Make your video game!

[Sabby]

Simplify, yes, but I couldn't take the matter manipulation out of it ^^ Things like learning Metal so you can move reinforcements inside of Stone structures. You wouldn't even know the Metal is there until you've had some experience taking Stone apart, and even then, would you even make the connection to learn and then heat or bend it? (or both?)

Plus I wanted the Forces to be as authentic as possible. Back to the Lightning example with gaining Glass, I should have mentioned that it's not firing a bolt at the ground. You would simply charge an area. If there's something to conduct, it will conduct. Go back to the bridge scenario with monsters crossing it, charge the Lightning at a point on the bridge so anyone trying to pass gets fried. Okay, you're just guna sit there until one of them tosses a hatchet over at you, or just until you collapse from holding the charge too long.

[Sabby]

Thread Necromancy! I want to see more peoples ideas =D don't let me hog the thread, am interestededs.

Okay, new one I'd like to see... this kind of game I've always wanted but never got anything close to it. I want to colonize a planet.

Think DayZ meets Red Dead Redemption. In SPAAAAAAAAAAACE. Servers are consistent worlds that change in real time, even when you don't play. Each new world has a completely randomized ecosystem. Something like Earth would be relatively easy, while an ocean world or storm world would be a high stakes but high reward world. You can go to any of the worlds when you like, if you can afford passage, and some require contracts to even get there.

Here's the thing. Death is permanent. Settlements grow in real time. New planets are rife with new diseases, unknown local species and materials, erratic weather patterns, ever changing trade routes, and sentient natives. So braving new worlds can be very dangerous, even under group contracts. Just as dangerous as joining a frigid ice planet to explore.

Say that a dusty old windy planet is struggling with only a few settlements. Some explorers manage to find rich mining lands between two settlements and near areas that are perfect for new settlements. Suddenly, boom. The area has just become very valuable. There's an influx of players, companies (Guilds) are scrabbling for mining rights, rogue miners are operating as they please and fighting among one another, and in the rapid expansion of the towns, local wildlife and plant species are changed. Some thrive, some die off. New disease could have the ports quarantined. Towns could be attacked by starving pack animals. Natives could begin fighting the settlers, which in turn could open up shady security contracts. Maybe it would just be easier to join up as bandits. I mean, ya go where the work is, right?

Maybe things get so bad a settlement is abandoned. Then what will a new player think when they stumble on this ghost town, exploring on their own with only the most basic gear? This isn't a predesigned MMO like Warcraft. This town has a real history. It was built, it grew, and it fell for a reason. And here you are with a knife, a rope, a canteen, and basic crafting skills, without the kind of real time data system the 'big timers' have that would let them access this info. If you did, you'd know it was abandoned only a week ago because of packs of starving raptors... and you're upwind from them.

Too bad you stayed there for the night. Might wanna take a contract next time :3

[SinXAzgard21]

I'm actually working on something using RPG Maker VX Ace.

[Sabby]

I'm actually working on something using RPG Maker VX Ace.

I saw that on Steam, Any good?

[SinXAzgard21]

I saw that on Steam, Any good?

Well I didn't get mine from steam but yeah, do I think people should fork out 70 bucks... No.  I've used a few RPG makers and this one is a lot simpler to use in my opinion.  You can however add more content too it but the battles are like the old school Dragon Warrior games, well so far that I could set up.  Writing the script though... It takes forever along with making scenes.

[Sabby]

New game.

Bone Lord

You play a Nechromancer in a Thief style steampunk/gothic medieval setting. Any dead body you come across can be revived. They begin as zombies, and are functionally useless until they shed their rotten flesh and become skeletons. Each skeleton is incredibly weak, and is only as powerful as the weapon they wield. They are sadistic creatures that enjoy tormenting humans but are very cowardly. Begin with 5 skeletons and target a small farm. The skeletons easily break in and murder the family, infecting them. After each raid, you get to see the resources you've gathered and put them to use. A dozen skeletons with scythes and pitchforks and knives is better then nothing.

Keep raiding farms and homes, your horde gets bigger and bigger, until you have bone horses with riders, the only swords or spears you've found so far given to them. You've made fire brands and simple clubs at your camp and taught the skeletons essential skills, like how to burn down buildings, how to equip themselves during battle, and to recover from fear faster, backing away from tough enemies or surprise flames instead of fleeing.

