Anyone here play tetris attack, puzzle bobble, worms blast, or other puzzle games of the sort (ones that have competitive multiplayerwhere it is possible to really mess up what the other player is doing). Is there any sort of good inspiration for these types of games?

Me and my wife are huge fans of puzzle games. We often play tetris attack, dr. mario, etc.

On the playstation we used to play StarSweep, Mr. Driller and Ballistic before they were stolen from our home (a sad story I don''t like to remember).

I''ll say that playing those games is a great source of inspiration. But sometime you''ll need to be creative to stay away from just cloning them.

Also, if you check out my website, you''ll see a lot of inspiration on those games as most of my games are puzzles.

Here are some of the rules that I try to apply when I make a puzzle game:
- Make it simple to learn.
- Make it simple to control.
- If the user is good at the game, make passing through the earlier levels fast.

That''s what I can think of right now...

Regards,

--
Jose Manuel Guerra
jmguerra@guerragames.com
GuerraGames

I had this idea for a worms/quake merger. Two players, one ravine, and a mortar each, with player critical targets either side.

Then there was the idea that 3d tetris could constitute building in an MMORPG. That wasn''t mine as such.

As for puzzle ideas, what would be interesting is a patterned tile game like Go, where you alternate by creating chain reactions and locking down tiles. The idea would be that you could change certain tiles to different patterns and these would have a carry on effect to other cards; under certain conditions, you would be able to "secure" tiles so that they did not get affected by pattern changes. The goal would be to secure as many tiles as possible.

The most interesting puzzles are those that reflect reality in some way. For example, you could have a puzzle game about supermarkets, where the goal is to manipulate prices to get the maximum sales. This game could be dynamic so that price changes were real-time and little NPCs paced around the store purchasing items or rushed for sale items.

They need a Scorched Earth / Tank Wars clone, where everyone enters their angle and velocity at the same time and fires at the same time.

That would be awesome.

i think scorched earth had the feature of having all tanks fire at the same time though the angles were entered in turn. thus you could play it with a single pc, yet still get the effect of everyone firing at once. though i might be mistaken and it was osme other clone that did this.

For me, puzzle games are best worked as a result of cause and effect. That and sometimes I''ll just see a weird pattern ni math or music, and an idea will emerge while I''m trying to un-wrap and re-wrap the situation.