Inspirational Grumblings - The Bear and Badger

LazyGunn

As a counterpoint to the 'Stuff wot I did make' thread, this is more for what you're inspired as to want to make stuff, game dev or not, and good place for me as i enter and exit game dev ideas as quickly as a day, and have only very recently found what seems to have become a perfect fit for the way I think and work

So if you think of what you'd like to be an awesome game, and i do mean true aspirations, not just pisstakes, or even as you want games to be, say something! Maybe god is hearing, and in all of you i think there's a mini gamedev or at least idealist fighting to break out

My first point is: The Tengen Toppa Gurrenn Lagann series and follow up film - Is Kamina the perfect protagonist? He's ballsy and brilliant and rather than the typical clueless kid-on-a-journey start should it simply be a guy who is already on top of everything simply because he feels like it?

If you havent watched Tengen Toppa, heavily recommended. It's very funny and is Gainax taking the piss out of Gainax, deconstructing typical mech shows into their absurd end (If you aren't anime types, it might be just the show you need to give you hope in anime).

Kow

I understand the first paragraph.

FranticPea

I thought you were fluent in Spanish?

LazyGunn

You can be the one with aspirations to understand more paragraphs!

You both can

Bollockoff

Gurren Lagann was great tho.

hylian_elf

Almost bought that massive boxset that was released not long ago.

hylian_elf

I have ideas. I have some coding skills. But I don't have time or the level of motivation required to make a game.

Yossarian

Bollockoff wrote:

Gurren Lagann was great tho.

Is that a phonetically-written grumble that you found particularly inspiring?

Bollockoff

Dad it's called Aneemay.

Yossarian

I thought she was a DJ on that Radio 1 you kids listen to.

[Deleted User]

It's not a fully fledged idea, but I've been thinking about an ultra-brutal beat-em-up/shooter (along the lines of Hotline Miami) but where time plays out in reverse. As you enter a new room, there are multiple bodies on the floor. Toppled furniture or broken glass gives an indication as to where they've been shot from. You start 'opening fire', and have to work your way through the room, and as each enemy comes back to life, it's harder for you to get them all before you exit (enter) the room. I appreciate there's a fundamental paradox (ooh, the name of the game?) that if you die, what you've seen so far is an alternative universe that never played out, but so is every game after you lose your first life.

Levels could be a mix of all-out action and stealth. Key feature; when you finish a level, you're treated to a reverse action replay, showing you how your death dispensing would have looked in real time.

I have no coding skills. Somebody make it so.

Moot_Geeza

My idea has been done a few times now, I should've struck while the iron was lukewarm. A Quantum Leap-ish through the generations fleshed out Wario Ware (albeit with full levels to be completed pre-leap), starting basic and building up to shiny modern graphics. Possibly all-new, but preferably calling on developers to create a new level for their existing classics.

Edit: Perhaps it could be a charity thing, like Game Aid.

superflyninja

Well a great many of my ideas have been made already. One that I was keen to make next I found out is already in development and on kickstarter(albeit with a different setting). It is detailed here

I still might make my version. It was to be set on a desert/water world and similar setup. Run a base and send excursions out into the wilds bringing back loot.

What inspires me most though with games is discovery and exploration within a compelling world. I love the feeling of isolation that games can evoke and the fear of the unknown. Games like Naissance and Firewatch do this brilliantly. That FPS animus section in Assassins 2 (I think) also was effective.
Id love to build one of these explore em ups. Ideally I would have very little text or speech and possibly no other characters at all.
My idea would be to do with (possibly a slightly improvised version of ) Irish Folklore. So you play as a parent, your child is missing, last seen near a field that contains a fairy ring. All this would be set up at the beginning in a couple of sentences. So the game starts here and an opening appears in the ground and off you go on your journey. Having the Irish setting would be something a bit different and could have some decent scope for good chunky stylised graphics.I'd probably end the game by the player having to remain in the underground kingdom but enabling the child to escape. I've not thought heavily about the plot just the general emotions I want played out. A big aim though would be to get some compulsive gameplay in there and not just rely on the player's curiosity to keep them going. I'd take many lessons from Grow Home in that sense. Make navigating the levels fun and necessary. Realistically though I dont know how I could do it all myself but its something always ticking away in the back of my mind.

LazyGunn

There's some good ideas there. I've had all sorts of ideas lately, lots to do with procedural generation, but also stuff like a sandbox based about an 80s teenage kids journey through an increasingly apocalyptic hometown in americana style, with it much being a love letter from the british to 80s american films and arcade machines of the period. A lot of my ideas do relate to breathing life into old games however, with a stress on VR mechanics and the latest graphics technology Unity can serve (which is getting pretty smart of late. I've been getting friendly with a realtime GI system with no precalculation, unlike Enlighten, the latest in FFT oceans, volumetric fog/fluids by mighty folk in the industry often 'done for fun', and Nvidia's Flex library ported to unity eventually, and since i have it, Next Limit's CaronteFX offline simulation plugin).