Now you have 30 skeletons with somewhat okay weapons and no armor. An armoured human with a blunt weapon can take down multiple skeletons without any difficulty, but surrounded by shrieking packs of them keeping their distance from his club and trying to put a cleaver in his back? Now you have an armoured skeleton.

Keep raiding towns. Dozens of skeletons now. You have access to more raw materials then actual weapons and armor. Now you need factories. Forges. You need a town capable of being a permanent base.

This just keeps on escalating until you have hundreds of skeletons, engaged in stalemates with humans and other races, constantly upgrading, equipping, getting those troll bones to make a giant skeleton, mining that ore to outfit him with armor, chopping down those trees to make siege weapons and build walls, defending your town, attacking others, making your horde bigger and stronger.

[Inkidu]

It sounds like a cross between Thief, Overlord, and Mount & Blade: Warband.

I likes it. :3

[Oniya]

Possibly with a smidgen of Dungeon Keeper thrown in.

I really like the idea of zombies 'evolving' into skeletons.

[Sabby]

Oh, Liches and gunpowder as well :3 The A.I. would need a lot of work though... these skeletons would supposedly be able to roof hops and climb walls and and invade homes and basically ransack a town instead of just running to attack people and then milling around uselessly. Once you get to a certain point, watching a dozen of your skeletons throw themselves across a gap and half of them shatter on the balconies wouldn't even matter.

A horde has gotta act like one.

[Oniya]

Or get trampled against a wall to make a ramp for the ones behind them.

[Sabby]

Hehehe, yeah, I toyed with the idea of turning them into living tools like Overlord, but I didn't want it to be comedic... so no bridges of skeletons. Suicide skeletons, however... chest cavities filled with black powder sacks and fuses dangling from their slack jaws...

[Oniya]

Actually, I was thinking more of the scene from the trailer of World War Z, where the massive sea of zombies is trying to scale the wall, and you have the zombies in back climbing up the trampled bodies of their fellows.

Don't forget shrapnel damage with the walking bombs!  A rib bone through your chest wall is serious whether it's your rib or someone else's.

[Sabby]

Ah. Not sure how that would ever be done, but it'd be boss as hell.

I'm thinking the game would work with you giving orders to certain Skeleton Generals. These are the 'big dogs' the rest trail behind. You tell one to wreck a street, and the dozens with him will do that. They're braver if they're with him, and if he gets taken out, the whole pack scatters. Eventually, these guys would just become Sauron like pillars of death with all your special loot, like magic amulets that rust and destroy enemy armor and weapons, for instance.

I was actually inspired by THIS

Possession[ps3,xbox360,PC]

Sadly it's vaporware :(

[Oniya]

Ah. Not sure how that would ever be done, but it'd be boss as hell.

If you mean the shrapnel, I'm sure there's half a dozen games that involve grenades out there.  Or anything with a good explosion engine should be able to give an area effect.  If a soft target happens to be in the radius, then just animate something like a boomerang whizzing out and thonking into place.

[Sabby]

Nonono, I mean procedurally generated bone ramps :P

[Oniya]

I was thinking something like a 'sand piling' routine on its side.  Skeleton runs at wall.  Can it climb over? If yes, it does.  If no, place 'crumpled skeleton' (climbable, height x)

Since the skeletons would presumably be hitting the wall in a somewhat random way in a given range of positions, it should generate a reasonable ramp.

[Sabby]

I so wish this could be real >.< Skeletons are so underrated.

[Inkidu]

I so wish this could be real >.< Skeletons are so underrated.

I think some of Oblivion's higher level skeletons were bad-ass.

[Oniya]

I just hope no one makes a mod of that ramp idea for Minecraft.  Last thing I need is zombies and skeletons piling their way out of a pit.

[Kythia]

That's odd.  Was talking to an old friend today and he's actually working on a game that, if I understand both you and him right, sounds very much like what you're looking for.  I'll hit him up for the URL

[Sabby]

O.O

Thank you kind lady.

[Sabby]

This ones just a snub, as I don't think I know enough about the genre, but I'd love to see a Fallout RTS, with more of a focus on trade and development then building units. You start as a Vault people who have left their broken Vault for an abandoned one, and slowly fix it back up and develop their technologies and trade routes and such. Sort of like a Fallout themed X-Com with a faction system and dynamic events like plagues, Mutant incursions, factions attacking others and the like.

Think of a LAN party where one player is a Vault, another is a Brotherhood of Steel bunker gone rogue, another is a Super Mutant Nomad leader, and another is a large Enclave settlement. That'd be fucking awesome.

