Game Concepts I'd Love To Make

I'm having some serious problems getting my codebrain to work this weekend. I'd blame the heat, but it's worked fine in much hotter conditions than this before (at Broadsword it wasn't uncommon to be working in the mid-30s or higher). What it feels like more than anything else is the mental block I used to get from being stoned, way back when that was something I still did. I not only can't maintain focus easily, but whatever part of my brain is supposed to process all those symbols on the screen just doesn't want to do its job right now. I wind up staring at my IDE wondering when exactly I forgot how to code.

So in lieu of actual constructive work, I've decided to write a blog post instead. I know, I know, procrastination ahoy... but in my defence it is past 1AM at the moment, so any development work I did would be pretty rubbish anyway

There are about a half dozen random concepts I have floating around my head that I'm probably never going to get to make. This is because they fall outside the patterns the industry permits - they're too complex/art-heavy/just-plain-technically-difficult for me to do as a one or two man indie project, but they're way too out there to ever be appealing to a publisher, even assuming publishers were remotely in the mood to assign funding to nobodies like us at the moment. It's possible some of them might happen at some point in the future if we got some actual cashflow moving as a company, but generally very unlikely. Here's a few of them:

1) Extreme Survival In Space
This is one of those concepts that has every single person that hears about it nodding and going "yeah, yeah, I'd buy that game!" Except of course no-one really would.
In short, this concept is First Person Survival Sandbox, not unlike a certain game involving the crafting of mines. However I'm not thinking vlox here; more tundras, savannahs, forests, jungles, mountains. The key to the game is survival, not building massive monuments, although building should certainly be in there somewhere at the very least. Walls would probably be nice.
The storyline would be pretty straightforward. Following a terrible accident, you are the only survivor of an attempted colonisation of an alien planet. You have a certain amount of resources and technology that can be salvaged from the wreckage (with other wreck sites discoverable around the area) and beyond that you have only what you can produce from the resources available. To add to the difficulty of the scenario, the planet's inhabitants are not friendly. They're not sentient, but the wildlife can be very vicious. You have scifi weaponry available, but how long will it last out?
I'm envisioning several play-modes - one a race against time where you know a rescue ship will scan for signs of survivors within a certain amount of time and you need to produce a detectable signal by that point (and survive, of course). Another a (potentially multiplayer) sandbox where the aims are really up to you. Another a Total Survival mode where the creatures are more common, there's virtually nothing to be found at crash sites, and even the air is toxic.
The main con? It's unavoidably a massive project. To be really good, it'd need a sold A-grade graphics engine and assets to match, and that's before the extensive gameplay coding time and immense amounts of testing.

2) Monomyth: The RPG
I'm a huge fan of Joseph Campbell, the mythologist and writer of books such as Hero With A Thousand Faces. One of his many suggestions regarding the structure of world myths was the Monomyth, the core basis of virtually all mythological tales (especially in the West, but also to a great degree in the East).
This covers several specific stages and most of them show up in games all the time for pretty obvious reasons. What I'd like to do is have an RPG featuring a lead character who is a little Genre Savvy regarding RPGs themselves, but more importantly knows the Monomyth well and can recognise the stages of the Hero's Journey as they occur. More importantly, it should be possible to diverge from the Hero's Journey by a considerable margin, although doing so should effectively prevent the player from proceeding.
In short, an RPG in which the only way to level is to cleave to mythic stereotype, in which the lead character is actually aware of said stereotypes. Strikes me as an interesting journey in and of itself. The main con I can think of is that the game would have to be a stereotypical RPG, sort of by default.

(As a somewhat connected aside, for years now I've wanted to see a character in one of the recent crop of "post-modern" horror movies such as Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer who was not only aware of horror tropes, but had actually lived through multiple horror movies and was now an emotionally-scarred ultrasurvivor. Imagine the kid from Zombieland, having lived through having his dreams invaded by Freddy Krueger and then avoided an alien monster attack during a visit to New York... just strikes me as an interesting take on the whole genre-savvy concept.)

