Create Your Own Game

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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby idontlivehere1122 » Wed Feb 19, 2014 9:38 am

Blackfish wrote:
idontlivehere1122 wrote:What about a game about/inspired by the black plague? [...] So, what do you guys think?

snip


Get what you mean about replay value. I would likely replay my game a couple of times to try new builds and character combinations but that might not gel with everybody. A friend of mine was thinking that maybe the plague being bs or not should be completely random with only very subtle hints throughout the game hinting to its reality. Combined with the cure not always being in the same location and maybe the nature of the cure itself being different each time, that could present a lot of different possibilities. Sometimes its located all the way in the ass end of nowhere, sometimes its located smack in the middle of the largest city, etc. each location leading to very different mid and end games. Even the early game could be different based on where you party starts off.

Having some toggle options with the cure might be one way to go to it, but intentionally giving the player blue balls at the end of the game is half the reason I thought of the original idea. :)
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby CarrieVS » Wed Feb 19, 2014 8:47 pm

Well, lately Strant and Marcuse have been talking about games (mainly Metal Gear) with me and showing me videos and stuff. They're probably gonna make a real gamer of me some day. Anyway, me being the way I am, it got me thinking a bit about a Metal Gear-esque sort of a game. Metal Gear-esque in the sense of the aim being to infiltrate places and fight bad-guys with an emphasis on stealth and things other than killing people.

Also in the sense of being quite story-focussed (so sue me; I'm a writer). But the idea is that the story is fairly interactive, so it's (within reasonable limits) not too linear. Kind of like choose your own adventure, only your 'choice' is sometimes determined by your skills with the controller. The idea is that the same events happen regardless, and there's no levels you can't complete unless you did X, but how you and your team handle it changes (and in some cases the difficulty), and there'll be special abilities/items, boosts to your abilities, different side-quests, etc, that you unlock with different achievements. Also, besides yourself, there's at least one mission in which each team member can die without failing the mission, and you'll have to play the rest of the game without that character.

Anyway, you play as a hotshot rookie dropped into an existing five-man-band of ... some sort of possibly top secret spec ops-like team of bad-guy-fighters, fighting some sort of bad guys. I don't know. Probably at least one government is employing at least one of the teams.

They all have different attitudes towards you - there's one who's a kind of mentor, another who resents your addition to the group, another who's nearer your age then the others and wants to be best buddies, and so on. Depending on what you do, their opinions of you will change (the guy who dislikes you, in particular, can end up accepting you or becoming openly hostile) and that will affect how much help you can get from that character and so on.

You have to make use of your team to complete the game (well, it might be possible without, but extremely frustrating for all involved). You won't always be told what to do or provided with the things you need, but you'll always be able to ask your teammates, who'll give you advice, items, and training. Training might take the form of a tutorial, but in some instances it'll be an optional side-quest that unlocks a special ability/item or gives you a boost to some stat if you can complete it successfully.

You'll also play as the other members of the team for some missions.

I have a few ideas for scenes and missions and so on. There's one (the first thing I thought of when I conceived the idea for this) where you play an escort mission - as the person being escorted. Your character gets injured on a mission and you play as one of your teammates coming in to rescue him. Then after he (you) gets to you, you switch back to your usual character.

You're slowed down, unable to use your dominant arm - so no two-handed attacks and you're weaker and less accurate in one-handed attacks, and your vision's impaired. You need to follow your (now back to being an NPC) teammate's instructions; in some places it's a little like doing a blindfold obstacle course (you've probably done that on a teambuilding exercise at least once). Your teammate takes care of most of the stuff that would be a challenge when your character was fit, so it's hopefully not too frustrating to have the controls impeded, but he needs your help and cooperation or he'll die trying to keep you alive with a suitably heart-wrenching animation/cutscene. You can also give him instructions - which might sometimes save his life, but if they're wrong or you distract his attention at a bad moment will get him killed.

You don't fail the mission if he dies, though. You can get out without him, though it's extremely difficult, and then he's dead for the rest of the game.

If there's a sequel, you'll be able to continue from a completed saved game, and things like which teammates are still alive will carry over (with certain things being adjusted to keep the difficulty relatively similar), and some of the special items and abilities that you might have unlocked.

Out of your five teammates, there's two that are 'intended' to die in the first game, it being quite hard to keep them alive. The other three are relatively hard to lose (at least one is very difficult). Any combination, including all of them and none of them, is, however, possible. The default (if there's no saved game) would be that the two that are hard to save are dead in the sequel, and (regardless of who's still alive) you have two new characters - so you're not flying solo if you end up losing all your team.
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby AboveGL » Thu Feb 20, 2014 2:41 pm

I figured I may as well bash this out now because it's really about time. It's long, just to warn you.

Anyway, I want to create a game set in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe (or similar) so it's a sci-fi RPG, but with some light fantasy elements too. It's hardly groundbreakingly original and the ideas I have for a story include the usual DX machina you see in almost every Final Fantasy game, but it's something I'd give a left arm to play.

