So what''s the latest Game Idea (tm) value? 2 cents a dosen? Ten for a dollar? Either way, the challenge is to put out five bucks worth of game ideas. Go Game Design! And don''t let any practical concerns bother this thread. Does your idea need 25 millions and technology that will (maybe) be available in five years? So what? OK, I''ll start: 1) An AAA text only adventure RPG hybrid, with writers doing most of the work (the same tens of thousand of man-hours used up by programmers, artists, etc. in the other AAA games), a game the size of tens of books, with really impressive level of detail. 2) A RTS game with realistic logistic and military simulation. A game where stand-stills (Caen, Sevastopol, Stalingrad) are as common as rush tactics (Poland, France, Breakout from Normandy), where tactics like flanking, encircling, breaking the front-line (and retreating the whole front if it was broken), holding to a bridge-head , cutting supply lines, capturing supply depots, holding the battlefield to rescue damaged tanks are not only common, but necessary. 3) A trading game with realistic communication restraints. Set a few hundreds of years back, the player woud be running his business from some headquarters somewhere. All his orders would be automatically carried onboard all of the players ships. If two of his ships meet someplace, they exchange orders, with newer orders overwriting (what''s the proper word here?) older ones. Likewise, information is exchanged from ship to ship, so the player will only find out the result of his actions when (if) a ship returns with news to the player''s headquarters (or location - if he decides to go on a cruise himself). 4) A real-time combination between the boardgames Go and Risk.

On the action end of things...

5) A high-powered dueling game. Charmingly bizarre characters with superhuman ability to inflict and absorb damage destroy several city blocks while duking it out to determine who is mightiest. The draw is the realistic architectural damage modeling: buildings are constructed from structural elements that can be destroyed individually, and when enough damage occurs in the right places the whole building collapses in realistic fashion. The mass destruction is a critical factor in gameplay: bringing buildings down on your opponent does decent damage and also prevents him dodging about until he clears away the rubble. (The city has been abandoned for the fight - to do otherwise in the current climate would be gauche at best). Think Street Fighter II meets BlastCorps meets Freedom Force.

I''m sure I''ll think of more later.

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-SpittingTrashcan

You can''t have "civilization" without "civil".

Value of a game idea? Extreeeeeeeemely small.
Anybody and everybody can come up with game ideas.

But why the (tm) on game idea?
Anyways, I've got tons of 'em. here's one of my favorites.

A game based on social interaction. Not like the Sims. You would have direct control of your character, probably from a first-person or Tombraiderish perspective. It would be story-driven, with little side adventures that have nothing to do with the main story(not even the same player character). The idea would be to throw the player into a strange(sometimes REALLY starnge) social situation and let them try out different ways of reacting. Here's my idea for one situation. You are driving with a friend to meet at another friend's house, maybe for a party or something, and along the way you see many things that would make you want to stop, but everytime you do, friend whines and complains about it. For instance, along the way you drive by a farm, and witness a flying saucer hovering over a herd of cattle. You can stop, and your friend will whine, or you can ignore it and go on to the next thing. If you stop you can ask your friend to come with you to investigate, or you can leave him in the car. He will probably need quite a bit of convincing to get him to go. If you go to the cows, you might get abducted right with them which would then be a sort of branching point into the next wierd situation, this time with aliens there

Actually, I guess the whole game could be about the trip to this guy's house, just with many branching points. Other, unrelated stories could be unlocked by playing through the main game.

I think it would be an interesting experiment to make it such that the player could just go straight to his destination and thereby reach the "ending" in just a few minutes. It would be neat to see what kind of choices people make. Wow, now I'm getting excited about this idea

[edited by - Kugels on October 9, 2002 12:32:28 PM]

6) an engereering-considered component to building eg in Sim Mega-Hospital, you might have a dozen floors but there are limits on room size, wall placement etc or it wont stand up

8) sim city except when people dont pay their taxes you go into first person mode and hunt them down

8) in response to 5): a godzilla scale street-fighting game but you have to prevent as much city damage as possible, and divert the fight to areas eg shanty towns that the mayor bribed you to prepare for development. the action moves from city to city as armies of huge warriors fight in certain places according to tactics described by Commanders multiplayer who wage war between monstor clans. if you attack a city they will get the army onto you. you can strike up a contract with a city to defend in exchange for money/healing. hell, you could extend this even further: theres a structure as the rulers of citys and districts organise into alliances which may or may not be in harmony with monster clan alliances. hell, furthermore, you could pay gangs to attack the army attacking you in exchange you let them move into an area you have control over. hell, then the rulers have an agenda against the gangs. hell, perhaps the monsters may be called on to attack a whole country. hell with it, im going to make this game!

