Make These Games!
After reading GAMECENTER.COM's recent article listing game ideas that the
editors have had rattling around in their heads I thought I would write
down some of my favorite ideas. Maybe somebody will make the games I've
always wanted to play.
Legends
A certain isometric RPG has done very well this year despite the fact that
I consider it to be flawed almost beyond belief. What follows is a recipe
for doing a far far better one:
* The game in question only allowed for four players at once in a
multi-player game. That is a ridiculous limitation, especially in
light of QuakeWorld's 32 player support. It's kind of difficult to do
more than eight with a peer to peer network so also offer the option
of running dedicated servers to support 16, 32, or more.
* It had no map editor and no specifications for building one!!! Fix
this by at least offering the file format that you are using or hand
out your internal editing tools and the file format. You won't make as
much money from add-on packs but you will have a game that is still on
the shelves and selling well a long time after others have faded
completely. And you might sell your engine a few times like another
game that begins with a 'Q'.
* One town plus one dungeon doesn't equal a world. Allow hooking
together maps to build a much larger island, continent, or world. Try
to make characters that do something other than wait around in the
same place forever waiting for you to come buy or sell something.
* Go really wacky and put a little realism in the game. Add weather,
seasons, and daytime/nighttime to your world. And don't people need
rest and food?
* Configure your peer to peer gaming with some prediction and sense. One
slow player shouldn't bog everyone else down.
* Come up with a system for conversation that doesn't limit your
sentences to short fragments. People really talk a lot in games these
days, I've even seen games simply stop while people spent an hour
chatting. Learn to accommodate this behavior rather than make users
fit your conversation system. Try looking at a chat program
sometime...
* Create a lobby interface that makes it easy to find the people you
like to play with and that always lists all the available connections
and evaluates them rather than just a random set selected for the user
to choose from.
* Don't make moving from one place to another take ten minutes. If
somebody has been at point A and point B a dozen times, let him/her
choose that destination and go directly there unless some encounter
with another character would have occurred on that trip. This has
obvious problems if you are dealing with a multi-player game, so it
would probably only be an option when playing single-player.
* Let the world have some continuity. If you hide some money or items,
they shouldn't go away unless another character (player or computer
run) takes them.
* Get some variety into what happens. Killing and acquiring over and
over again is not a game, it's farming...
* Cheating really pisses people off. A lot of it can be avoided by
designing to a client/server model where the server makes most of the
decisions and keeps track of the state of each player.
* Finally, look at some older examples of this genre. Larn, NetHack,
Moria, Omega, and others represent more variety and a higher level of
gameplay but lack the graphics and sound that gamers expect these
days. Spend a few hours exploring any of them and you will come away
with lots of ideas.
Frenetic
Imagine a cross between Centipede, Tempest, and Asteroids. Your craft
starts out in the center of a level with spokes radiating outward from it.
Each spoke is wider than a single opposing craft and you can fly freely
through the center area and even into individual spokes if need be.
However, you are unlikely to want to do so because each spoke feeds in the
invaders who are trying to close in on the center. Shooting the bad guys
results in floating debris which has the same vector as the original object
shot. The debris won't kill you if it hits you but it can absorb some shots
fired into it which will mean more advance down each spoke by the next
wave.
Don't slow down, don't miss, and don't blink because each time you complete
a wave the spokes get shorter, the enemies get faster, or something else
awful happens.
Nazi Hunter
I was watching PrimeTime Live one time and they had a story about modern
day Nazi's. They showed games about running death camps and other stuff
that were supposedly distributed on BBS's etc. The idea was to get their
anti-semetic message out to young kids in the hope of finding some good
recruits later...
So I thought it might be a good idea to balance out that garbage with some
good games from the other side of the fence. One that came to me
immediately was the idea of doing an adventure game like Gabriel Knight
where you play a Nazi hunter like Simon Wiesenthal. You could track down a
lunatic like Mengele somewhere in South America while others try and stop
you. It would be lots of detective work with a little bit of action thrown
in once you start to get really close to men who don't want to be found.
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Copyright ⌐ 1997 Bells & Whistles Software, Inc.
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