This game concerns a concept known as the noosphere, or "sphere of thought", which effects all cognitive human beings. For anyone who hasn't played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and hates spoilers, here's the back story:

Spoiler: show
In the game's universe, some scientists were experimenting on the noosphere to get rid of negative emotions and in the process formed the Common Consciousness, or the C-Consciousness. They carried out their experiments at the derelict Chernobyl NPP because it was surrounded by huge antennas which were strong enough to send the psi signals they needed for their tests. During one experiment, a serious disaster occurred, irreparably damaging the Noosphere and giving rise to an area called the Zone.


The Zone is a mysterious place full of mutated horrors and concentrated areas called "anomalies", which can do various horrific things to a human body, but the main attraction is the presence of valuable objects called artifacts, which are spawned by anomalies. Most can be equipped for various effects (usually a positive effect and a negative effect, but some very valuable artifacts have just positive effects). Some have no use but they can be sold to scientists for a fair price.

The people who inhabit the zone are known as Stalkers, and they are all divided into various factions with different objectives and ideologies, most looking to make a quick buck through artifact hunting. Many fall to the zone's natural dangers with just as many to other stalkers. Some report having hallucinations. Occasionally, powerful bursts of radioactive and psychic energy occur, called "emissions" or "blowouts". You'd better take shelter when this happens, especially if you're near Chernobyl NPP, the Zone's centre.

The Zone itself is also expanding, and is said to increase in diameter each time an emission occurs. In this tragically nonexistent game, it's so large it engulfs part of England (though the effects on the outer areas are far less potent).

Spoiler: show
Emissions are entirely man made. The scientists could still control the noosphere despite the damage done to it, but at a price. They had to release the excess energy from their experiments periodically, giving rise to emissions. However, emissions can occur by themselves too. They came in handy as a protective measure as the scientists felt the world wasn't ready to learn about their research, often resorting to using other horrific methods which I won't elaborate here.
Another thing to note is that by the time the game occurs, the C-Consciousness has been destroyed and its research handed down to a team of scientists I mention below.


The series' main protagonist (who I'll just name The Protagonist since his actual name is also a spoiler) now works alongside a team of scientists as an advisor to study the zone and the noosphere. Since the events of the most recent game, Call of Pripyat, many scientific wonders have discovered and manufactured by various corporations, but only The Protagonist and his team of scientists know how to control the noosphere, thus their identities are protected by the FSB. A lot of rival companies want to obtain the research but have no leads. Somewhere, a maniacal CEO comes in.

You're an MI5 agent who needs to go on some mission of some kind and as the game progresses, you get tied up in all this. I haven't thought that part through.

MECHANICS

I think top-down third-person works for this and for no reason other than to show off, instances of second-person gameplay. Distance is quantified with hexes.
There are inter-linked local maps and a world map with random encounters, which include anomaly fields (positions often change with each emission, which should make your trek interesting or frustrating).

You can customise your agent with primary stats, derived stats and skills (of which up to three can be tagged). Skills are either combat or non-combat. You can select up to two optional traits. You have hit points. You also have levels for radiation, toxins and mental health, as well as resistance to poison, radiation and psychic damage. Your character can’t have very low intelligence but increased intelligence will add a little more resistance to psychic attacks. You also have stamina which lets you sprint and jump, affected by your character’s endurance.

Low stamina hinders your movement. Heavy doses of radiation gradually drain your health at a much faster rate, as will a large quantity of poison. With low mental health, the screen blurs significantly if it’s your turn in combat and your ability to aim is massively hindered.

You can do the same for any companions who join you. In addition, you have separate inventories. You can control them separately in combat too. Speaking of which!

Combat is turn based like in Fallout. You have action points to determine how much you can do in one turn (including movement, for which you spend one point per hex moved). With weapons, you can take a normal short or aimed shot with the possibility of a twitch-based mechanic which allows you to take as much time as you need to line up your shot. In addition, you can fire bursts this way, with longer bursts using more action points as you hold down the trigger.

As you level up, you can gain perks, but some can only be earned through other methods, either automatically or requiring AP to learn.

There will be stashes. Kill someone with a PDA or other digital device, they could reveal some info about some goodies they left in some obscure location. Of course, you’ll have to scan it first.

One main feature I want to bring (which was meant to appear in the first STALKER game, but was cut entirely) is artifact activation. Basically, each type of anomaly spawns certain artifacts. In the first game, anomalies spawn three artifacts with the same properties but the rare and expensive ones have potent effects. Well, activating an artifact will produce its corresponding anomaly and the anomaly's power depends on the artifact. The more expensive and potent its effects are, the more powerful an anomaly it will create. However, anomalies only last a few turns and the more powerful ones burn out faster. Artifacts can be activated on the spot (move away!) or thrown but how far and accurately you can throw it depends on a skill. Of course, they can still be equipped for their effects.

As can be seen from above, artifacts are practically one use. However, I also want to bring in another feature: artifact farming. Basically, you can obtain artifacts from anomalies by calming them somehow and obviously, the kind you get depends on the kind of anomaly. You'll usually get cheaper artifacts and your chance of getting a more expensive and potent one depends on the anomaly’s power and other factors. However, with SCIENCE! you can make more expensive artifacts from cheaper ones as long as they all spawn naturally from the same anomaly. Certain rare artifacts with ONLY positive effects can only be obtained from special anomalies or other tough methods to replicate unique effects, like removing gravity in one area, slowing down time around you or teleportation.