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A Problem Worthy of Attack
Proves It''s Worth by Fighting Back

9) interactive gary larson strips

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A Problem Worthy of Attack
Proves It''s Worth by Fighting Back

10) Seek and hide game in FPS style, where one player goes hiding and others need to find him out. Or where one is a seeker and others go hiding and seeker must catch one of others, then the caught player becomes seeker and so on.

five bucks????? the way the market is going right now I can get at least a playable prototype for that kind of dough.
Seriously, for five bucks you should be able to get somewhere around 10^14 unique game ideas.

lets not talk about ideas in quantity, but about ONE idea, of which we´ll try and solve ONE aspect.


btw: we once did one of these idea things irl, using random words as starting points.... guess what, you can make games out of EVERYTHIGN!

Well I had an idea for a airgolf game. The presmise was supposed to be simple, you had a golf ball u slingshot up into the air using a rubber band sort of thing. After that its gravities will to bring it back down, the point is ur supposed to sling shot the ball up to hit a target, there are things on the level that affect your ball moving, these things are items like Magenets that slowly move ur ball twoards them, and fans which blow your ball away from them. Then the idea wass upposed to be sorta puzlmatic you could always make a hole in one eevery level if u just knew what way to fire you ball to that "sure shot " sorta like in real minature golf where if you hit the eone hold right or the one place right ur ball will fall roll or move right ot the hole....

I almost finished this silly game as my first directX game, then as I demoed it to one of my friends he laughed and thought it was stupid..and I had to actually agree, the game as it stood at that point (though not 100% coomplete) wasn''t much fun. Though I hated to drop all the coding and that so close t completion, so perhaps with more ideas to make this game more fun this game coudl be salvaged and finished, but perhaps not

I have several ideas but alas they need a good 3d engine for...one idea is a RPG that isnt really that special (minus it being an RPG on the PC) the game will play a lot like icewind dale but feature 3d engine and be placed in Gothic 1890''s earth. It will be very dark and gritty and totally real time...this brings up control issues such as selection of spells and actions while getting thudded by the enemy..to help with this the game would implement a sorta of bullet time... where u click that and the games lows down like max payne but u can do all ur house cleaning and choices right then and there... and then choose to control a main character to have running and jumping combat sorta like Threads of Fate or Secret of mana for those who played it.

(again another idea that will have to be teseted before it is said to be fun)

*Sigh* its hard to bring ideas to the light with no artists or muscians , just me one lone programmer..

Okay...here are some:


Sim-Bee...a sort of action/flightsim game...players take control of a bee out to collect pollen, meenwhile the pesky humans try to swat you away...you can only sting once (then you die), so you have to be very particular about whom you sting (and on what body part)...

Sim-game developer...hire programmers, artists, and other staff...design your own development studio...make deals with publishers, and movie execs wanting to make a film about your game, etc...invest in new technology, from new PCs to VR systems...

An initial game idea may be pretty worthless but I think an innovative fully fleshed out game document that includes solid technical solutions to implementation would be worth at least $5.

That said, here are my worthless initial game ideas.

1) A "falling blocks" puzzle game that changes rules every other minute and lets the player know when it happens. So part of the gameplay is to figure out the rules by experimenting.

2) A PC football game where you play the quarterback in first-person and aim passes directly yourself using the mouse. I''m sure this idea has come up somewhere. You could also replace "football" with soccer or basketball.

3) A Massively Online Mafia Game with less emphasis on combat and more emphasis on social gameplay, alliances and family ties, and management. This one could be done fairly cheaply with just a web interface.