Tuesday, January 18, 2011

My dream game before I forget about it

I don't even have a name for this yet. It's just something I have in mind. When I actually learn some C or C++ I think I'm gonna hack old games to incorporate this idea. Anyway, the idea is:

Game is a cross of beat-em-up and versus fighter. Imagine Ninja Warrior Again or Valkyrie Profile 2 and you see the basic looks of what I'm shooting for, A 2D or 2 1/2D world.

There are shops, interactive NPCs who can give you quests and you can give them items for friendship parameters, or deceive and steal from them for quest shortcuts, money, or items. Can recruit any NPCs in the game as a sidekick. The game will have a lot of quests, but no leveling, fuck that timesink shit. Rewards are gears, but players have only certain amount of gears they can keep to make things fair for newcomers. Gears are reflected on player sprites to encourage customization. I plan to find a way to make the game generate itself some random quests so I can focus on quests that advance user's stories while not spending too much time on random ones myself. A lot of main quests that I do myself will be cross-genre to make things fresh, like, a quest will have tower defense gameplay, another is a puzzle to get by a dungeon, overhead ship shooter, racing and so forth. This will be possible once I figure out how Capcom did it with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure PSX.

That's not even the meat of the game though. What I want is a total, customizable versus fighter that interacts itself into a beat-em-up. If anyone knows Variable Geo(the anime), then it's kinda like that where a ring appears when character is "challenged" by 2nd player or met a boss encounter. Fighting area can expand via classic shatter-the-corner method employed in Real Bout and other oldies. This time, you can swap with your recruit when you feel endangered and regain health outside the ring. Game is not over when your ally dies, but it's over when the main character does.  Since this would be an illegit indy game, I'd rip off every cool costume I can find. Superman with Goku's gi? you got it. Light Yagami head with Batman costume? Definitely.

You know how the leading fighting game company likes to make 7 different variation of same fucking character, and call those different? I'm sick of that shit, and I want to make a game where you have one character who can equip any variation of a single move(say, hadoken) as user's preference. The player will even get to customize input methods. Sick of doing sonic booms hold back-forward+punch? Now you can make it (hold punch), release! or any way you want. The inputs are zero-sum so no single input will be easier or harder, just more optimized for the player. This way, there can be many characters slots while being balanced. Like GwonHo, every while the selectable moves will be introduced and balanced.

Also, the player is never given a penalty for losing a game in his single player campaign. Plenty of story branches would allow to lose a game but trigger a sequence, not endgame, from it. When gameover happens, whatever they worked would be saved.

Since I suck balls with writing a good story, I will copy someone's good work or hire a good writer to do overall story, one that is not a save-the-world. A horror game or sci fi fits my preference, but doesn't have to be. In fact if I have the resources I will probably do a level creator.

Too grand? Of course. Dreams are meant to be grand. When I achieve them, that just makes it more kickass anyway.

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