In addition, one companion will be able to create anomalies without using up artifacts! All they have to do is equip it and after gaining enough AP, they can create as many anomalies they please! However, their use will drain their mental health and stamina so you want to keep it replenished. You can “cast” three levels of each type of anomaly with the most expensive allowing you to learn the highest level (though the AP required will be much higher). The anomaly disappears immediately after it's been "cast" and the damage done, but there are perks that will keep the anomaly going for more than one turn.

Finally, you can buff weapons with anomaly effects (like the Buff power in Saints Row 4). Imagine inflicting a powerful anti-gravitational field with just a kitchen glove. You get the idea.
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby Craic- » Fri Feb 21, 2014 3:34 am

I have whiled away many hours on Medieval: Total War, and ever since I first played it I always wanted to create a game with three 'levels' of game dynamic in a similar vein. The most 'zoomed out' level would be akin to Total War: a strategic overview where you build and conquer on a world map. There would be the sort of 'middle' layer, where you get to control the battle still in the same way as the existing Total War games: a fly-around battlefield where you control lots of different regiments etc. Where I really wanted the addition to be was on an individual level.

I like to draw a somewhat unlikely analogy to the latest FIFA games. I don't know exactly when they introduced this, but with the latest versions you're able to play as an individual player through the footballing world, whilst doing all the old-style managing and 'zoomed out' (absolute flimsy word choice) football match control (switching between players etc.) on the pitch. It's your choice whether you spend the match as the single player or control the whole team. This is the element I want in my Total War game. I want to be able to create an individual knight, or serf, or whatever just like any Bethesda style game and fight as that individual either third or first person. There would be side quests popping up from time to time on the world map, and of course everybody's favourite big siege battles. One would have to be careful not to design it in a style like Dynasty Warriors, where the repetition of battle gets tedious very very quickly. Rather it would be all about the tension before battle - seeing the amassing army looming on the horizon, seeing the siege engines being pulled into place. You could mount a horse and sally forth like a mad man, or pick up a bow and fire from the ramparts, strap on your shield and whip out your longsword and revel in death like a Sean Bean. The beauty is, people would not get bored with the action as there would be so many different ways to tackle the same battle. Throw in a random NPC and map generator or something and you're set for life.

Then you would buttress up your buttresses with the spoils of war and be able to walk majestically around your city. Maybe if you get promoted high enough you have to start sorting out problems within your governed city. Of course, you would still be the omniscient demigod controlling your armies from a tabletop map, but this individual element would be so Gandalf.

There would be so much potential for expanding this model to different universes too. Just imagine how awesome Lord of the Rings would be, or a WWII setting, or a futuristic Starcraft version. Then you could have different combinations of strategy with RPG and FPS elements. I wouldn't have said this game was possible ten years ago when I first played Medieval and lusted after the idea, but as the universes created by Rockstar and Bethesda show now, I truly believe it can be done. Too bad I'm not a chief executive in the gaming industry.
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby CarrieVS » Fri Feb 21, 2014 9:24 am

Guys, I'm gonna go off and learn C++ (or something besides Java, Perl, and Fortran) and when I get back we can set up TCSware - a games company making all these games. Craic, you can be Chief Exectutive. Nudge can be lead developer because he programmed a Pac-man game once. The most I ever did was hangman-in-the-command-line. JT's in charge of graphics and MeatPuppet can head up the AI department. And we have any number of writers.
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby Blackfish » Fri Feb 21, 2014 12:53 pm

Craic-, have you played Mount & Blade: Warband? As its name implies, you start out by yourself with poor equipment but you can recruit men (and some women) into your warband. You typically start out running away from, then actively taking on bandit parties, then as you and your men become more skilled and better-equipped you can hire yourself out as a mercenary band in one of the wars that are pretty much always raging in the game world. Eventually if you perform well enough you will get offers to become a vassal of one of the various kings, and even gain fiefdoms for yourself if you play it smart. Mid- to late-game battles resemble miniature Total War battles, where you pit your large warband against other warbands in formation - you can command your troops to stand ground, stand closer, fire at will, etc. Although just rolling all over the enemy with a hundred heavy horse is also very effective.

It primarily does the small-scale personal combat the best (and it does this really, really well), the engine and AI can't really handle battles with over about a couple hundred men and the campaign map is kind of barebones, but if you're looking to scratch that itch until a better game of this nature comes around there's Warband.

Spoiler: show
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby Craic- » Fri Feb 21, 2014 6:22 pm

Carrie - Wow if all it takes for a promotion is "Too bad I'm not a...", our company is going to excel!
Blackfish - You wonderful person, I'm going to check this out straight away. Never heard of the game.
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby Matthew Notch » Mon Mar 17, 2014 7:46 pm

This is my latest concept. I really really want to make this game, but I don't know the first thing about coding. I can do literally everything else for it (art, music, sound, story, design, even marketing), but without coding all I have is an idea I can post on a forum in hopes that somebody will see it and decide to make it into something real.

