What is your dream game?

[brickiemart]

If you were in charge of a development team, or had the time and knowledge to do it yourself, what games(s) would you create? Or if you already have, what games have you made?

I’ll go first, I have a couple games I’d like to see made. An idea I’ve had would be for a retro game that’s a fusion of several genres, or rip-off if you like. It’d be part shmup, RTS, and sim. It’d have the appearance of a nice 32 bit game, all 2d, with a fair amount of story. In brief, you’re stranded from a botched deep-space experiment in who-knows-where. You find yourself under attack by unknown hostiles and begin vertical shmup attack. Once done you learn you’re in the future and humans are the galaxy’s peons, but now they have your ship and nominate you to save them. Enter the strategy phase.

To help the humans, you must make them self-reliant on the planet they’re on, so the gameplay is now 1/3 Dune 2, 1/3 Herzog Zwei, and 1/3 Zero Gunner 2. Your ship has to function like a helicopter in the planets atmosphere which makes your ship go from vertical Raiden-like shmup to Zero Gunner 2. You’ll be building stuff to help the humans get stronger (basic RTS stuff) and defending them against the aliens you failed to annihilate on the shmup level.

Once done there’s more story (which is left out for the sake of brevity) and exploration. Thus the sim phase. Borrowing from Star Control and Star Flight you warp around the galaxy finding new locations and events. The events are at various location in different sectors in space and can be major/minor story events, new alien badies for shmup levels, more enslaved humans for RTS levels, or nothing (most of the space will be nothing, story events and clues guide you to the scattered somethings in space). There will be a lot of open-ended events, paths, and various levels. Also, along the way you’ll get power-ups for your ship to make you more awesome and hopefully prepare you for the game’s goal, getting back Earth.

Next would be a series of point and click games similar to the NES Shadowgate, Déjà vu, and The Uninvited. Simple games that involve little animation, a solid writer, a variety of settings (fantasy, sci-fi, classic noir) and good music. The point would be to use plot to hook the gamer, to advance you have to solve not just find Red key/Blue key, but also use Sherlock Holmes type logic to further the plot. They’d hopefully be very hard (a call back to some classic PC titles I imagine) and very rewarding to solve.

Finally, a true single-player Phantasy Star sequel.

[lordofduct]

My buddy Adny and I have been busting ass to get into the game design field for a while.

The games we have designed out and attempted making range across several different odd genres... as we have very odd taste in games, neither of which we share.

The games we have dreamt up tend to be weird ensembles of our two ideas of what games should be. Me believing it should be brutally difficult but possible, and his being that it should open ended and not so frustrating it makes the user want to shoot themselves. Which is good as he puts a governor on my desire to piss off every player who plays.

The one thing we do share though is our desire to make children friendly games. Not to say we don't like violence in games, I'm down for blowing stuff up and killing some zombies. But we've both always had an affinity for less then violent games with childish stories and the sort. Not Disney children stories though... more like Grimm Faery Tales, Anansi/Braer Rabbit, and other fables that can still be bleak and haunting.

One of our biggest dreams for a games, with out going into super detail, is a game based around a UI that integrates with the users actions to progressively tell a tale of a little girl trying to break free from her oppressive nanny in her family mansion in the middle of the woods. She sneaks out every night after a day of chores to explore the surrounding forest and meet interesting characters. As every night passes she begins to have a harder and harder time finding her way home in the mist until finally she is forced to remain in her imaginary world. (as you can tell its very much inspired by several fables and childrens tales...)

The game play is based around where you don't receive direct weapons or anything in the game. Instead there is an ensamble of different items just laying around the place with no explained use. Instead you the player can invent uses for the items you collect through out the game so as to create either an offensive or defensive game play pattern.... with reward given to taking the least violent path. (this is portrayed through an ongoing battle with the antagonist who is a walking toad sorcerer who steals children's dreams). Think like the recent film "Bridge to Taribethia" in which the kids invented tools out of odd items they found in the woods. But they always made them defensive items, like leg guards that made them run super fast or magical emblems of protection.

Of course there is a heap more to the game with emphasis on intuitive game play versus defined key press gameplay. Progressive story line that plays out like those old "make your own adventure books". And a transparent leveling up system.




Of course we've had other ideas in other genres. Like a 3d side scrolling platformer based in the distant future on some far of planet with a weird post apocolyptic theme. Tons of mayhem and destruction in the game and overly violent. It was actually an extension on a Sonic sequel I dreamt up in high school... it was I imagined Sonic should have become instead of what it did become. Of course we stripped Sonic out from it completely.

Or another one based in a weird Sim game based in a space colony that is a Dyson Sphere and you have to maintain the pollution output of the people that launch giant garbage asteroids into orbit that collide with and destroy stuff about the place.

Or little music synth based games in the vibe of Rez where your interaction with simple gameplay alters the soundtrack.

I'm an old school arcade gamer. So I like simple, fast paced, puzzley action that rewards fast wits and gives you a Game Over screen every 5 seconds if you mess up just once. Screw save files, save files are for the weak!

[Hatta]

Quest for Glory VI. When you talk to Wolfie in Dragonfire you get some information on how he wants to go back to his native land of Inja. Sounds like a tease for a potential sequel, but alas. Real shame about Sierra.