3 ) Living Kingdoms
For some reason I have an incredible yen for medieval and cod-medieval economics. The part of the Total War series I really enjoy is the strategic map, and I play all sorts of simulators such as the Europa Universalis series.
But while Grand Strategy has its appeal (and I love most forms of it, especially Hearts of Iron), I'd love to see a direct simulation. One of the useful things about medieval economics is that it's fundamentally microeconomic in nature. For that reason, it should be possible to set up a landscape, set up a bunch of resources on that landscape, set up a whole slew of simple AI agents with basic resource-gathering and processing behaviours, and let them loose to form their economies naturally.
So where does a game come into this? Well, if we make it more fantasy-ish, add in some kind of "mystical blood" which allows almost instant control over the little guys, and then gave the player a radius of control around a moveable main character within which they can direct development as they wish, we have the basis for a sort of economic sandbox. Much like the Settlers series, but vastly less contrived and with more complexity (and less requirement for you to personally handle said complexity, since the resource chains would come into existence naturally).
Cons? Just imagine the quantity of testing required to get a system which reliably produced a workable economy to play in. And that's before we even consider the amount of animation work needed for the little peasant dudes. Essentially we'd have the same problem as the Settlers developers, only 20 times worse.

Right, I'm getting quite sleepy now so I'll leave it there. May go into some of them some more in future, may dredge some more out of my brain at some point. As always, all feedback is welcome.

Gestalt - Concept Part II

Paradigm and Evolution

The Gestalt is capable of improving itself via its Blue Axons. As mentioned in Part I, Blue Definitions (geometric structures of Blue Axons) produce a resource known as Paradigm. This represents the Gestalt's slow modification of its own nature.

These modifications are handled via the Paradigm screen. On this screen is a list (with visual cues to the right, just before the Custard Bar) of different possible developments, each marked as an Evolution or a Paradigm (and highlighted in green-blue and darker blue respectively). One can be selected at any time and this will fill at a rate related to the amount of Paradigm resource produced, however all of the entries on this screen will very slowly fill over time regardless of being selected or not.

Once a requisite amount of Paradigm resource has been gathered, the result differs.

Evolutions unlock instantly, allowing some new possibility for the player - examples include 3-legged Axons (called 3-Axons), new Assemblies for Reds, and so forth.

Paradigms, on the other hand, remain on the Paradigm screen. They must be selected again to become "Active", in which case they begin to have an effect. Once this occurs, they turn steel-grey and can no longer be deselected. However, once this occurs, a new Paradigm will appear that has the capacity to reverse the effects of the previous one.

Paradigms act as selectable "powers" for the player. The player may decide to leave a number of Paradigms charged and ready to be activated if needed, and several Paradigms will be designed around that role (Survival Mentality Paradigm is a classic example).

While most Evolutions provide only simple incremental improvements in the player's capacity (in a manner similar to Tech Trees in other games), Paradigms serve to allow us to almost entirely change the way the game is played based upon the player's decisions.

Enemy AIs

Enemy AIs in Gestalt currently come in three forms:

1) Gestalt

Other Gestalt can come into existence, and these will generally be the most common enemies. They operate in the same way as the player's Gestalt, including Axons, Paradigm and so on. Much as with the player, they can only be defeated by destroying their Yellow Axons.

2) Virii

Rapidly moving enemies that piggy-back the natural data packet traffic on the network (represented by occasional pulses of brightness along the link lines). They slip by most defences, steal resources (which can cause Axons to die), and then flee before they can be attacked.

3) Deus Ex

Monolithic intelligences can arise that are based in a single conscious process on a single Node. These opponents are extremely difficult to directly take on, but have limited ability to affect the network beyond their home Node. They can take over the processing of other nodes and weaken them, and can with great effort move their entire selves to another Node to gain better strategic position.

Suggestions for other kinds of opponent AI are gratefully received. Variation in this will be key.

Play Modes

The simplest play mode is called Conquest Mode. The player is let loose on a network and wins by dominating every Node. There will typically be a number of enemy AIs of the three kinds mentioned above.

Slightly more complex is Singularity Mode. This presents the player with a couple of wrinkles on the basic structure laid out in the Conquest Mode. Firstly, many of the Nodes in the network will have some oddity or special property that might help or hinder the player, and secondly, the game will be accompanied by a relentless red ticker counting up as the game progresses. After a pre-defined period, counter-actions will be taken by the humans running the network; deadly viral counter-agents and worse will be released into the network, and Nodes will begin to disappear. The player can prevent this by controlling certain Nodes that will allow the player to keep the human watchdogs away from their own network.

Multiplayer is intended to be effortless and seamless. If it is enabled in the options (which it will be by default), the game will permit other instances on the same local network to connect to it silently and without mentioning the fact to the player. The game will only stay actively able to host for a few minutes after a game is started, however all games will perform this check on game start.

The maps of players in Multiplayer are connected at their edges, so when the player explores outside of their starting area, they will eventually discover their Multiplayer opponent.

It will of course be possible to whitelist, password control, or turn off this feature entirely.