The game is an app for smart devices. I suppose there could be PC or console versions, but they wouldn't make much sense given what the game actually is. The game is called "End of the Line", and essentially what happens is, you start up for the first time, watch a brief tutorial, then play for a high score. The art style is like a children's drawing in black and white. The game is a lot like Flappy Bird in that obstacles come at you and you have to avoid them. You place your finger down and then the game starts, and a line draws behind you as you move around these obstacles. Sometimes coins come along and if you can draw a circle around them quickly, you will earn them for bonus points. If you pick up your finger or run into any obstacle, you will lose and will have to start the run over again.

So what we have is your typical scraping-the-barrel sort of iPhone or Droid game. This is where it gets interesting. After about the third or fourth run, after a certain distance into the game, a little colorful "hole" appears as an obstacle. Players focused on that high score will avoid it dutifully, but curious players might run into it purposefully, and when you do a cutscene is played and suddenly several other games are unlocked. All of the games are tried and true platforms: a puzzle RPG, a slots game, an idle clicker, and eventually a point and click adventure are all unlocked. The unlockables occur with items won in each game, but the items serve purposes in games they aren't native to.

Okay, I'll explain that better. Remember how in the first game, the "real" game, you could draw circles around coins for bonus points? Turns out you also get to keep those coins, and they can be used to play the slots game. Another item that seems to serve little purpose as an equippable in the puzzle RPG is actually used to jam the slot machine so that it forces a certain result and awards a different item altogether. And of course, paths in the point and click adventure that seem to just be walls that can't be crossed are actually pathways to even more game.

The whole time a narrator is telling you things like "you can't run from it forever." As you get deeper and deeper into what started out as a very trivial Flappy Bird clone, you discover that the colorful hole at the beginning was, in fact, the beginning of your death, and all these games are distractions to keep your mind and heart away from the big picture, which is, of course, that at some point it's all coming to an end. The final challenge is a text adventure in which you finally move away from the trivialities and get to the important things you must take care of before you leave the world forever. After you finish this and finally die, one last cutscene discussing the mystery of it plays, and then all games with all unlockables become available for play whenever you like from a central menu, and if there's space, maybe even a new game, a tactics RPG battler, perhaps.

I feel like this game wouldn't be difficult to code if I had any knowledge of such things, since templates for every sort of game mentioned are probably running around on the Internet somewhere. The difference, to me, is that you can put all these concepts into one game, give them a central narrative with a deeper theme than you'd expect at the beginning, and really tap into the joy that comes from venturing just a little farther, winning more stuff and power, and uncovering more of the story. And frankly, if one just wanted to spend a whole lot of time racking up money on the slots or the idle clicker, it's not like those games HAVE to be plowed through or anything. Everything happens at the player's pace. No IAP, though non-intrusive ads on certain sections of the game could help improve the revenue stream (it's not as though I could, in good faith, charge 2.99 for what looks like a Flappy Bird clone to anyone browsing it on the App Store or the Play Store). It's a game that I feel would inspire a lot of people, once they discover what it actually is, to tell their friends to get immediately.
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby Matthew Notch » Thu Jan 15, 2015 11:55 am

Double post! But separated by time and space.

I want to make Pacifism Quest. Do you realize how many games that tell any sort of story require combat? Even puzzle RPGs use the matches to make attacks, with life bars and damage and so forth. I'll admit, I can understand why. It's nearly impossible to make a game that has no combat, because then what does the player actually do? So I thought and thought about it and I think I might be on to something.

Gameplay
The way I'd set it up is, at the bottom half of the screen is a puzzle grid with tiles containing four different shapes in four different colors a piece, so you have 16 possible tiles, but you can make matches with shapes OR colors, although each has different effects. What these matches do is slowly build up powers that don't involve attacking another person. The powers serve to assist your character who is playing out on the top of the screen. The action itself is all cutscenes, after a fashion. So rather than moving your character around the world, you watch as the story unfolds, and at critical moments use your powers to protect and defend the pacifist and those around him.

I'll try and explain better. So for instance, your character is at his job when he is cornered by several other co-workers who call him a coward and try to pick a fight. Before they can grab him to start beating him up, you can hit the evade button, and as long as you keep holding it you can dodge your way out of their grasps. However, you can only do this for as long as you have your Evasion bar filled with energy. Once it runs out, you run the risk of getting caught after all. However, you can keep adding energy to it by continuing to make matches while you hold the Evasion hotkey or hold it down on your touchscreen. This mechanic, in which your attention is divided between the action on screen, the status of your various powers, and the puzzle grid you use to build these powers, comes into serious play later on when timing is critical to being able to complete all your tasks without running out of juice.

Examples of powers are Evasion, as I mentioned, and Stealth, which you can use to hide in certain background objects you may encounter. An Intuit button lets you interact with objects in the game, and can also be used to reason with aggressors, in hopes of neutralizing their threats peacefully. And finally there would be a Heal power, which you can use to heal yourself or, as the game goes on to reveal, others who are injured or ill. Matching shapes rather than colors builds your inventory of crafting supplies, which you can use to make items that affect the grid itself, making it easier to get matches for instance, or slowing the action on the cinematic down in order to try and catch up down below. Finally, matches of five or more, or matches that are all the same shape AND color will earn experience that eventually allows you to unlock more powerful versions of the powers you begin the game with, as well as new techniques that use two powers in tandem.

