Search

GameIntrospection

Love and Hate for Gaming @GIntrospection

Open Search
Category

Game Design

Game Idea: Where I’ve Been (Suspense Adventure)

Game Idea: Where I’ve been (Suspense adventure)

The Start:

The premise is easy, it starts out as an adventure game with a dash of tedium but only for a short time. You’re running errands for people, say 10 errands total around a city. It’s a bright day, you know where to go, probably takes about 15-20 minutes to complete while building some sort of character story in-between. The whole of the city should take probably 5-10 minutes to run through in broad daylight.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Where I’ve Been (Suspense Adventure)” →

1

Steady Status Auto-Balancing of Games

Steady State Auto-Balancing

Idea

Looking at the scale of some of the online multiplayer games, it’s always fascinating to see how people always complain that only a small subset of things are usable in competitive play. In Halo or Counter-Strike, only a handful of weapons are considered good and the rest are never touched unless you’re in very constricted situations and the less-preferred weapon is the only option. League of Legends has over 100 champions to select from, but you only see about 30-40 played the majority of the time. Player-vs-player (PVP) in World of Warcraft tends to have the same team layout in their 2v2 and 3v3 arenas making the meta-game predictable after playing for so many iterations.

Developers do try and balance these problems, but re-balancing takes a long time to complete. When you make something (gun, character, class) weaker or stronger, it changes many other aspects of other classes. Which character’s are good to support them, who does the original character do well against, who does well against this character. Many aspects change because of small changes that the developers make to try and re-balance the game, making things that were perceptively weaker -> better and making things that seemed overpowering -> weaker.

Continue reading “Steady Status Auto-Balancing of Games” →

4

Game Idea: Transfer Powers from Strong Allies to your Character

Game Idea: To get stronger, you have to take the power of you allies (power transfer)

Game:

The mechanics are simple. For your main character to get stronger, e.g. better stats, higher level, more weapons or abilities, your allies in combat have to get weaker. You start with a level 1 sack of potatoes with little ability of his own but is accompanied by one or two bad ass no-McGuffin types. As you play through the game, the player gets chances to steal the powers of his allies to make himself stronger. You can balance this out by requiring the use of each character throughout the game, so you have choice of power-transfer but you make parts of the game harder for yourself.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Transfer Powers from Strong Allies to your Character” →

0

Gaming Experiences: Bonding over Single Player

Every one should check out Zac Gormon at http://magicalgametime.com/ His work hits so many feels buttons, it's not even fair
Every one should check out Zac Gormon at http://magicalgametime.com/ His work hits so many feels buttons, it’s not even fair

Sitting down in front of the couch, friends by your side. One of you pops in a game and everyone’s voice gets hoarse as the chatter escalates to yells and cheers because someone just got a clutch head-shot from across the map just as the countdown reaches 0. There are games design for multiplayer and those designed for single player. Goldeneye, Halo, Mario Party, Unreal Tournament, League of Legends. Many games and franchises build their fan base around single player experiences and multiplayer experiences, but that doesn’t mean that those socializing bonding moments can’t be found in single player games.

Continue reading “Gaming Experiences: Bonding over Single Player” →

0

New Controllers Brings New Interactions in Games

Yes, yes. Bad, we get it. Christ, that joke is older than the internet.
Yes, yes. Bad, we get it. Christ, that joke is older than the internet.

Remember when the Powerglove was supposed to be revolutionary? A kids imagination running wild with fantasies about moving Link or Mario around with just a flick of the wrist , an attack with a finger twitch, and a jump with a twist it. But this was still not as intuitive partly because the Powerglove was an elephant’s turd, but also because the games weren’t built for controls other than the native controller. This is also why the gimmicks of the Wii and all of its peripherals seemed like gimmicks, because they felt like after-thoughts to the game instead of being involved in the initial inspiration of the game.

Arcade games had a better potential with these kinds of non-directional pad controllers because they had a game in mind where non-d-pad interaction was part of the core design. Light-gun games where you shoot the screen, punching games where you hit a physical pad, dancing games where you mash buttons on the floor. Having the space for peripherals outside of the d-pad helped inspire completely different genres of games or, at the very least, re-interpret the genre in a different way to help spawn different types of games.

Continue reading “New Controllers Brings New Interactions in Games” →

0

Game Idea: Computer-Pandemic

Game Idea: Computer Anti-Rx (Computer Virus Pandemic)

Game:

The game pandemic is about creating a type of infection (bacteria, fungal or viral) and designing it in a way that will cause the world’s population to become infected and die from it. As your infection spreads through more of the population, you can upgrade the infection to be more resilient to the weather, easier to spread, or more severe symptoms and side-effects after caught. The more people you infect and the easier the symptoms are to notice, the quicker people start to find treatments for and treat the symptoms. So the upgrades need to start moving towards defenses against antivirals (and the like).

Compu-geddon takes a similar approach, but instead you engineer a computer exploit (worm, virus, web-hack) to infect as many computers as possible. As the exploit becomes more permissive throughout the ecosystem, the easier it might be discovered. But the more people who you can infect, the more valuable your exploit becomes.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Computer-Pandemic” →

0

Game Idea: Blindfolded (e.g. Blind Unfinished Swan)

Game Idea: Blindfolded (Blind Unfinished Swan)

Game:

What Unfinished Swan did was create a world devoid of color where it was the player’s job to put color back into the world to navigate through it.

The idea for Blindfolded is that instead of adding color to navigate through the world, the sound that you generate by moving through it paints the world in front of the player for a short time. Like the image perception that bats have with their echo location, Ben Affleck from that horrible Daredevil movie or Toph has in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

And with great sight comes things your can't un-see.
And with great sight comes things your can’t un-see.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Blindfolded (e.g. Blind Unfinished Swan)” →

0

Game Idea: Server Admin Simulator

Game Idea: Server Farm Simulator Tycooninator

Pitch

The backend of game dev tycoon, where the player maintains and fixes issues that occur when a web site or video game becomes too popular.

They grow up and obsolete, so fast. Time for the garbage dump
They grow up and obsolete, so fast. Time for the garbage dump

Continue reading “Game Idea: Server Admin Simulator” →

0

Game Idea: Fun Evolution Spore

Game Idea: Fun Physics Evolution (Think Spore with less realistic evolutionary history)

What spore tried to create was a game about a single celled organism, following its biological descendants as it tries to follow the same evolutionary track as humans. The interesting parts of this were the evolutionary choices that the player presided over the creature that it created, e.g. long legs but stubby arms emphasizing defense over aggression, eyes predominantly higher on the creature to see objects and other creatures at a distance, no mouth making communication and “making friends” with other creatures next to impossible, these are all fun and biologically interesting aspects about the game. It takes real life animal psychology, animal biology and evolutionary postulation and tries to convey and teach these aspects in the most passive of ways, where the player isn’t reading text and trying to absorb information in order to progress (i.e. Edutainment games) but where the player sees their failures in their creature creation because they forgot to put eyes on so it can’t see it’s environment making surviving, or even simply navigating, a difficult task.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Fun Evolution Spore” →

0

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