Mr Bigmouth Anonymous.

[Midnight_Carnival]

This is going to sound strange, I would really like to hear all the great (and some not so great) ideas you have for games that you know you will never have the time or skill to make. It doesn't matter how practical it would be or how popular, comertially sucsessful, etc...

I have millions, or course, but I'll shut up and listen for once.

I'm interested in games, yes, but mostly I want to hear ideas, system you have come up with, themes, etc...

Just warning you though, if you post your "great idea" and someone uses part or all of it and makes money out of it while you die in poverty it is really not my fault. I'm still holding out on the idea that there are insanely talented individuals who have no imagination of their own... somewhere.

And then of course we can get some more experienced people to explain why the idea won't work, or give helpful suggestions. I'd also be interested in seeing a frankenstein game made out of several people's concepts, all totally original becasue nobody thought it would ever work.

[Gambit]

But it already has worked...

I want a digger clone.

[Sgt. Groovy]

A space exploration game like Elite or Vega Strike, but where you can seamlessy fly down to the surface of the planets and explore them on foot (or ground vehicles), kinda like first-person, 3-D Starflight. The planets are generated procedurally, and there are different types (volcanic, ice, liquid, gas giants). Some planets support life and the life forms are also generated procedurally. For each planet, a phylogenetic tree is created, so that not only is life unique in each planet, but the life on one planet looks "related". The physical environment influences the actual appearance of life forms (on heavy gravit planet animals are flat and crawing, on gas giant there arre only flying animals and gas-bag floating plants).

[john_who]

A space exploration game like Elite or Vega Strike, but where you can seamlessy fly down to the surface of the planets and explore them on foot (or ground vehicles), kinda like first-person, 3-D Starflight. The planets are generated procedurally, and there are different types (volcanic, ice, liquid, gas giants). Some planets support life and the life forms are also generated procedurally. For each planet, a phylogenetic tree is created, so that not only is life unique in each planet, but the life on one planet looks "related". The physical environment influences the actual appearance of life forms (on heavy gravit planet animals are flat and crawing, on gas giant there arre only flying animals and gas-bag floating plants).

I think you'd enjoy playing "The Ur-Quan Masters" !

[Ken_Oh]

Here's a list of the game projects that I will probably never get done (or even start):

#1 http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=23280

#2 An online, multiplayer (perhaps massively) form of River City Ransom (basically a Double Dragon-type game). Watch some gameplay and think about what could be expanded.

#3 An Infantry/M.U.L.E. - hard to describe this one, but think of action multiplayer with economic persistence.

#4 A first-person view Nethack/roguelike

#5 A side-scrolling/platforming Nethack/roguelike - Maybe I could list off a few more game types like this. Every other week someone comes out with a new, single-player roguelike in some slightly-different flavor than the last one. I'd rather see some branching out in the mode of the game but with the core principles of procedurally-generated content, gaining loot and leveling up. Spelunky is the closest game I've seen to doing this.

#6 3D turn-based combat. This one is the most pie-in-the-sky idea. The game would look maybe something like Soulcalibur but with a bunch of units on the field. While the game would pause and play out in turns, between the turn markings would play out in real time. Imagine Team A as a dude with a katana and a chick with a knife and Team B as three thugs with clubs of varying size. You, controlling Team A, select your katana dude to drop his sword horizontal with the tip to the right and rush to the left, to the outside of the thugs, slashing forward. You then select the girl and have her dance to the right size, slashing if the enemy gets in range but mostly defending. None of the units move until you (and Team B) have selected their actions and then both sides move at once. Things don't necessarily happen as both sides designate them, but rather the units' attributes, statuses, items, skills and chosen actions all converge, get mixed up, and an outcome gets spit out. If the thug on the left runs right into the katana, it might be bad news for him. If the thug on the right rushes the girl too fast for her to react, it might be bad for her. The key is to see where your own weapons are vs where the enemies' weapons are and try to intuit how to get your weapon from point A to point B without letting the enemy's weapon do the reverse. Yeah, incredibly complicated, totally un-KISS, but I would personally really enjoy the game.