I feel like even though the game is technically on rails, the level of interactivity can change the story in different ways, or can even lead to failure if you cannot meet certain objectives or are killed. Graphically I think a pixelated style would be best, and probably a chiptune soundtrack to go with it. Basically it would look like an 8-bit game, but it would be moving over much headier territory than those games ever got near.


Story
So as far as the story itself. You are a young husband and father on what will end up being a faraway planet. The weather worldwide has gotten much colder, to dangerous levels at night. In addition, masses of alien craft are swarming in the skies. The aliens were once your closest allies, but something seems to be off, and now your people are preparing for war. You have taken a vow of nonviolence, though.

An accident at the factory you work at serves as a brief tutorial to interacting with the game, as well as the mechanics of level building. After you fix the machinery and discreetly heal one of the employees (since your powers are a secret to the rest of the world), it's discovered that the factory was planning on installing new equipment anyway, since they are to begin constructing munitions for the war effort soon. After you refuse to build weapons, you are cornered into a fight with some co-workers, but you escape them. You will, however, lose your job as a result.

Some days later a draft is instituted, and your name is chosen. Rather than hide like a coward, you stand up for what you believe, but it results in you going to jail. While there you are once again threatened, this time by much more dangerous fellow criminals in the mess hall. If you can survive their attack, the prison guard will finally step in to intervene, only to be stabbed to death by the ringleader of the gang.

That night you are accosted in your cell by several guards who blame you for their comrade's death. You must manage to avoid their attacks while stealing the keys from the belt of one of the guards. Once you escape you lock the guards in the cell. Not long after, though, a large explosion is heard, and you discover that an entire wall has been blown away. The aliens have begun their attack.

All the prisoners are escaping into the woods, and you follow them, only to discover that the aliens are waiting in ambush, and begin killing at will. Now you have to avoid them, hide when you can, and ultimately make your way to the radio transmitter they are using to coordinate their attack. Destroy that and they will be unable to continue effectively slaughtering the prisoners.

It's cold and you're going to start getting frostbite soon. Try and stay alive, taking shelter to warm back up when you can, but keep moving until you come to a tavern on the edge of town that has managed to stay intact. Inside, you drink up, and get too drunk. The strain of the war pushes some into a barfight, and without your inhibitions, you enter the fray, quickly dispatching the other patrons. After you go to a room to get some rest, it is revealed that in the past you were an alcoholic with a short temper, always getting in fights until the day you discovered that you had the power to heal others. With a renewed sense of purpose you vowed never to cause harm again, and now you are sorry for the fighting you've just done.

The next day you make your way back to the village, to your wife and son. Your wife is unharmed, but your son lost a leg and is now suffering from a strange illness that seems to have taken a great many from the village. Using your healing powers, which you reveal to your wife for the first time, you slowly reconstruct your son's leg and then purge him of the illness. After that you begin an arduous journey through the village, healing any you can find. There's an achievement for saving them all. After you enter the last cabin, though, you discover an alien warrior, who shoots you and leaves you for dead.

You awaken on an examination table. An alien scientist enters the room, but after some discussion it becomes apparent that he and his group are not affiliated with the invaders. In fact, they are trying to devise a peaceful, diplomatic end to hostilities, but both sides are so taken with war that they are beyond reason. However, the scientist, after his examination of you, theorizes that you are actually a member of a long lost species which grew on the planet until a certain point, and then blossomed into beings of pure energy and took up residence in the sun. Because their kind has been dying out, the sun has lost its energy, and the climate has gotten colder. This, by the way, is a good time to build lots of levels.

A shudder is heard in the craft you are on. The alien warriors have entered, looking for "seditionists" who are turning the people against their government. The invasion turns into a massacre, and it's up to you to make your way through the ship, safely getting as many crew as you can to the escape pods before escaping the attack yourself.

Now that you are back on your planet, you meet up with the pacifists' counterparts of your own species (or rather, the native species of your planet), and through them discover that the reason for the invasion is because your own planet has taken several political prisoners, hoping to use them as bargaining chips for meteorological control devices. The group is planning a protest outside the government center to bring this truth to light and hopefully force the leaders on both sides to agree to diplomacy once more. Although you want to return to your family, you feel like you have to join them.

The protest, however, also turns violent when the police arrive. This time it's all you can do just to keep from getting killed yourself. However, there is still a chance the message can be spread, if you can just get the data cube to the world news affiliate broadcasting the protest. Most journalists are also fleeing the police brutality, but you can hopefully reason with someone to stay behind and run the message on the air.

