Basically this is a game where how you customize your character determines how far he/she gets in the game. Granted the amount of AI to make this work sounds substantial (honestly, I don't know if it is), however let's for now just deal with the user's end of things.

The game is for the most part is your standard, sideview scroller. You on one side, enemies rushing towards you from the other. (Throwback to SNES/Genesis days) There are multiple stage on a level. Each stage gives you the chance to pick your weapons, armor, magic and abilities. Once you pick them you can't change them until the next stage. Your character just begins to fight whatever enemies are onscreen. Of course, the character will be scored. The scoring will be based on number of enemies killed, consecutive hits, consecutive kills, amount of health left, how much of the stage was travelled and whether or not the stage was completed.

Granted this game is just for bragging rights and watching cool effects and beat downs. The other thing I'm thinking of is allowing your character to use auto-pilot, adjust what skills to use (use more status magic, or more offensive magic, offensive attacks, or defensive attacks (ex: throws)), or using some "learning" mechanism.

Your thoughts?

Sounds cool. A few game has done similar things, but I haven't heard about this particular implementation type before.
One thing though; player's generally can accept a degree of not being in control, but they generally like to have some way to affect the final outcome of each level. Maybe add player controller abilities that could affect things if well-timed? That could be kinda cool. Anyways, just pitching in.
Good luck!

Nothing to add... but it's certainly possible. Reminds me of that game Gratuitous Space Battles that I think I saw here once. Checking out his home page it seems to have met some success!

This idea sounds like it is to RPGs as tower defense is to RTS.
I'm not a massive fan of tower defense, as i find that they quickly become uninteractive, but there's no denying that it's a successful genre, and I think this idea could work too.

In order to work though, you will need a very carefully designed character creation system in order to ensure the game is not trivial. TD works because in addition to the different towers you can build, there is the decision of how to place them to make them work together in synergy. I'm not sure how you will manage to get those subtleties to come through with just a load of skills and equipment being used one at a time by the ai.

It would be interesting to see this type of genre as a stunt martial art mix action adventure hybrid.

Any object can be used for a offense and defense weapon. Use some parkor, muay thai and watch the action flow.

You can use player interaction as a way to knock down things from over head or to block the AI from attacking you.


Just my two cents.

I've seen a game like this (where you pick stuff but don't play). It had characters that fought other characters. I think it was called my brute or somehting (browser based). Considering you don't actually play it it was quite addictive. I deleted my favourite shortcut so I wouldn't play it . So I do think your idea has somethign behind it. I'd perhaps go with something more interactive if the game/rounds are a bit long. Perhaps after everyX kills or so it pauses and give you a choice of some kind (power up/health etc). Maybe a slow down effect where the player can interact and avoid something dangerous.

Honestly, as it is, I probably wouldn't play it very long if it were a flash browser-based game, and I wouldn't even bother downloading it if it was a download-only game.

It would be interesting to see this type of genre as a stunt martial art mix action adventure hybrid.

Any object can be used for a offense and defense weapon. Use some parkor, muay thai and watch the action flow.

You can use player interaction as a way to knock down things from over head or to block the AI from attacking you.


Just my two cents.

The choice of fighting style is a good idea. That definitely adds variety. It could be different for all characters or your characters & groups of enemies. Interesting!

I'm not a big fan of games where you only watch. But maybe if the player had something else to do while the character was fighting, like the player had to quickly grab loot that appeared before it disappeared?

Sounds like Progress Quest.

But seriously, I think it could be done and would be pretty cool. I can certainly see it work.As Sandman said, it sounds like an RPG version of tower defense, but I think it could be applied to other genres too - certainly platformers and strategy games.

I've played a few games that weren't too dissimilar actually. I think most were flash games. Basically a "design a robot" type game where you can construct a robot and giving it orders and then letting it fight without user interaction to see how well it does. The same could be applied to RPG settings.