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Original post by Impossible
I love all the people just saying "yes" with no sample games, design documents, or even one sentence "ideas" to back up their claims. What you think is fresh and original may be old hat.

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And at the same time, they might very well be fresh and original. You don''t know because you haven''t seen the designs.

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Original post by superpig
And at the same time, they might very well be fresh and original. You don''t know because you haven''t seen the designs.

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Exactly, that''s why I take those kind of posts with a grain of salt until I see something. You can''t judge the idea, or even know if someone has an idea, if they just say "yes I have an innovative game idea that will blow everything else away."

How about a game where you try to come up with an idea for a game?

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Original post by tolleyc
How about a game where you try to come up with an idea for a game?

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It''s been done.

Personally, I think that origionality for it''s own sake is a little overated. It''s quite possible to come up with many novel ideas, and they certainly might be entertaining for a while purely based upon their novelty value. You play it just because it''s interesting and quite unlike anything else you''ve played. However, I find that they rarely seem to have as much lasting interesting.

There''s a reason why certain themes and styles of game get made again and again: the formula is sucessful. I don''t mean from a commercial standpoint, because that is a completely seperate issue, but also from a gameplay point of view. There''s something about the style of play that people find enjoyable again and again. After all, these games would never have become popular in the first place if nobody liked them. (Not to say that I don''t think there are some ''popular'' games out there which are total junk, but that''s an aside....)

I think it''s better to focus on evolution and refinment rather than complete origionality. Why start from stratch if you can take a great existing idea and make it even better, or change it in some way to create a different playing experience.

Take the rts genre for example. There were a few popular games early in its lifetime, and their commerical success prompted a flood of ''clones''. Many of these were pretty much just dirivitive, with little added or significantly changed. Some were even worse than the game they attempted to copy. However, some were great and worthy successors, enjoyable even if you''ve played many other similar games. Some took a fairly unique twist upon the genre, while others simply refined and improved the genre without neccesarily doing anything truly ''origional''

For example, the Warcraft series. The origional Warcraft was one of the first rts, before it was a really established genre. Warcraft 2 could hardly be called very inovative compared to the origional, however it took what was good about the first game and made it better; improved the graphics, refined the controls, ect. Warcraft 3 did much of the same and added some new twists with its hero system, and rpg-esque campaign. Is Warcraft 1 the most ''origional'' of these games? Quite possibly. Is it the best? Certainly not. Does playing the other games take from the enjoyment of the sequals? In fact, I find quite the opposite to be true.

I think that non-original games only appear to be boring or dry because they''re not that well executed in and of themselves. I''ve played quite a number of rts games (it being one of my prefered genres), yet I never really get bored of them as long as they are well executed and add at least a little something new. Some thing old done well is always better than something new done poorly. I''m not saying it''s not possible to come up with something completly new which is an amazing game yet defies all classical genre, however I think it might be a good idea to look at why this seems to be a sort of holy grail of game design.

I agree with that 100%. You also need to consider that whenever a new genre is created, or even if a convention is changed in an old genre, people have to learn it. This can actually be a barrier if you make interface or gameplay changes that aren''t necessarily better than old stuff just to be different.

Ok what about an extreme hybrid of a game. A Turn-Based Strategy, RPG, FPS. Basically you have a group of people that you play with (online), and your stats get tracked (levels, skill, etc). These stats allow you to improve yourself/your team with better weapons, armor, team skills. When you engage in battle it is similar to a turn-based system. According to what stats you have, you can move further on the ''board'' and when you are ready to attack someone it goes into FPS mode where you would have a technical advantage over your enemy (having been the intiator of the attack). The battle would end when each station (player on battle grid) was defeated by the opposite team and items would be swapped/traded/etc. I know it''s a little extreme but it could make for some fun/interesting gameplay.

Well, first of all, you''re in the forum for game designers. There are a great number of types of games we *could* discuss, but there are few games that you can really innovate in.

Example: "I want to make a football game where you can play the player, or you could play the coach... or you could even just trade players and be the GM"

Oh wait... that''s already being done by a 2 or 3 companies. Of course, that ends up giving me another idea... of playing just the player, choose to be traded to another team, change positions, etc... that could really be an interesting game.

Anyway, then you have RTS games, but most of those boil down to "go get resources, make units, kill enemy", or something similar.

RPGs allow you to build an entire world, from the ground up. This is where a lot of game developers like to be, we''re world builders, universe designers. There are few places we''d rather be than creating the background physics and game mechanics for an entire world. Trying to figure out new algorithms for the chance of a football player being injured just isn''t where we shine.

Yes, yes I can.

Here's a couple of ideas. They're bare-bones, and badly-written (basically just a brain-dump) but whatever. I wouldn't be surprised if they've been done before.

Idea 1 (abstract, combative puzzle game):
The play area is a large, rectangular grid.
At the middle of one side is a wide-beam laser, which is your base. There is a corresponding laser on the opposite side of the grid (the enemy).
There are various objects placed around the grid:
leses (convex or concave), mirrors, prisms, opaque blocks (variation: other objects could be added as necessary to adjust game play).
The game is turn based. Each turn lasts 30 seconds, and you're allowed to make up to 10 changes to the grid in that time. A change is either to add a new object, or to delete an existing object.
The objects which were on the grid at the start of the game cannot be deleted. You are also not allowed to delete objects placed by your enemy.
Between each turn, both lasers fire. The object of the game is to place objects such that the beam from your laser hits your opponent's laser (ie, their base).

Of course, never having played this game myself, I can't tell how well it would work; no doubt it would need a lot of fine tuning of the objects, timings, grid size, and so on.

edit: The basic idea for this (ie, a couple of lasers firing at each other) came from an Acorn User magazine, but I've never played the game - I have no idea how similar this is to the real game (which would've been for the BBC micro).

Idea 2 (hierarchical multiplayer tactical game):
(this has probably been done before)

The play area is a town (including building interiors).
There are two sides. Standard good-guys/bad-guys setup; one team are terrorists/gangsters/whatever, the other team are army/swat/whatever. Each side has a leader, and three teams (and each team has a team leader). The leader sees an overview map of the town, showing buildings, and high level building layouts (enough to plan routes around and through buildings), but not detailed interior maps. On the map, the leader can see iconic representations of each player on their side, any obvious tactical objects/positions (eg, machine gun emplacements, weapon stores, etc), control points (we'll get to that), and also any known positions of enemy players. Positional information on this map is not accurate. Any more information must be gained through good communication with team leaders. The main leader cannot communicate with anyone other than the team leaders.
All the other players work in first person mode, but the team leader gets a mini-map. This mini-map is quite accurate, but only shows things visible to players in the team.
The objective of the game is for one side to control every control point on the map.
In this game, for each round, dead means dead. The main leader cannot die, since they aren't actually fighting on the ground. If a team leader dies, control of that team passes to the next player in the team list (the order of the team lists is decided by the players before the match).

edit: The idea is to emphasise communication, team tactics and planning.

John B

[edited by - JohnBSmall on April 6, 2004 1:05:23 PM]