Game Developer Conference is next week, and as I prepared for that this week, (especially polishing up some rough edges on, and making appointments to show my Puzzle Prison prototype to whoever I can), I also began working on some enhancements to the enemy AI behaviors for the locally made multiplayer platformer game Chimera Genesis.

I have also been watching the AlphaGo games this week, and talking about the implications with whoever will listen.

Without further ado, here were my game ideas from the last 7 days:

3/4 – Another VR puzzle game concept. This one with falling blocks and slow-moving gravity. I imagine it sort of like Klax you are actually standing in and catching the blocks with your hands instead of a machine. You then have to stack the blocks yourself.

3/5 – A street-fighter like fighting game, called instead: Treat Fighter. You pick from characters like donut, candy bar, cupcake, ice cream cone, slice of cake, slice of pie, buttered popcorn, or bag of candy. Each with their own unique special powers, of course.

3/6 – Thinking more about a solar system simulation in VR where you can zoom in and out, and move around the system instantly, at a glance. It would be fun to form additional planets and set them in motion by pushing them with your hand. Could be like some of the circular Osmos levels in a way, but maybe it needs to feel simpler than that since it’ll already be in 3D. Just make a set number of planets and get them spinning around the sun without colliding into one another. Maybe they have to make some number of rotations, or last for some period of time. (Incidentally, later in the week I discovered a game on Steam already that sounds a lot like this. I didn’t see any mention of VR though.)

3/7 – Thinking about playing simultaneous games of Tetris. I came up with a variant on probably my first VR puzzle game idea, where you would simply have a bunch of games of Tetris floating around you and control the one you are gazing at. (Attempting to keep them all from hitting the top, of course.) This new idea is just that you control them all at once. No VR necessary. The goal would be to survive the longest, of course, but maybe all the boards would clear after some increasingly difficult threshold. Pieces are random, of course, so there would be no completely optimal solution. Or maybe you could optionally clear them between levels, giving you a multiplier for each one you didn’t clear.

3/8 – A candy crush clone, but with some extremely personal narrative pasted on. The heart-wrenching narrative would be the incentive to unlock further levels, but the game itself would be very commercialized and monetized. Lots of paywalls, and requests for you to share the experience. This is a money-wrenching tear-jerker. (And the ultimate point of the narrative would be about how gross it all is together.) Bonus points for a political message as well. Note that I would never make this game, but it’s funny to think about.

3/9 – An abstract strategy game played with a go board/stones, where you attempt to surround the opposing color with your color. The twist is/was that you can play either color stone on your turn. I finally did just the smallest amount of playtesting this morning, and the game doesn’t really work mechanically as written. The color choice is a neat idea, but it needs something else.

3/10 – I had a few different ideas yesterday while riding the light rail:
* An adventure/exploration game where you play as a skill toy (I was specifically thinking a Kendama), exploring a world populated with other skill toys.
* An Excalibur VR game, essentially I just think it would be cool to be able to act out various scenes from Arthurian legend in VR: finding the sword in the stone, pulling it out, throwing it in the lake, having the lady in the lake bring it back to you.
* Another VR puzzle game, this one played around a smallish (table sized) 3D block of cubes. Maybe from above the block is simply 3×3. You must touch a square of the same color on either side of the block, ideally in the same row, at which point the entire row is removed from the block.