My game ideas for last week:
6/10 – Three rhyming ideas: Weasel Easel, a drawing app where everything turns into fuzzy animals. Cube tube, a puzzle game played by swapping adjacent tvs, what’s playing on the tvs is how you match things. Two episodes of the same show, for example. Cop Mop, a game where you are the janitor of a police station, and have to clean up messy (bloody) jail cells and solve crimes.
I also wrote an entry about shoving giant blocks around in VR, and how it might best be accomplished.
6/11 – An intriguing idea for a two-player abstract where you move a piece, and then choose a square anywhere on the gameboard to raise. Once a square has been raised, the other pieces on the board would slide away from it, assuming the spaces beyond them are empty. I first started by thinking of this as a chess variant, and it works as that, but I think it also works with simpler pawns and I could imagine any number of different victory conditions. The first thing that came to mind is the last player with a pawn remaining on the bottom level would be the victor. One interesting aspect of this idea is that it would likely be rather difficult to play with a physical prototype, and yet, unlike a lot of my other digital board game ideas that meet that criteria, I didn’t start out trying to think of a game with it in mind from the beginning.
6/12 – A brainstorm that started with the title “VVVVVR”… The obvious idea is just a 3D version of Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV. You are in the platformer, but you can teleport around for movement, and if you teleport onto the ceiling, the whole universe flips upside down. Obviously, it wouldn’t be a literal translation of the mechanics from the original. That clearly wouldn’t work, but it might be fun to take inspiration from as many mechanics as possible. I even thought a bit about one of the possible levels or areas.
6/13 – More thinking about my VR RTS idea from 5/22. I outlined some details for 5 different ship types: Fighter, Scout/Sniper, Shield Generator, Destroyer, and Miner.
6/14 – More thinking about the idea from 6/11. I basically just wrote down more of the details, and outlined some specifics for the non-chess game.
6/15 – A brainstorm devoted to video in VR. Thinking about how we might capture a scene in realtime, both with standard cameras and kinect. This would enable lots of game ideas, charades, hacky-sack, social dance games.
6/16 – A game where you play as a turtle swimming around in a murky swamp. I outlined rules for how you might control a 3rd person turtle character that swims in front of your HMD (head mounted display), avoiding Crocodiles and looking for other turtles.
Today (after doing my brainstorm) I started re-reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, and got to the part about how games take place in a “magic circle”. This reminded me that I had picked up The Magic Circle back at Indie Cade last year, but hadn’t played through it yet. I spent most of this afternoon doing so, and highly recommend it. I think it’s probably the kind of thing where I shouldn’t talk about it too much, or I’d be spoiling it for you, but obviously, it’s (at least somewhat) about game design. This led me to wondering what other games there are out there specifically about the making of games. I can only think of The Beginner’s Guide, and some others that are more accurately summed up as “game developer simulator” games. (Game Dev Story and Game Dev Tycoon are the ones I’m familiar with, but it looks like there are a bunch more on steam.) If you know of any others, please let me know!