvarduil pretty sure that was called Conker's Bad Fur Day.

I think I'll be playing the different game of what already exists that is the pictures.

 

Oh, come on. Be creative. There's all sorts of things you can do with a squirrel, a castle, and shark with frickin' laser beams on its head.

 

Genius.

 

Uhhh... A cruel and spoiled billionaire turns part of his castle into a shark habitat and makes captive squirrels run through a dangerous obstacle course for his own amusement...

2D sidescrolling platformer where you have to use your squirrel abilities to jump and climb around the levels while trying to avoid the shark infested water beneath you.

Edit : Sharks that patrol the waters scan the ceilings with lasers which will shoot missiles at the player when they cross them...

Edit : Do I post 3 more pics now??

 

That would actually be rather easy to do. Nice.

Sure, knock yourself out.

 

Add... maybe you're an experimental squirrel weapon with hyper intelligence and enhanced abilities... and it's all a test. Then you realize that to complete the test you must be dissected and studied and that's when you must escape.

 

Ok, not going to make this easy though...

 

So, Starcraft?

I'm getting turn-based, interstellar warfare where the villain is a serpentine eldrich abomination... genetic mother of all life or something.

You gotta unlock all these stones to open an ancient portal to go kill her, because she's created another race and they're her favorites now. So, she's giving earth to them.

Or same plot, but its a fps where your best weapon is a light saber/energy sword thing but you can't spam it. Call your main character a Paladin, powersuit like samus aran....

The villain is vulnerable to uv light.

Somewhere in there is at least one game.

 

Want a real challenge? Write a design description that people will actually read. Present company excluded, it's nearly impossible to get people to read anything. Skip, skip, skip. To answer the challenge, use a story. Bonus points for finding the recipe and using it in a reply.

Gigi

 

If I sell it too well someone might Steal My Idea™. Maybe on another one, these three pictures are too generic sci-fi to stir up my imagination.

Edit: Actually I think this exercise is an exercise (!) in futility, just my opinion, but three pictures can paint a story, but where is there any basis for a game??

 

That's a bit of a cop out. Asvarduil's images were also pretty generic, but the concept that came from them is pretty rad.

I don't have time to write a story or really flesh this out, but here goes a quick brain dump...

The player takes the role of a minor noble in a far-future human society spread amongst the stars. Cities in different star systems are connected by gates.

Prior to the game, a plague ravages the civilization, attacking not the people themselves but the materials around them. Each time the plague was taken through a gate it morphed, and would attack a different material at its destination. One city has no iron, another no glass, etc. To stop it repeatedly jumping between cities and eating everything the gate system was shut down, each pair of gates locked with an "elemental key" - something which was (so far) save on both sides of that gate. Alas, this meant the economy was also shut down - a mortal blow to a civilization spread thing across a star system - so everyone was put in cryo-sleep until the plague passed.

You are the first to wake up. It is your job to re-start civilization by finding the keys, unlocking the gates, and waking up key individuals at each city.

I've got ideas to take it much further than that, but I'll leave it there for now.

 

Oh, sorry for not posting 3 pictures in response. Can someone else step in, and I'll post 3 after I'm home?

 

Per @Gigiwoo, This is how far I got.

I think that should be part of this "game" as well.

I lost interest, it's not visceral enough... too "floaty" like the most neckbeardy 900 page scifi novel. Where's the sexy/explodey part?

Here's why it's not a copout..

The first two images, in fairness, are basically the same thing... a central thing staring at you. The third is... well, what is it of? A fight? A game? A group of people? I could post a picture of television static, a recliner and snow. Make a game out of that AND write a game description under three sentences that will grab someone... bet you can't.

 

Funny thing about that remark in this context - in Level Up! The Guide to Designing Great Games, most of the book is written in a sort of comic format, with text between frames that illustrate a previous point. In the introduction to the book (it's short) he talks about his experiences with writing a standard GDD that no one read, under any circumstances. At one point he got flummoxed, and as a sort of snarky, tongue-in-cheek response, rewrote the GDD as a comic. Everyone read it, and the game got made.

I recommend reading that book. It makes me look at this topic as a extremely useful excersize, because as we all know: images are worth a thousand words. In fact, every set of three images is worth three thousand words, which is more than enough for a single-page overview. Factor in an individual designer's creativity...and stuff gets magical.

 

Awesome. That's exactly what I was going for. Some Alistair Reynolds or Peter F. Hamilton.

Whether or not it's a cop out has nothing to do with what's in the images. Someone could have posted three colours and that could still get juices flowing. The point is that you're looking for reasons not to let it inspire you, instead of looking for inspiration.

You saw two pictures and thought about how samey they were based purely on their composition.

I saw the same two pictures and thought "I wonder what I can think of to connect them?" First of all there's the sense of vastness that both images have. Then, one suggests to me that it's a transport device, and the other implies a person who's been around for a really long time. They're cool concepts which can be joined. There's the clear space influence in the head picture, and cultural motifs that are clearly not contemporary (but gave me a strong Alistair Reynolds vibe). There's the necklace on the face image, which gave me the idea to bring elements into it somehow. So on and so forth.

 

This is how you do it.

 

No! Action. Adventure. Short attention spans!

People have too many choices in entertainment, so now everything is bang-for-your-buck.

 

True, but I get very little bang out of samey, senseless "action". If something doesn't make me think I'm typically not overly interested.

 

The princess was kidnapped by Trident's evil minion, the mighty Water Dragon! To save the realm, Master Jumpsin rides to the ends of the ocean on his magical surfboard.

TL;DR - Little Mermaid + Tiny Wings + Ninja Gaiden.

Gigi.

 

I keep a dark secret. For years I have quietly imagined and off-and-on began to write several long and short stories. I have given up that for now, but I still spend hours seeing them in my head, often while driving, ranging from sci-fi to fantasy, to YA fiction. But stories are stories, games are games.

The novel reader brings a recliner and enough snacks and drinks to last 6 hours. He finds you. The game player may not even realize he is interested in your game until he sees it, in which event there will be ten other shiny, noisy things screaming for his attention.

I choose games now because I'll write when I'm old.

 

Rides a surf board, shoots ninja water magic... hehe. Yeah, I like it. I'd probably visually theme it Polynesian style, with enemies based on tikis and Easter island heads. The ui could be bamboo sticks, you could sell them scrolls with various effects.

@angrypenguin - It's not a copout, just don't see the point in trying to make a playful game inspired by static, dreary images that imply no action. You are inspired by the above images of said dreariness, where I feel they're too vague to imply any direction. You aren't inspired by the images I posted, but I'm not accusing you of any copout.

 

Who said I'm not inspired? It wasn't my turn...

 

Lol, i was thinking of these characters running around with their hands flopping all over the place jumping around this low poly art style candy land with celebrities' faces on them slapping each other.

 

You have to go through the portal to generate a random and ugly beast, and then play in a 2d world with light spears and kill these randomly generated monsters that never die