Game Idea a Day – Week 20

Here were my ideas this week. You know the drill.

5/13 – A story/environment set in a near-future dystopia, when all buildings in a large downtown area are bridged together and there are different strata of people who live at different heights in the superstructure. Lots of dazzlingly high views and really massive architectural structures. Maybe part of the game is just finding your way around. Maybe it’s an open world and you have to find your way between buildings for missions and figure out where things are.

5/14 – A game where you have this grid, maybe 20×20, and every second or so, a pulse of light begins at one end of the grid, travels down one row, and ends at the far column. Then another pulse travels down the next row, etc, until all the rows have been traversed. Then the pulse begins at the top of a column on one side of the board, and pulses continue down the board until that is done. So the game is to place things in the way of the beams: splitters (that divert the beams to either direction — left & right from the perspective of the pulse), and coins (that will be collected when the pulse travels over them), and other collectables that might take more than one pulse to collect. Some of the objects you place would only work once, and just become blocked spaces (not blocking the light, just not useful anymore), and others would be used to clear those spaces. Anyway, you just keep piling things onto the grid until you can’t anymore.

5/15 – The only innovative idea here is that you could have something suspended between the player’s hands (this is a room-scale/Vive idea), and the closer together they have them, the fewer points. If they are holding their hands wide, more points, but a bigger target to avoid all the things that are in the playing field. Another idea: bring a Helix like experience to the Vive. You would essentially have to circle things in VR, and avoid running into those same things. It could be really fun/cool.

5/16 – I wrote a ton in this entry about Portal Stories: VR, which I consumed in a single night. It made me think a lot about sokoban-style games in VR, which led me to think about porting various PuzzleScript games to VR, specifically my friend Ian’s game, Frog Bike. Basically, you can’t port directly, so it would just be re-using/re-creating various puzzle mechanics in 3D.

5/17 – Thinking about games for the donutron, I think it would be cool to do a puzzle game with tank controls. (Where you use both sticks to control both tire treads independently.) You also shoot, as tanks do, but there are no enemies, so you are shooting at switches to open doors and things like that. This entry included a bunch of ideas for levels, and trailed off when I started searching for Tank-tread controllers on the Unity asset store.

5/18 – I found an open source Unity plugin for implementing teleporting in the Vive, and that led to a brainstorm about a 2D puzzle game in VR played on the floor, where you actually just teleport to select the individual grid squares. What do you think about the name Teleporzzle?

5/19 – Thinking about time manipulation in a puzzle game, specifically where you might know the state of the puzzle at some point in the future (maybe even the end), but have to re-create the steps leading up to that point. You could jump around in time, and figure out clues for other time periods based on what you know at each point.