Once you do this, the game is almost over. The two sides are now sitting at one table, but diplomacy is at a gridlock. As the news reports that both sides are secretly planning for war again, it becomes apparent that even the truth will not unseat these conflict hungry politicians. It's at this point that you finally make the transformation, turning into a being of light, and after teleporting the prisoners back to the invaders' ships, you then send the invaders back home. Finally you return and take material shape once more. However, it is apparent to your wife that you are not of this world, and will not be able to stay. Saying your goodbyes to her and to your son, you once again transform, and this time fly into the sun, energizing it and bringing warmth back to the planet.

The final scene is your wife being approached by a man who was with you in the prison. He was one of the gang that had threatened you in the mess hall, and he confesses to her that he was impressed by your stand even if he did not agree with it at the time, and mostly went along with the fight to protect himself. He tells her he never got the change to tell you in person, but she tells him that she thinks you might still know anyway.

Finishing the campaign unlocks an endless mode with different timing challenges at random that increase in difficulty the longer you play.

I know that the gameplay would be a little frenetic at times, and would require a certain amount of micromanagement. But I was thinking about this, and as a case in point the combat in FTL can all be done automatically, although it is affected by the weapons you and the enemy power up and by a certain amount of randomness in targeting and accuracy. I'm not sure that it's that much of a stretch to make a good lot of the game happen automatically, but with plenty of events requiring strategy (which powers to use) and timing (when and where will you use them). And anyway, I know the story and concept would be so different from anything that's out there--for once you're NOT trying to beat down the other guy. It just feels like something that could be pretty good, if at times perhaps a bit heavy-handed.
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby skooma » Wed Feb 11, 2015 5:05 am

I want to do something space carnival, probably an RPG. Think it would have to be human far-future or something similar, to have the carnival history and ambience. Instead of the usual classes, there would just be some casual or coincidental overlap with those, from among different kinds of carnie characters from many species, with a lot more creative customization options than usual (not unlike Spore's creature creator, but probably way less than that).

Fighting would happen, but lots of other kinds of quests too, with an emphasis on dealing with a huge spectrum of different cultural challenges, along with space flight or survival concerns on the route. Also quests, puzzles, goals within the carnival, which would grow as you progress, guess the general goal would be taking over, by carnivization, although force might be an option, most likely just in minor cases/side quests.

A lot of emphasis on cultural and species differences in space, not that well thought through so far (suggestions super welcome!) but definitely, absolutely, with first person space flight simulation, including for battles. Things like a linguistic or visual puzzle for communication or changing up the show come to mind, at this point it's still somewhat a melting pot idea.
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If you could design a game...

Postby cmsellers » Mon Mar 02, 2015 12:37 am

I've been trying for awhile to develop my own 4X game. I'm hindered in this by the fact that I don't know any of the C languages or Java well enough to use them, so I'm trying to write the damn thing in Python using pygame. I imagine that it's highly unlikely I will come anywhere close to developing a minimum viable product anytime in the near future, let alone a fully functional game.

That said, I've put a lot of thought into what my game would look like. It would look something like this:

Introduction
I've decided that the most important feature of this game is that it would be unitless.

One thing that drives me nuts about turn-based 4X games is how unrealistically long it takes to move units from one tile to another. The problem is that you're combining long-term thinking, in terms of how to manage an empire, with short-term thinking, regarding how to deal with military units during wartime and workers and diplomats in peacetime.

I always try to play games such that the war is essentially won before I start it. My economy should be stronger than the enemy's and/or my technology should be significantly ahead of theirs. As long as I don't do anything incredibly stupid, I should have no trouble winning a war. One frustrating thing that I note is that the AI in strategy games usually seems focused on units, and will tend to declare war if it could beat the units you currently have. I've noticed this in both FreeCiv and EUIV, and it forces me to keep unrealistically large standing armies in order to prevent the AI from making a stupid move.

Considering Clausewitz's dictum that war is simply politics by other means, warfare should be an extension of the political choices you make in managing your empire. If you run a country well and hire good generals, your management in the minutiae of the war should be irrelevant. Even in cases where a national leader did take charge of his armies and did use military genius to achieve great victories, political factors likely mattered more. Alexander exploited the superiority of Greek troops and the political weakness of the Persian Empire. Napoleon was propelled to power by the French Revolution, and his tactical genius could not overcome his strategic and diplomatic failings.

My game would thus be all about two things: government management and strategic use of land. To explain, I will cover the four "X"s of a 4X game, with the first three rearranged: expansion and exploitation come before exploration. You would start with a relatively small area of the map revealed, and can build your first settlement anywhere within it.

Expand
Once you have your first city, you can expand by building poli. Poli start as trading posts, religious sites, forts, or naval outposts, and can develop into full-fledged cities. They will develop naturally based on the value of the terrain (natural population growth), the safety of the location and value for trade (local immigration), your economy, and the economies of your neighbors (poorly-run neighbors will spawn immigrants and refugees). They can also be developed by forcefully relocating populations.

Poli have two important features. One is that they will exert zones of influence which allow you to build other poli. The other is that they allow the settlement and exploitation of surrounding land within your zone of influence.

Capitals of large empires will cover up multiple hexes as their "urban area", and certain technologies will allow the creation of larger urban areas in all cities and suburban areas.

You can pretty much always build new poli, and they will draw population from your existing ones. Large, thinly spread empires will be vulnerable to division and their poli will be more vulnerable to attacks by barbarians and your neighbors.