[Guren]

A Shooter/Mech MMO -

Everyone would start off as being foot soldiers, capable of doing small damage to giant mechs.  There would be a similar system to Planetside 2 (The way they handle territories) Except instead of bases there are big cities that are destructible, and that infantry can hide inside and shoot out of. At the base for both factions (There would only be two) there would be free mechs that weren't especially good, but didn't require any progression to obtain.  Players who played for a long time could buy vehicles (Jeeps, tanks, planes, helicopters) for a large fee (Either in game money or real) or a mech (Not like a gundam, more realistic and forced to stay on ground, only around 30 feet tall) for an even larger fee.  Infantry would have the ability to fortify positions, and set up traps, against the enemies (Collapse buildings on mechs for instance)

That's the basic idea for a game anyways, could go more into detail but basically -- story would be generic, this is just the concept.  Might add more onto it later.

[Valeran]

"His face was hollow and he was pale. He wore a cold expression and stared directly at you. Least you knew he would be your best bet for survival"

A laboratory experiment in space. certain specimen psychics are being tested on. When an alien horror show begins. Now veteran security guard and one of the test subjects are to escape with sanity in tact. Though this may be hard when the subject itself can present its own horrors into reality. What is real and what is part of your imagination becomes blurred between fine lines as demonic aliens and psychics try to tear the mind of the ship apart.

[Cyrano Johnson]

I have a couple of long-standing dream games:

1. The Open-Ended Mercenary Game:

A true spiritual heir to Pirates! is long overdue. I never understood why more people didn't get that open-ended mercenary games were a winning concept. Sid Meier's original Pirates! game -- and its various later editions -- was digital crack: most especially the original version, which was perfectly balanced between ship-to-ship combat, swordplay, land battles and trading. (I will confess I could have lived without the ballroom dancing simulator and the "stealth game" addition to Pirates! Gold.)

There needs to be a new game about piracy on the high seas that broadens its focus beyond the Spanish Main. After all, the real pirates of history operated in all the world's oceans. A game that lets you be a buccaneer on the Main, or a Barbary corsair, or a Malaysian pirate or a Japanese freebooter raiding the coasts of China... that game, correctly done, would be incredible.

This applies to more than just pirates. The original Mechwarrior game likewise had an open-ended fight-for-hire feature -- which made perfect sense in the Battletech universe and was frankly far more fun, and had more replay value, than the game's "plot." Yet this, the game's best feature, got ditched in subsequent Mechwarrior titles. What I wouldn't give to see an open-ended mercs-in-giant-robots title once again.

2. A Century-Spanning Superhero Epic:

I actually have a rough outline in place for a game like this, with the working title Burning Bright: following the career of a long-lived superhero -- longevity is one of his superpowers -- from his (and the genre's) origins among the latter-day pulp heroes of the early 1930s; through his World War 2 adventures and subsequent battles with communism and a period of semi-retirement; into a Silver Age career that starts out bright and optimistic and even a little campy, with his own super-family and even a super-pet to back him up, and then tacks into the dark and confusing waters of the conflict-ridden Sixties and the cynical Seventies; through his period as a tough-as-nails deadly spy, assassin and avenger in the late Seventies and early Eighties... and so on, culminating his career with one final adventure, a mission to stop a white supremacist plot to kill the first Black Presidential candidate in 2008.

The character would be an East-meets-West concept, a combination of the science-ninja-hero and Western detective who's equally at home with Taoist alchemy and modern forensic chemistry. He'd meet and mingle with a cast of thousands -- heroes and villains, fellow heroes who become villains and make it back to the light again, a succession of sidekicks and associates that the player can choose, and a host of mundane allies, friends, acquaintances, informants and enemies -- his powers and skills growing more subtle and diverse with the passing years, the difficulty level of combat gradually increasing as age begins to catch up with him even despite his superhuman longevity and supreme fitness. It would be a stealth / beat-'em-up game -- in the style of the Arkham games, or perhaps more comparable to Arkham Asylum-meets-Deus Ex -- with a whole century of missions and locations to choose from.

The concept is probably too huge to work as a single game, is the problem. Unless one built the game starting with one era and sold the subsequent eras as DLC.

Unfortunately, I have zippo in the way of coding and visual arts skills. So these ideas are likely to stay on paper unless I can find people who want to work with those concepts and have the skills to actually realize them.