Navigate the rat infested town whilst playing a tune. You must guide rats away from populated areas. If you play the wrong note then you could loose rats or worse they attack innocent by-standers. Different tunes maybe necessary different vermin.
Then, proceed to be ripped off by the townsfolk and in a bout of calculated revenge, lure their children into a cave in the mountain that closes again after they enter.
_______________________"You're using a screwdriver to nail some glue to a ming vase. " -ToohrVyk
Have you played the Total War series? In that you control large armies (in the first, Shogun, which ran on 600mhz machines, you could control an army of about 1,500 soldiers at once, with either [can't remember] 4 or 8 opponents max for a total of 6,000-12,000 units in play), by controlling them on the formation level.
The result was a very tactical game - instead of the usual click fest of micro managing quick movements of individual units, you controlled 12, by normal rts standards slow, "units", made up of 100 or more members.
You controlled things like formation, movement speed (fatigue and moral where both modeled), direction and target. Since the units moved as a formation, turning in a different direction was a slow, deliberate action. Distances where meaningful, and overall the battles, while quick (anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes) where not overwhelming in pace. The game was all about positioning - getting your troops in the right place at the right time to slaughter the enemy - there was the normal rock/paper/scissors relationship between units, however flank (attacking another formation at its weakest point), terrain and moral also played an important role in determining success or failure.
You can probably pick up some combo pack of Shogun and Medieval Total War in the bargain bin for $10.
Hmm.. I thought the thread died when it disappeared off the front-screen.. Just goes to show ;)
@Michelson: Yupp, I've tried the Shogun games; a little to slow for me, but fun. It might be cool to do that with a pre-emperial Roman structure; their concept of Maniples and Legions should lend itself quite well to a game like that.
@Rasm: "I didn't think of adding randomized maps. I always thought hand made maps were more strategical because the map maker could do test runs and balance the choke points."
Well; the individual 'tiles' WOULD be hand-crafted. The idea is that you handcraft 4-7 different designs that all fit the same basic gameplay mechanic ('chokepoint', 'archer gallery', 'open battlefield', 'production/rally point', etc). The map-generator then uses the template-map to pick a random sub-set that fits the criteria. Might be a bit of work making them match seamlessly, but it's all technically feasible, and humanly tweakable.
Take DoTA, for example. While people love going back and replaying the same map (known expectations), they also love it when updates to the map comes out (incremental changes). This is just trying to integrate controlled randomness into the core design. I'd also guess a game like Troy functions primarily as a multi-player game.
@Rasm: "Followers were something I thought were either trained out of a barracks (RTS style) and equiped by your choice of gear or random walking people in towns that you must convince to join your army."
Remember, this is a HORDE game. Followers are 100% expendable, and are delivered in bulk (an average follower swarm would be between 50 and 1500 at any time). As such, picking them up is more like a health-pack :D
@Rasm: "I'd like to see a fully developed design document for this idea. If you plan on doing it, keep me updated, as I'd like to hear about."
Well; I moved away from rigid design docs a couple of years ago; in general our production process is a lot more agile. We'd usually build an internal pitch document in PPT; usually somewhere between 5-20 pages. It would basically be equivalent to the description given above.
If that's internally green-lighted, we'd do a small prototype with grey-box/programmer art; and play it to see what works and what doesn't. Usually at that point, it'll get anywhere between 3 weeks to several months of iterative tweaking and brainstorming (or be condemned to the bit-yard, if noone loves it enough to fight for it).
Finally, when we're happy with the prototype, the artists will take over and start on the concept sketches. Using the prototype as a basis, they'll build a mockup of the main game screen (character view, UI controls, player/monster/environment look-n-feel, etc). It'll get the same prototyping cycle as before, though the iterations are a lot quicker. Finally, we'll green-light the concept-design, and start on the first build.
It's not a method I'd recommend for a big team, or anyone sitting on a high burn-rate situation. For us it works pretty well, since it minimizes risk, and we work on multiple titles in parallell (some at the prototype stage, some in full production, some in final cleanup and polish stage)...