A sparsely-inhabited empire will have a weaker economy than a more compact empire of the same population. However rural population growth will be influenced by the amount of fertile land in a tile and a surrounding tile which hasn't reached carrying capacity. A thinly-spread empire will have faster native population growth in its rural tiles, but lower immigration and a higher risk of barbarian raids.

Exploit
Development of your country is determined by five things: subjects, resources, technology, policies, and people.

Subjects represent the mass inhabitants of your realm. Subjects will have certain features, including culture, religion and caste (under pre-capitalist governments) or class and sector (under capitalist governments). Only yeoman, serf, and slave castes, and members of the primary sector can settle outside of a city's urban area.

With castes, you also have burghers (craftsman and trader subtypes), administrators (mandarin, clergy, and academic subtypes), and warriors (noble and order subtypes). Burghers contribute to your economy, adminstrators to your research and contentment, and warriors to your military abilities.

With the development of capitalism, your subjects convert to a class and a sector, with class determining fertility the amount of money they can contribute to the economy and/or taxes, and sector determining how they contribute to the economy.

Subjects' culture will be your nation's culture, unless they moved into your country, you conquered a foreign city, or they're undergoing ethnogenesis (see the "etc" section). Subjects not of the your primary culture will have a chance to assimilate. Specialists assimilate faster than peasants. Also immigrants assimilate faster than refugees, and refugees faster than natives or exiles. Subjects of the wrong religious group will never assimilate if there is any state which has that religion as the official religion.

Assimilation will not necessarily be to your primary culture. It will be to your primary culture the subject is in a city and yours is the dominant culture of a city. If may be to your primary culture if there is an nearby where your culture is dominant (whether in a city or the countryside). Otherwise, assimilation will be based on the dominant culture of a city (if in a city) and the dominant culture of adjacent tiles (if rural).

Resources fall into three kinds: renewable, non-renewable, and marine. Non-renewable resources have different amounts which can be accessed at different levels of technology, and when they're gone, they're gone. Marine resources are accessible all at once when the appropriate technology level is reached. They're self-renewing, however the lower they get the slower they renew. Complete elimination will allow a marine resource to renew only if the resource is present in a neighboring tile.

Renewable resources can be exploited like oceanic resources at any level of technology, however at very low levels. Certain technologies, usually early ones (herding, agriculture, arboriculture) will allow the domestication of a renewable resource. This will allow the resource to be exploited at much more efficient levels, and also to spread the resource to other tiles in your realm which are suitable for its cultivation. The spread will happen naturally with adjacent tiles, and can be sped up for a price.

Technology will follow a technology tree, but unlike with most games you won't be able to specify what paths you follow. Generally technologies will be discovered based on the needs of your realm and what your neighbors have. However you can encourage research into different technologies by national policies, and if a known country has a technology you desire, you can attempt to discover it by epsionage. Even if you positively discourage research, technologies will still leak across your border, and skilled immigrants from countries with superior technologies will have a high chance of spreading those technologies to your country.

Policies will allow you to prioritize certain things at the expense of others. For example, adopting a feudal government will result in a higher number of nobles and clergy while reducing the number of academics and eliminating the possibility of mandarins. Assigning land to support military orders will support those orders, at the expense of all other specialists. A centralized government will reduce the land needed to support military orders, but will have fewer clergy, resulting in higher citizen discontent.

People represent great individuals. This is the part I've thought out least. I know that I want the possibility to have pretenders, reformers, and great rebel leaders, whom you can embrace or oppose, with varying effects. I also know that I want them to include generals, which will play a role in your military abilities, and viceroys, who will improve the value of the land assigned them but may revolt if they grow too powerful.

Explore
Unlike traditional 4X games, you cannot manually explore new lands. Rather, new lands will be revealed in four ways: expansion, technology, interactions with other governments, and the hiring of people.

Expansion is the easiest way to reveal new land, since a new polis on the fringe of your empire will reveal all land in its sphere of influence, and gradually reveal some land beyond it.

Technology will increase the land that you can see around your borders, and the speed at which it is revealed.

Interactions which reveal new land include trade, diplomacy, espionage, and immigration. As you trade with a nation, you will gradually come to reveal more land, in particular important cities and sites of rare resources. Diplomacy will allow you to request a nation's world map, and espionage will allow you to steal it. Finally, immigrants will bring knowledge of their city of origin and some of the lands along the way. Some immigrants may bring additional knowledges as well.

People can be hired to discover new land. Diplomats will attempt to learn about tiles in a country they visit, and reveal the route they took. Various kinds of explorers can be hired with certain technologies, and sent to a specific region, where they will reveal a certain number of tiles.

Exterminate
My game will offer several ways to expand your territory at the expense of other nations.

With diplomacy, smaller nations may willingly seek your protection. Alternatively, you can issue an an ultimatum, to either forcibly protect a small nation, or demand territory from a large, but still weaker nation. With espionage, you can attempt to persuade the elites of a city to join your nation or to seek independence for themselves, and provide support for their attempts once they agree.