[Blarumyrran]

#6 3D turn-based combat. This one is the most pie-in-the-sky idea. The game would look maybe something like Soulcalibur but with a bunch of units on the field. While the game would pause and play out in turns, between the turn markings would play out in real time. Imagine Team A as a dude with a katana and a chick with a knife and Team B as three thugs with clubs of varying size. You, controlling Team A, select your katana dude to drop his sword horizontal with the tip to the right and rush to the left, to the outside of the thugs, slashing forward. You then select the girl and have her dance to the right size, slashing if the enemy gets in range but mostly defending. None of the units move until you (and Team B) have selected their actions and then both sides move at once. Things don't necessarily happen as both sides designate them, but rather the units' attributes, statuses, items, skills and chosen actions all converge, get mixed up, and an outcome gets spit out. If the thug on the left runs right into the katana, it might be bad news for him. If the thug on the right rushes the girl too fast for her to react, it might be bad for her. The key is to see where your own weapons are vs where the enemies' weapons are and try to intuit how to get your weapon from point A to point B without letting the enemy's weapon do the reverse. Yeah, incredibly complicated, totally un-KISS, but I would personally really enjoy the game.

That's Toribash (only 1 person per player, but it's complicated enough)

[Iris]

A free/open-source side-scrolling platformer game engine. I had planned to either reuse Wesnoth Wesnoth/Irdya elements (GNU GPL and all) or come up with my own story and content based on my old notes (content would've been proprietary).

I finally dropped the project at the end of 2009.

[Captain_Wrathbow]

Neat idea for a thread... this is gonna make great reading.

[Kalajel]

#2 An online, multiplayer (perhaps massively) form of River City Ransom (basically a Double Dragon-type game). Watch some gameplay and think about what could be expanded.

Hey, why not!? After all, they made a Dragonball Online game…

[Midnight_Carnival]

A space exploration game like Elite or Vega Strike, but where you can seamlessy fly down to the surface of the planets and explore them on foot (or ground vehicles), kinda like first-person, 3-D Starflight. The planets are generated procedurally, and there are different types (volcanic, ice, liquid, gas giants). Some planets support life and the life forms are also generated procedurally. For each planet, a phylogenetic tree is created, so that not only is life unique in each planet, but the life on one planet looks "related". The physical environment influences the actual appearance of life forms (on heavy gravit planet animals are flat and crawing, on gas giant there arre only flying animals and gas-bag floating plants).

I think you'd enjoy playing "The Ur-Quan Masters" !

Seconded and thrided!

That game really PWNZZ

shadowmaster: I am interested in your platform game idea, but will never do anything anyway so...

Among my millions of ideas were a platform side-scroler where your character could gain experience and go up levels, with a sadistic AI who created levels based on teh skills you had neglected when upgrading your character, a fast-paced pirate themed first-person shooter called Call of Booty for which I worked out a system to make more realistic sword-fighting possible, and a real-time fantasy strategy game in which your heros couldn't gain experience, but the rank and file units did, and depending on which hero you had in the baracks/dojo where you sent them back to train they could get different skills depending on thier stats. Eg: Strenght was not a value, but rather an apitude, sort of, a stronger soldier would be more likely to gain bonus damage...
-well, I said I'd shut up so...

[Velensk]

I was once working on a game that was designed to be a faster simpler squad leader with more distinct sides and a sci fi theme. This project kind of got shot out of the water when the person who had all the pieces left and took them with him. I still have the part of the rules that I wrote.

[Ken_Oh]

That's Toribash (only 1 person per player, but it's complicated enough)

Hah, so it is. I can't remember now if I got the idea from Toribash at all or not. My idea was more along the lines of watching where the geometry of weapons and shields are during upright battles rather than triple axel spin kicks from handsprings.