I'd love to do a deep story based walk em up or some novel adventure game based on my thoughts about post-humanism and wotnot but I don't have the confidence to pour so much time into something ill only be doing myself with the chance of it being any good completely unknown.

I have a load of really nice resources now so i'm foolish for not getting at least something done, but at least i know i have choices

superflyninja

Another idea I had was a spin on a roguelike rpg. The setting is very different though. You play as a person with anxiety issues(lolololo....see ALL my posts in the things that dont matter thread) and/or depression and your goal is to get through a week. Each day would be a level. One day of work, on another day go to the shops. An objective might be to ask someone a work related question, s the route to the person would morph from a simple straight line into proc gen dungeon complete with battles with anxiety imps etc. Yes its a bit literal but Im sure some subtlety would work itself in there during development. It would be a hard one to tackle though, would need to get the tone just so....

Tempy

Cart Life may well have a character who has anxiety, I know it's all about scraping by in a world that doesn't give a shit.

hylian_elf

I had an idea of a small strange 'game' based on an argument with wife who was/is having an affair and you find a way to kill yourself and the other two in some way. Or something.

I should probably go see a shrink.

cockbeard

You mentioning twin sticks earlier had me thinking about something along the lines of Three Quarters Life

Standard twin stick shooter except main weapon is a gravity gun, using it to direct enemies into obstacles rather than straight up shooting them

The balancing act would come as gravity in mildly intangible, so if you rotate too fast you end up losing whatever you are carrying or flinging it into another (not)random (but unintended) direction which may do you more harm

In fact this all exists and has since the eighties, anywhere to easily put stuff together on a very weak laptop

LazyGunn

Was the last bit a question? You can use unity on just about anything

cockbeard

Hmm, yes it was, and yes thankyou, if I make something with it that I like do I have to buy a license to publish, or can I put it up on steam or whatever

poprock

I always thought it would be nice to have intersecting persistent game worlds across different genres.

Which sounds wanky, but let me explain …

Sequels are dull. Diminishing returns. What if you expanded a franchise horizontally instead of vertically?

You use the actions or outcomes of one game to set up a lobby for playing another.

Example: Some kid in Korea is playing a strategy game. He deploys a lone gunman against an infantry troop. That action is used as the setup for an first-person shooter set in the same world. So a girl in Florida logs in to play her shooter and is cast as that lone gunman.

Separate games, but riffing off real player actions in each other. Crosses genres and expands the game world in a non-linear fashion.

Lord_Griff

I came up with the idea to put uv lights into hand dryers.

cockbeard

poprock wrote:

I always thought it would be nice to have intersecting persistent game worlds across different genres. Which sounds wanky, but let me explain … Sequels are dull. Diminishing returns. What if you expanded a franchise horizontally instead of vertically? You use the actions or outcomes of one game to set up a lobby for playing another. Example: Some kid in Korea is playing a strategy game. He deploys a lone gunman against an infantry troop. That action is used as the setup for an first-person shooter set in the same world. So a girl in Florida logs in to play her shooter and is cast as that lone gunman. Separate games, but riffing off real player actions in each other. Crosses genres and expands the game world in a non-linear fashion.

Bit like that space sim, wit ha separate planet based combat game, but tied in together. I liked the concept of that don't know if it ever made it

poprock

Aye. I originally had in mind something like a crime scene CSI investigating the aftermath of an FPS shootout. All generated from real player data in another game, set in the same world.

RamSteelwood

cocko, Unity has a personal license for free now, it's pretty much fully functioning in terms of the pro licensed versions, the only limit is if you make over $100K you have to buy the pro license, which is only thousands so a fair trade really!

superflyninja

And Visual Studios has a free community editon, which is great. So Unity + VS = free goodtimes. Its only 20quid of so for a dev license for android.

cockbeard

Cheers gents, given my work day today is pretty similar to yesterday I've not a huge amount of time, but I do need some hobbies rather than boozing non-stop

Are mechanics and such immediately visible, it's not like just reskinning GTA or Oblivion, which I've done a bit in the past?

Ignore me I'll go and look, I'm sure you can make allsorts in it

superflyninja

Nope you make what you like. You dont get a default template to reskin. You can code the lot or else assemble the bulk of a game from prebuilt packages(will still need code)

LazyGunn

Its extremely flexible but doesn't assume anything from when you start, you can go in every direction. Do the unity tutorials, check the unity standard assets for some prefabs that might give you a boost in the right direction, the asset store is a goldmine if you know what to look at, and ask questions. Your game idea sounds exactly the kind of thing unity knocks together quite easily

davyK

Might give Unity a try myself. Have a few ideas. I see you can use JavaScript or C#. Have a fair bit of JS background so that lets me get going at any rate.

LazyGunn

I'd recommend using c# - almost all tutorials, hints and tips etc for unity are written in c#. Plus JS, or unity's subset of it, feels a bit shoddy in comparison. You'll be using Unity or third party APIs so much that implementation isn't usually a massive headache so you can make the switch quite easily

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories