So my friends and I have been working for a while on designing a game where you''re this virus with AI that can move from person to person and completely control them. It''s in the future, and you were the product of a weapons program to help turn the tide of a war, and they tried to destroy them all, but you escaped, and so on and so on. The main thing is, now you can go on missions like any other FPS except you can move from host body to host body in order to better accomplish your goal. For instance, certain host bodies would have different strengths and weaknesses so you''d want to switch occasionally for an advantage. So we were designing this game and then we discovered the game "Geist," which is for the GameCube and hasn''t been released yet. So anyway, Geist is pretty much the same except instead of a virus you''re a ghost. So, obviously we really liked this idea, and we''d really like to make the game. After all, it isn''t _exactly_ like Geist. On the other hand, we aren''t far enough in the development process so that we couldn''t just scrap the whole thing and come up with something new. The problem then would be to come up with something new, which is easier said then done. We thought this idea was relatively new when we came up with it.

it doesn''t matter, IMHO. look how many games there are with the premise that you are a military hero guy who has to kill everyone by themselves, or how many games with a guy with a sword fighting the evil wizard.

make your game if you still want to.

Messiah from Shiny also used this gameplay mechanism (an angel entering and controlling people). Still worth doing as its hasn''t been overused and could make for some interesting gameplay if used well.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions (www.obscure.co.uk)
Game Development & Design consultant

Remember to check out Instinct: Stimulus vs Control as your type of game seems perfectly suited to it.</Shameless Plug>

Well, let''s look at HL2. It''s a game about aliens and heroes with guns. There''s gonna be some wort of attractive woman, and I bet my left bollock there''ll be a boss of some sort at the end.

So even though it appears to do plenty of things that have been done before, am I going to ignore it? Hell no, it looks like they''re doing a fantastic job of making an intense, visceral and unique experience.

I''m all for originality (and nuking EA hq for license whoring) but giving up on idea just because it is similar to other games is pointless. As my mum once said to me...

"It''s not what you''ve got, it''s what you do with it darling"

Although she wasn''t talking about games design at the time.

quote: Original post by m_wherrett
As my mum once said to me...

"It''s not what you''ve got, it''s what you do with it darling"

Although she wasn''t talking about games design at the time.

i''m afraid to ask...

quote: Original post by Obscure
Messiah from Shiny also used this gameplay mechanism (an angel entering and controlling people). Still worth doing as its hasn''t been overused and could make for some interesting gameplay if used well.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions (www.obscure.co.uk)
Game Development & Design consultant

There was a coin-op game (forget it''s name) that had you play a ghost who could possess enemies and use their attacks and abilities.

So don''t worry about Geist having the same idea as your game. It sounds like yours is different on enough counts to stand as its own game and not some derivative. Good luck to ya!

Thanks for your thoughts, everyone! We''re now pushing ahead with the project.

Something similar happened to us when first designing our game. I thought I had the story down pat, and what a story . Then over a weekend, I got the chance to play the almost new Halo for the first time. Turned out that apparently the designers at Bungie and I get our inspiration from the same science fiction author, Iain M Banks, and one idea in particular, the guiding AI in your head that also forms an intrical part of the story, not some random voice over saying "You''re an inspiration to birth control Duke!".
Of course, that was a story thing, so it was pretty easy to work around, but the plot I was forced to come up with then had at least one more dimension of depth to it, and that''s not bad.

It also happens to the big boys too. Apparently Team Fortress 2 was on the homeward track to release, and then Battlefield 1942 came out, and was apparently so similar that Valve decided to pull back on TF2 and improve and differentiate from BF. And we still haven''t seen it.