A free/open-source side-scrolling platformer game engine. I had planned to either reuse Wesnoth Wesnoth/Irdya elements (GNU GPL and all) or come up with my own story and content based on my old notes (content would've been proprietary).

I finally dropped the project at the end of 2009.

OK, so this is actually like the one project that I'd like to take a stab at (hence not listing it above). I've been toying with having the setting as Wesnoth/Irdya and GPLing it too, but I have my doubts on what restrictions Wesnoth's world would give (unless on a totally different continent, etc.) The gameplay would be based on Zelda 2, everyone's least favorite Zelda, but my absolute favorite one. The gameplay would focus on humanoid vs. humanoid combat.

[Sgt. Groovy]

A Paradroid variant with two notable differences:

1. It's a TBS, not live action
2. When you hack into an enemy robot, you also get to keep your old one, so that your army of robots gets larger over time.

A text adventure with procedurally created world: the engine first creates large scale features, adds detail and objects, and then makes up a textual description.

A text adventure with graphical interface where the environment is defined by parameters and the graphical representation is created on the spot by raytracing, taking account of illumination (time of day, artificial light sources, etc.) and objects and creatures present.

[Zerovirus]

Hrm. A fighting game.

Let me sit down and tell you of one of my best game ideas ever. Well, maybe not best. Your mileage may vary.

A MMORPG 2-d platform sidescrolling fighting game. Kinda like OWAW but with less weapons and more combo-key-pressing moves. The real kicker of the idea is based around this, though:

Variable movesets.

That is, every player will be able to purchase or train his own moves out of a pool of preferably a few hundred different ones. The moves will be varied, and once in a while there will be a new pack of moves released. Preferably the new moves aren't told to the public, so that they get a pleasant surprise when they find a new move. That also gives an element of surprise to PvP, because you don't know exactly what moves your enemy will unleash on you, so you have to design your move folder to compensate for any unforeseen events.

Another idea would be that some moves would be pre-designed and others would be customized ala Toribash. The damage would be calculated similar to how Toribash does it, except it's converted into a raw number and then subtracted from an enemy's total HP. Augmentations may include area damage, changing damage type to elemental/other, etc.

"Alright, forums, Upgrade Pack 3: Souls of Shadow is out! Have fun discovering the new attack styles..."

"Sweet! I wonder what new moves there are..."

"Hey, that new move 'Blackclaw' has a really good uppercut range, if we use a diagonal-down attack combo with it we get a really high stun time, then we can use, I dunno, Shatter Bolt and do multiple hits in a row!"

"Screw that combo, I can use Blackclaw with the feat Rapid Melee and get a triple-stun combo. Then the built up vertical inertia to the enemy sends him flying and allows me to use a Skyfire attack and literally knock him out of the sky."

etc.

I have designed several systems and subsystems, including 2 major trees of combat: Inner and Outer. Inner is based on magic and chi-based DBZ karate, while Outer is based on usage of weaponry like swords and arrows, and melee combat. Then Inner would be divided into several subtrees like, I dunno, the 4 Classical Elements, some psychic tree based on doing stuns and doing speed changes, an alchemist tree based on going into battle with tons of upgrades, maybe some sort of lifestealer, etc. The Outer would be divided into Blades, Polearms, Ranged Weaponry, and unarmed, or something. Both major trees would run off a generic 'energy' that some classes can recharge, other classes don't need it, etc.

The good thing about this system is that new subtrees can be added on. For example, maybe you would need to have skill in both Inner and Outer for a special Ninja subskillset or something.

That's the main idea of the game. The world would be kinda like an RPG system, NPCs to give quests, and stuff. Also, Player-based Economy. Cuz those are awesome. Maybe an inventory/equipment system, though that's not so important in a fighting game.

The idea came from watching like a billion stick animations online and going "Man those things would be so cool if they were in a game. An online game. Where you could customize your own moves."

[Captain_Wrathbow]

When are you making this game? I can't wait to play....




Oh and where are those billion stick animations?