I have seen Cube 2... although it was upsettingly inacurate for a hypercube. But in fact that was what spawned this idea for me.

I haven''t played lode runner... could you describe it?

Anyhow, like Myst I would like the focus to be on puzzles and clever intracate maps, not on action. And there''s the tricky part: a large intracate map set in a cube (well, 8 cubes). It''s a hard environment to add detail to. What kind of setting would lend itself to such a shape? Nature is almost certainly out, as a cube is a very unnatural shape. But I want the rooms to be large, and I need something to put in them.

Lode Runner is an old game made my sierra. Took place on a square window, had ladders, different types of ground, items you could pick up and use, and monks that chased you and mugged you. The point was you were supposed to find these hidden treasures in all the levels. you could jump off levels if they weren''t to high, blast through the floor if it was dirt, get stuck in glue, find keys, unlock new ladders, etc..
it was pretty simple and made for some complex puzzling levels. I suggest downloading it if it is now abandone ware.

quote: Original post by OrigamiMan64
Now, the trick is, I need each room to be large enough to contain a ''level'' so to speak... a single house would be very fast to explore and solve the puzzles in.

Goodness, didn''t you ever watch Doctor Who as a child?! External dimensions are no indication of internal dimension. And from the Heinlein story itself, location is an arbitrary construct when you deal with the 4th dimension crease; recall that the characters fell out of a window and turned up in a desert several miles away. Your characters could cross through space and/or time (there''s a good Asimov short story on a man imprisoned in a hoolow copper cube without seam by a demon, and taunted about how it was flawless in 3 dimensions, who escaped by thinking himself backwards in time) whenever they stepped across a "fold." It''s like the old wormhole idea.

You seem to really need to read more sci fi. Real science fiction, please. Not that non-intellectual pulp bullshit marketed to today''s public.

quote: Original post by OrigamiMan64
What kind of setting would lend itself to such a shape? Nature is almost certainly out, as a cube is a very unnatural shape.

On the contrary, I think it would be real nice to see a stark mettalic stucture with simple geometry being overtaken by the freeform lines of plant life and organic material. I think that could make for a thoroughly engrossing environment. It may even go some way to providing your plot/puzzles as you work around the theme of plant life trying to take over.

Once again thinking back to to the Cube films. It would almost be like an attempt to vanquish what was a horrific and pointless structure by slowly making it embrace nature and life.

I'm going to stop now before I start sounding like a hippy.



[edited by - m_wherrett on November 27, 2003 4:51:47 AM]

Well, for a plot and theme idea, here’s something that I’ve been thinking about for some time. I’d be working on it if the technology required wasn’t way over my head.

Viewpoint is either first-person or third person. Concept is surrealist puzzle adventure. Basic gameplay is wandering around in the currently available area, interacting with objects in the world to open up more of the world, for instance:

The player starts out with two available rooms. In the start room, there’s a mirror that the player can’t break, since they don’t have any weapons/tools/etc. There’s also a rotary dial telephone on a pedestal, with which the player can dial five digit numbers. Say a locked box of some sort in there also, for puzzles farther in the future.

In the second room, the player finds what looks like their own dead body, with a five digit number scrawled above it in blood. On the body there’s a crowbar, which can be taken to used as a tool or a weapon.

Dialing the number into the telephone causes a duplicate of the player to come crashing through the mirror, wielding a crowbar. Fight ensues. After defeating the doppelganger, the player is free to explore the room behind the mirror. Note that if the player had used the crowbar to break the mirror instead, the same thing would have basically happened.

Once in the room, the mirror reforms itself into one-way glass. Now the player’s stuck behind the mirror, watching themselves as they enter the room and either dial the telephone or break the mirror, however it was done in the past. Maybe if you beat yourself up again, you’ll find a note with another number that could be dialed, or a key to the chest, or whatever.

The plot and story, which is slowly uncovered as the game progresses, is this: some race of super-intelligent aliens is attempting to study mankind by downloading a copy of people’s minds into some undefined supercomputer, which runs the alien equivalent of a laboratory rat maze. The rules of the simulation are derived from the mind being tested, so it’s usually something on the order of watching a housewife go to the store to buy milk. In our case, it’s different, since the player’s just a little bit crazy—something terribly traumatic has happened to him in the moments before being downloaded, and as a result the world that his simulation is being run in is a nightmarish puzzle world.

The idea I’d been working on in that regard was that the player had held some argument with his wife, who storms out. In the driveway, as he’s watching her drive out of his life, she gets smashed by a drunken semi driver and killed. Moments later, as he’s still grappling with this horrible event, he’s uploaded into a world built on anger, remorse and a deep sense of guilt.

This is basically Alice done Myst style.

Sounds like it could build into quite the thriller of a game. You should have a system of sanity, like eternal darkness had. Except rather than just making weird things happen and then you flash back to what was normal because its not happening, it triggers weirder and more insane random events in the cube. As you do things like beat yourself with a crowbar your mind gets more and more lapsed in insanity. As you grow more and more insane you can begin to learn how to manipulate the cube and understand its map. The game''s story and mechanics could be so player absorbing, that the player himself (or herself) goes temporarly insane while playing the game. I''m not talking pissed off at the game because it makes no sence kind of insane, but rather the kind of insane that borders on genius. You could even have memories scattered through the game. Little pockets of conciousness that have been blown up through the alien program. The player comes across these, and can enter into them. But he can only observe the memory and interact with it on a very limited way. These can help in adding clues to the game and to develop the depth of character. There could even be false memories that the aliens plant in there, like his wife being raped and tortured, resulting in the character going more insane, unless the player finds something in the memory that proves to the character it wasn''t real.
Sorry, as i was reading your theme i had a rush of ideads and felt I had to do a brain dump. Your game seems to be very inspiring.

Oluseyi: I think the argument about a smaller scene being able to contain a much deeper plot is a good one (if I interpreted the first part of what you said correctly). However, with referance to the short story, I disagree with the ideas that A) you could get into or out of a hypercube and B) that if you could the exits would lead to arbitrary places in the world. Also, introducing time travel to the structure is an addition to, not a property of, the structure.

Consider a 2D analogy. The regular world is a flat piece of paper (well, it could be warped and curved, but you get the idea). A ''hypersquare'' for them would be the same idea as a ''hypercube'' for us... and we can see that it would be a cube, with 6 rooms, all of which interconnect to eachother. There would be no way to walk ''off'' of the hypercube and back into the plane of the real world... this would be as impossible as trying to walk off the edge of the world.

Now, I like the idea of having it be a virtual world of some kind, as it solves the problem of a way in and a way out very cleanly. However, the idea of a human being a rat in an alien maze has been used extensively, and is somewhat predictable. I would like revelations to send chills down the players spine, not make them think "yup, thats what I expected". I want a new angle on the virtual world idea... perhaps it has been self inflicted for some reason? There would probably be complete lack of memory at the beginning as well, and clues about the past could be uncovered in the environment.

An idea I have been fighting with would be to give each room it''s own theme. It feels a bit cliche, like the stages in sonic... however it would help the player to get their bearings as they manuvered between the rooms.

Good thoughts everyone, keep ''em coming :D

Hrmm, I’d thought the new angle was that aliens didn’t create the rat maze, they just put the player in it and let his/her mind create the experience. It doesn’t have to be aliens, though, I was just using them as a convenient agent.

How about this: our protagonist is a research psychologist, who’s developed a system that allows people to explore their own minds in the hopes of understanding their problems. Whenever someone is plugged into the VR simulation, the computer maps out the idiosyncrasies and unconscious symbols of the mind and presents them to the player in such a way that they can face them—kind of a computerized Thomas Covenant* on demand.

After witnessing the tragic death of his wife, the researcher plugs himself into his invention in order to escape the horrors of reality. He’s not amnesiac; he simply does not want to remember. Due to this, and the fact that he’s pretty well unhinged by the experience, the VR system starts to break down, and we’re left running around in a system that’s becoming more and more nightmarish as time goes on.

As a virtual reality system the world’s also free to ignore normal physical laws. If each room is a construct of different parts of the player’s disturbed mind, each room could have it’s own bizarre theme without breaking internal consistency. In one room gravity is upside down, in another its raining blood, and another could be full of brightly colored flowers or whatever.

The game starts off with the character realizing he’s in some strange dreamworld. As time goes on, he finds its not just a dream, it’s a nightmare, and he put himself there without leaving any way to escape.

---------

*The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a fantasy series by Stephen Donaldson, where the main character dreams he''s in a fantasy world, populated by his inner demons and whatnot.

Wow! That would be one amazing feat if you were able to pull off a game like that successfully! It would get pretty complex since the player can walk around the cubes in specific orders to end up walking on different sides of the same room . For instance: if you were to be in the first room and went forward into room 2, then up stairs into room 3, then back into the first room through room 3, you would be walking on the wall of room 1 that connects to room 2! If you went forward two rooms, then down two flights of stairs, you would be walking on the "roof" of the first room. Although the fact that there is a pattern to "flip" which side you are walking of any room you are in makes it a bit easier to play, but nonetheless a difficult concept to visualize. Trying to get all the game elements to work together well in a situation like this would also be rather difficult. It sort of reminds me of the Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time, only on a much larger and vastly more complex scale .

I''ve always thought it to be a good idea and relatively easy to use in something like Unreal Tournament, but for a puzzle game, it sounds like a big challenge to implement in an environment like that. I wish I could help you in anything other than topology, but I can''t think of any good ideas for a puzzle game. Good luck though!

I''ve actually been thinking about doing a 4th demensional game for awhile now, although completely different from your idea (more simplistic). Essentially I want to make an asteroids style game but in 4 dimensions instead of 3 (or 2, as was the original). Really it would just be wierd to play, as rotations/translations would lead to unexpected results ("You''re not thinking fourth-dimensionally!").