Trade between nations for necessary resources and products will happen automatically to some degree, depending on the technology levels and trade policies of the two nations. You can influence trade through embargoes against specific nations or tariffs against all comers. You can also have trade treaties with other nations, which may be either mutually beneficial, or solely to the advantage of the stronger nation. As with the US in Hawaii and the British in Africa, having trade interests in a much weaker country will make it easier to take over later.

Of course there's war. You can set objectives for your generals, such as capturing specific cities or fortifying certain tiles, or you can leave it to their best judgment. War will essentially be a matter of dueling economies, as your generals apply your money and manpower to taking enemy territory and fortifying key positions. It will be possible, once territory is occupied, to try to integrate it into your country or encourage the independence of certain regions. Successful annexations and puppet states will move the goalposts for what you can demand from the enemy. Technology and your economy will limit supply lines unless you order your generals to exceed your limits. In that case, you may find yourself like Napoleon in Moscow.

A war which essentially stalemates, with one power unable to advance into another due to supply limitations, may eventually result in an automatic peace on the terms of uti possidetis. However any movement of more than a few tiles will reset the stalemate timer, encouraging players to reach a negotiated peace.

Negotiations for peace will be based on a modified version of the principle of status quo antebellum, with successful seizures of territory being counted as part of the status quo, while merely occupied territory will not. The AI will consider disruptions of its economy, subject discontent, and occupied territory in what terms it will agree to if losing, and what terms it expects you to agree to if winning. It will always be possible to demand cities and their hinterlands, gold, technology, the AI's world map, and trade concessions. Later technology will allow demands of individual tiles and possibly other benefits.

Etc
Map
Another thing that drives me nuts about 4X games is that you always have a flat, cylindrical, or toroidal map.
Ideally, I would eventually be able to create a game in which tiles were based on a globe, and you could look at either the globe itself or various flat projections

Culture
Each empire would naturally start out with one culture. As it grows larger, natural regions would form new cultures, a process which is accelerated if some provinces of one culture end up under a different government. Relationships between cultures would be tracked via nodes, with both a base distinction for individual cultures directly under a node, and a "cultural distinctivness" for individual cultures. Distinct cultures which remain in close proximity would also have "cultural convergence" factors, which would bring those cultures close together.

Additionally, "civilization" would spread to neighboring barbarians, generating new AIs. These AIs will sometimes adopt the culture of the civilization spreading the culture, sometimes create a closely related culture, and sometimes create an entirely new one. Early in the game it's much more likely that the AI will adopt the spreading culture, while later in the game it's likely that the AI will adopt a new or child culture.

Decay of empires
It should be almost impossible to keep your empire together throughout the game. Cultural distinctions and catastrophes will lead new empires to split off your old empire. Whenever this happens, you will have the opportunity to take over the new empire, and will continue to have the option of taking over any child empire which has not culturally converged with another empire. (You can of course take over any nation at all by returning to the main menu.)

Scoring will be partially based on your civilization's achievements, and partially based on the achievements of each of your child civilizations.


How about you guys? Any of you have games you wish you had the skills to develop (or the money to pay someone else to)? What would yours look like?
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Last edited by Dr. Ambiguous on Mon Mar 02, 2015 6:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Create Your Own Game

Postby Jack Road » Wed Mar 04, 2015 8:30 am

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Post Your Stupidly Awesome Game Idea Here

Postby Jack Road » Thu Jul 21, 2016 6:08 am

We all that are gamers have our idea of what an insanely perfect game would be. Post yours here!

My idea is below.

Okay, so my idea is that the Lord of Chaos has said to the Lord of Order that no matter how unequal the playing field, the Lord of Chaos will always win. So they play endless games of universe chess. Basically they have made this artificial universe. It has five layers. First layer is the realm of order. Fifth is the realm of Chaos. Second and Fourth are neutral zones. Third is the realm players are in.

The third realm contains everything the species that has been chosen for its needs to live. 1500 of those species are placed at the start of the realm and allowed to do whatever they like for one hundred thousand years. They can propagate and multiply and they and their offspring can do whatever they like within the bound of that reality. All of this species live between zero and hundred years.

The thing is, at the start of the game, both Lords have agreed on fifteen champion spirits that can be either chaotic or orderly, or even neutral.

So you play as a player. You pick any of the fifteen champions, all of which have different stats. You are born as a random individual in a random point in time and you live your life. If you die you get placed in a new random individual in a new random point in time.

You basically exist as a character in an RPG. You can do whatever you want. You can influence any number of events. But you can specifically gain either order or chaos point. Either give you certain abilities. Order points mean you can regenerate when you die in specific ways. You can be reborn in your own family tree, for example. Chaos points mean more ability to cause chaos.

The trick of the game is that the entire 100,000-year history is already completely laid out. Your actions disrupt the history. But not just your history. The game goes down an hour every day and loads everyone who is playing the game to the central server and combines everyone’s actions, changing the fabric of the world.

At the end of a hundred days of real-world time, the game iteration is over. The Lord that had the most points wins. The fifteen players that gathered the most total amount of points are declared the next fifteen champions and their stats set the stats for the champions of the next generation.
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