[Anapan]

http://www.geocities.com/anapan8/cvo/frames2.html
Essentially a platformer based mmorpg engine (with Castlevania SOTN as a base for the physics and graphics modeling) to be turned open source with easy-to-use tools for modding all the aspects of the engine and able to support most popular platformer game functions - tho aimed at creating castleroids.
We actually got the project pretty far into production (more than the website lets on) but I couldn't afford to devote the time needed to develop it properly and was running in to too many problems with the new engine to the point where a rewrite of most everything except the level and character editors would be necessary so I let it die and went to college (RL is always spoiling my fun). I'd like to start it up again with some major changes but that'll have to wait till I get rid of a lot of debt.

brickiemart - You've played Star Control 2, right?

[fingersmaloy]

A Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks-style game where you can play as Capcom and X-Men characters.

Although I'd settle for that Devil May Cry-style Strider remake that people have been talking about possibly existing.

[J T]

When I first heard about the game Brutal Legend I misunderstood what it was going to be about. I thought it was going to be a game where you did battle with Guitar Hero controllers. I love the campy fun concept of Brutal Legend about being a cool rock dude saving the world in a heavy metal cliched universe. I think Jack Black is the perfect choice for the role too because of his band Tenacious D. But once I saw the gameplay was action battles and racing, I was disappointed because I thought it would be something like an RPG where the battle system required you to put down your joystick and pick up your guitar. I imagined a sort of Devil Went Down to Georgia battle style where you take turns battling your enemy. You each get maybe 32 bars of music per turn. While your enemy is playing his passage you have to select what kind of attack you want (fire, water, lightning, wind) in a typical RPG strategy style, but each spell will require you play a different passage of music and the percentage of notes hit correctly will determine whether the spell is activated and how strong it is. Once the battle was over, you could also play a finishing move outro passage for extra flair that would allow each song to conclude naturally at the end of a battle and give you an opportunity to earn some extra gold or experience points. I still like my idea better. I wish that was what Brutal Legend was going to be. Maybe for the sequel?

[lisalover1]

I imagine a sprite-based Action RPG, but with the elegant and deep fighting style of GoW/DMC. Something with highly detailed Neo-Geo-esque sprites, and a fun-but-intricate battle system, similar to Star Ocean. Kind of like Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures for the Gamecube, but as an actual RPG. That would be awesome.

[brickiemart]

brickiemart - You've played Star Control 2, right?

Yes I have. I have the Ur-Quan Masters freeware game on my computer now. I meant part two when I typed Star Control. Star Control 2 is like Street Fighter 2 to me. I just say the game name without the number and I am automatically referring to the 'classic' title. Did you ever get a working version of the SOTN MMO?

Lord of Duct I like that idea of the 'child-escapes-into woods' game. Something about your main character being an innocent kid makes the game more compelling too. One of my favorite books growing up was The Little Prince and I have wondered how well something like that would work in a game format. Your character lives on a small planet that only he maintains and the sum of everything there is all you know in life (as I remember the planet only consists of a few volcanic holes, a small house, and a self-centered rose). You catch comets in a net and explore the universe. Completely innocent and inquisitive, your character sees the workings of the things through his own naive child logic. I'm not saying that a direct story-to-game translation would work, but something that gives off that same tone of isolation and discovery. I haven't seen Bridge to Taribethia, but Pan's Labyrinth sprung to mind when reading your description.

JT, I think if someone made your idea and marketed it correctly that someone would get rich. That's a really good idea. Just the notion of using Guitar Hero controllers for a non-Guitar Hero or Guitar Hero-esque game has potential.

[Anapan]

Ah, just wanted to make sure cause your game sounds to me like a beefed up SC2. It would be really cool to see something like that come out.

The closest we got was the first engine that had 2 player battles working and almost-decent hit detection. I was building my version of the engine from the ground up to be a proper customized API since at the time there was only Multimedia Fusion and some gaming oriented modified programming languages that we found and none seemed to be able to handle the requirements for the game we wanted. Perhaps I bit off a bit more than I could chew, but I still have all the groundwork started in various places. All I need is time...

Lol I remember the little prince. It was on TV too. good stuff.

These are all some great ideas.

[lordofduct]

Lord of Duct I like that idea of the 'child-escapes-into woods' game. Something about your main character being an innocent kid makes the game more compelling too. One of my favorite books growing up was The Little Prince and I have wondered how well something like that would work in a game format. Your character lives on a small planet that only he maintains and the sum of everything there is all you know in life (as I remember the planet only consists of a few volcanic holes, a small house, and a self-centered rose). You catch comets in a net and explore the universe. Completely innocent and inquisitive, your character sees the workings of the things through his own naive child logic. I'm not saying that a direct story-to-game translation would work, but something that gives off that same tone of isolation and discovery. I haven't seen Bridge to Taribethia, but Pan's Labyrinth sprung to mind when reading your description.

The Little Princess was one of my favourite stories as a kid as well.

^^^surprisingly NOT the gayest thing I've ever said^^^


@Anapin - yeah, that's kinda how it fell through on my projects. But those big bites I took taught me a lot of stuff. Our projections never completed but it did launch us into real jobs. Adny went off to Vicarious Visions and I went off to LA for a small company. It was cool. Especially for Adny, that kid has some skill... just a weird twisted mind. Hopefully I'll be moving up there soon with Adny... just need to get this house off my back.

Strange Game GO: