For those of you who have not seen the movie this guy lives over groundhog's day about 100 times, changing what he does each time, perfecting what he does. I think you could make an intresting game like this. It would be an adventure/(Life sim) game. You play through a mounth or so and if you die, or fail your objectives. Then you redo the day. You would have a certain number of days to make it to the end of the month. Each day would be the same no matter how many times you play through except things you efect, add in some conversation/persuasion options, a little fight. I think it would make a good game. Comments????????

The second Legend of Zelda game for the N64, "Majoras Mask" (sp?), had something like this. You relived the same day over and over, with the NPC's doing the same things. You had to remember what certain people were doing at certain times of the day to solve puzzles. It's certainly an interesting concept.

I think it would be a cool game. One thing must be considered though. It gets really tedious doing the same thing over and over. So perhaps either have a kind of save spot, or else make it so that the tedium is some how removed.

Perhaps have each path relatively easy, but innumerable paths to travel. It would take quite a bit of tweaking to make a well balanced game.

Also, I usually play games like this more or less. When playing Hitman contracts, I would play the levels so well that I could run through them, not killing a soul, and time out delays, etc. to get into guarded areas. Any game can be played this way if it's linear and you don't save.

So to center a game around it, you'd have to incorporate it into the design, like they did with Majoras Mask.

That's one of the best game ideas I have heard. It would be cool if there was an actual cause for the groundhog phenomenon that you didn't find out until the end of the game (if you can get there of course ;)

I don't think the game would get repetitive and tedious as long as you put enough different choices for the player to make each time. Or perhaps when you have figured that the player has worked out some problem, do it automatically next time so they don't have to do it all over again.

One variant of this groundhog idea would be to make it horror genre. Instead of a cheerful game like the movie groundhog day, the game could be foreboding and scary like a terrifying recurring nightmare which people occasionally get while sleeping. To add more psychological damage things could change subtly on each iteration to add to the horror effect, like a face in the painting that wasn't there "yesterday". Going off on a tangent now so will stop..

The only problem with this is it removes the linear aspect of the gameplay. If it's a non-linear genre like the Sims, no prob. If you're trying to make an RPG or horror game, beware.

One such example (tried and failed) was Ephimerial Fantasia, PS2. Horrid game. It used the same concept - that you played the same week in time, then had to go back and do it all again. The problem was, NO ONE (and I mean no one) could figure out what to do. It was meant to be non-linear. What it was was progress-hindering.

Majora's Mask (Zelda, Nintendo 64) proved to be at the opposite end of the spectrum for most. Of course, it rode behind an established Nintendo franchise, but nonetheless, it worked. It was tough to figure out what to do at times, but when you needed help figuring it out, help was there.

So, I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying be careful. Don't leave your player stranded, and everything will be fine.



(and if anyone doesn't agree with my opinionated generalizations of either of the above examples... I don't care.)

How would this be any different to standard save and restore options, other than being restricted to a certain time of day? Keeping track of the number of times you restart a day wouldn't really add much to that, unless I'm missing something obvious.

A similar storyline was also used in the Stargate SG1 series, and in common with Groundhog Day, there was a light-hearted section where those trapped in the time loop realised they could do whatever they wanted as many times as they wanted, without needing to worry about consequences.

If you limited the number of times a day can be repeated, you would remove (or at least severely restrict) this aspect.

You could possibly have the ability to record your actions from the beginning of the day to any point in day, and then on any following day, you could choose to re-act the recorded day, up to any point you choose (that was part of the recording). But maybe there's a skill involved with re-acting out a recording. With a low skill, there's a good chance you're going to mess up, and thus the game quits the high-speed (or instant) play back halfway through the recording, where you messed up. As you go on, you get better at re-acting a recording without making a mistake.

I like array of char's suggestion of changing details each time the player starts again. You could make slight differences at the beginning and make them more noticable later on. That way you'll end up with a totally different world after a while.
Something like this could happend if there were more than one Groundhogger.

It's an interesting idea, but it could turn very boring very fast if you just have to do the same thing over and over again.

array of char: actually, this concept is much older than Groundhog Day, apparently it was a concept in an episode of 'The Twilight Zone' written by Richard Matheson.

The concept is indeed nice, and I've yet to see it done well in a game. I personally disliked the way MM went about doing it, fun game, but I got frustrated with it and I'm not one to get frustrated with a game usually. It could work, and I think it'd be best if it worked on a level where you didn't rush people to get to the end of the day, as in, it didn't have it's own clock system. That was one thing I didn't like about MM, that I either had to sit around and wait for something to happen, or I had to haul ass to get somewhere. If you let the player progress time through the day at their discretion it'd allow for more control and IMO be more fun.

Another unique aspect of this that you could take advantage of is that you can't really ever have a 'Game-over' screen, because if ya die, then it's back to the start of the day. If you can really exploit this idea for all it's worth and intergrate it into the gameplay in such a unique manner not seen before, then it's gotta be good.

One of the key features of Majora's Mask that made the time-loop less of a pain was the "Bombers Notebook" - essentially a notebook/day-planner that automatically notes any timed events, allowing you to plan around them