Gestalt - Concept Part I

The currently active concept I'm working on at MCG is currently named Gestalt. A Plushie Axon will be winging its way to the first person to figure out where the direct inspiration for this concept comes from.

(There are no illustrations yet, as few exist outside of sketches on pads. As this game is almost entirely code-side, I haven' t really involved the art team at all. I will add piccies when the demo is ready.)

Screens

The game opens on the Map Screen; a scrollable view of an abstracted network. Nodes, represented by circles, are connected by blue-white lines. Pulses shoot along those lines, representing packets. One of the Node circles has a highlight around it. We click on this Node, and we find ourselves in the Node Screen.

Within the Node Screen, at least to begin with, we find a rectangular "bucket", and a large mass of yellow, in the rough centre of a few areas clearly representing the connections out of this Node. Every so often, the yellow mass moves and wriggles and a new Axon drops into the bucket - a circle with two short lines coming out of it.
There are 3 kinds of Axon available at the beginning of the game: Yellow, Blue, and Red. Three sliders next to the yellow mass (known as the Yellow Core) permit the player to choose which of these colours is preferred. This is important, as each of these colours has a different yet essential role to play.

Yellow

Yellow Axons contribute to the "consciousness" or general self-motivational capability of the Gestalt. They naturally connect together in long chains, which pulse and throb in colour at a rate connected to the activity level of the player. So if the player is making high-speed clicks in the game the Yellows will flash and flicker rapidly, while if the player is taking their time and considering their moves carefully the Yellows will throb slowly. If for any reason they remain unconnected to at least one other Yellow for more than about 30 seconds, they die.

To the right of this screen (and indeed all screens once in-game) is a large meter showing a yellow bar and a smaller greenish indicator line. At this stage of the game both the indicator and bar are quite low down the screen. This is the Gestalt Meter, and indicates the "mental health" of the entity you represent within the game. The Gestalt Meter throbs at the same rate as the Yellow Axons, indicating the relationship between them.

To keep the Gestalt's consciousness intact, the player must keep the number of Yellow Axons above a certain quantity, indicated by the green line. This quantity is determined by a combination of the total number of Axons in play, and the number of Nodes you currently control. If the number of Yellow Axons falls below this level, first the player will begin to lose control of the Gestalt, then outlying Nodes will begin to fragment and their Axons flee back to core Nodes in an attempt to restore the Gestalt's balance. This process will continue until only a single Node is left, and if the Yellow Axon level remains below the green target line, the Gestalt "dies" and the player loses the game.

It is therefore clear that management of Yellows, and attacking enemy Yellows, is central to victory or defeat in this game. (My colleague Ian refers to the Yellow Bar as the "Custard Bar" and came up with the tagline "The Custard Must Flow.")

Blue

Blue Axons contribute to the Gestalt's ability to think and evolve, to rationally examine itself and its surroundings and modify its own nature to suit. In order to function correctly they must be connected into geometric shapes called Definitions. If left together they will generally connect up into simple Definitions, but they can be guided by the player (by clicking and dragging with the mouse on the Axon's body to move the whole of it, and on one of the legs to force it to connect with another Axon) to form Definitions of their choice. Blues not connected into Definitions give no benefit, but do not eventually die like Yellows.

Once formed into Definitions, a crackling electrical effect is seen across the blue Axon links and the Definition begins producing a resource called Paradigm. Paradigm is used on the Paradigm screen to drive the Gestalt's evolution. More geometrically complex Definitions produce more Paradigm - so a pentagon produces more Paradigm than a triangle, while a kite-shape using more advanced 3-Axons produces more than either.

The player can pull Definitions apart, but as with Red Assemblies (see below), destroying a structure will randomly destroy some of the Axons within it.

Red

Red Axons are specialised elements of the Gestalt's being devoted to its attack and defence. Reds form special geometric structures called Assemblies. Red Axons make no attempt at self-constructing, instead waiting to be told what to form, and do not die if left unconnected. It is not necessary for the player to hand-construct an Assembly - all currently available Assemblies (depending on the player's Paradigm and Evolutions) are shown as floating icons near the Axon "bucket" inside each Node.

Clicking one of these Assembly Icons expands the icon into a large "frame", onto which Reds will automatically travel and assume the geometric form indicated. These will then float into the area surrounding the Node's structure, orbiting near the Links. Clicking one and then clicking on the link will either send the Assembly out along that Link or deploy it for defence on that Link, depending on its type.

If during the course of its life a Red Assembly is broken apart entirely, a portion of the remaining Red Axons will die and the others will disconnect and attempt to flee to a friendly Node.

Next up - Paradigm & Evolution, Game modes, and more!