Lessie

Sharing is caring, so share the design!

Bundling all the responses here. Also, SORRY FOR THE LONG POST. Someone is bound to get mad at looking at this taking up their dashboard. Really sorry, people.

paperparachute:

I’m not a developer at all, but goodness. Someone. PLEASE, make a co-op puzzle horror game. That’s all I want. I love psychological horror, I just can’t do read/watch/play anything in the genre on my own for any long period of time. My imagination is too rich for that haha. I need another person there to keep me grounded, so I can focus on the screen, not on what’s lurking over my shoulder.
Now all I can think about is potential stories. You always get me excited about the horror genre haha.

I’m imagining a bottle-episode style game, where everything is localized in some kind of control room / wing of a facility, where you can observe the consequences of your actions through security footage or an observation deck. A game that lets you play God, but how can you make important choices when all of your options are the wrong ones and you’re sending people to their deaths? You could spend the first part of the game getting all of the controls back into working condition. The second part directing people/workers, maybe to secure or evacuate the facility, and then the very last part maybe getting yourself out?

Or a kind of child-like horror theme, where you’ve got a classic haunted house/mansion setting that you can’t escape from. And the protagonist is a child that needs to explore this dangerous/frightening environment in order to accomplish their goals. There would be lots of hiding places, ideally. Because I doubt that as a child you could use weapons effectively. It could be a multiplayer puzzle game, easily. I think it would be cute if it used a lot of childish reactions to horror in it’s game mechanics. Like the idea that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Maybe some kind of invisibility cloak/security blanket type of object that the kids can use as a shield? Or the notion that your stuffed animals come to life and protect you while you sleep?

Why do you tease me like this? haha. Now I’m getting myself over-excited, and none of this was helpful to you at all!

Both ideas are pretty amazing! In the right hands, any one of those could easily turn into a goldmine. My hands are definitely not the right ones, but I really wanted to work with these ideas. Think of the possibilities!

Also, how could it not be useful to me? Your ideas are incredibly good and the whole point of this all is to exercise our minds so we can hopefully learn enough to make something amazing!

ghribacki answered your question: Sharing is caring, so share the design!

COUNT ME IN FOR THE BEAT ‘EM UP

LET’S DO IT.

udknovice answered your question: Sharing is caring, so share the design!

I love the idea of manually breathing/blinking. Especially if you have to blink often and obstruct your view of whatever’s attacking.

Yes, that is one of the possible uses of such mechanic. Maybe add the idea of tear gas/smoke to that, forcing the player to spend time with their eyes closed while navigating the world?

wesleyeldridge:

Lessie2d links this article, which should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in game design. He/she (Sorry, your name is gender neutral) then shares with us some of their nuggets of design. Topics like this are a great jumping off point for mechanics discussion!

lessie2d:

[…]

I would be happy to provide insight, I’m not sure how useful it will be, but here goes.

A manual breathing and/or blinking system

I think the biggest challenge will be to make the mechanic compelling. As you describe it, I am imagining a “push to see good again” button that players may continuously mash as they play to avoid the visual impairment. If the mechanic is on a timing basis, be careful not to just make a quick time event out of it! Breath control is explored some in the Modern Warfare games, with a mechanic to hold your breath while sniping to steady your aim. This is an example of the mechanic being used in a compelling way.

I really like the concept of having to calm down your Avatar/NPC in a survival horror. Here is an idea I’ll throw in. Instead of a button press, consider using a microphone to monitor the player’s voice (xbox headset, DS microphone, etc.). The mechanic is the player must use calming language to talk down the in game avatar. A combination of voice recognition and voice stress analysis can determine how effective this is. Another use would be if the Avatar is being chased, and not moving fast enough, the player can yell at the Avatar and try to encourage them to run faster and increase their speed. The mechanic could be an abstraction of anything, You’re talking to the Avatar on the phone, You are trying to help other NPCs who are in the situation with you, etc. Obviously the technology behind something like this is beyond the scope of indie development, but I think it could make for an interesting experience.

A cooperative first person horror/puzzle game.

This could be very cool. The puzzle mechanic could revolve completely around the monsters. Freeze a monster to hold down a switch. Light a zombie on fire and lead it around to light torches. Having to use the players as bait to position the creatures could be pretty interesting. If the goal is not just to kill zombies/survive but to solve the puzzle, this could really have a LOT of potential, definitely worth some exploration! Zombies make sense thematically since they are mindless and easily manipulated, but dear god they are SOOOOOO played out.

A cooperative 3D beat ‘em up.

I love old school 2D beat ‘em ups like Turtles in Time, X-Men, Simpsons, etc. but they suffer from a complete lack of replayability. Once you have experienced the game, there is nothing new to explore. My biggest fear would be to repeat this flaw. I’m curious why you would not want RPG elements. It may not be ‘levels’, but wouldn’t the game benefit from some sort of character growth system at least from a replayability standpoint? Exploring skill trees creates that replayability, even if only artificially. Do you think randomly generated objectives will be enough on it’s own? If you don’t want character persistence, then perhaps a combination of the two systems? When you start a game with a friend, you start at level 1, and grow until the end, however once the game is over. you loose all of the growth you achieved? A game like League of Legends uses something like this to great effect.

Thanks again to Lessie2d for sharing her thoughts, I’ll have to type up my own list one of these days!

First of all, I appreciate the care you had with the noun. I know my name is quite gender neutral, and I’ve grown fond of it mostly because of that. I find that people often (not always) treat you differently depending on the labels that apply to you, so I struggle to prevent myself from being associated with a gender or a sexual identity while talking about stuff which my own identity should have no weight on. (does not matter to the subject being discused here)

A manual breathing and/or blinking system

While my ideas are far from perfect, what I had envisioned was something less of “push to see good again” and more of “push with the right timing to prevent negative effects”. It is subtle, but it makes a difference, like that example of the tear gas/smoke I used earlier: you cannot open your eyes, or else you’ll feel even more the effects of it, so holding down the button for blinking should keep your eyes closed until you think are safe from the hazard (you could use audio cues like your character breathing normally/not coughing.

Also, I absolutely loved your idea of using a different input system to work with this mechanic, but as you put it, it is a technology that is (at least for now) beyond the common indie developer’s reach (especially if you develop for PCs, like I do. Consoles should fare better at this).

A cooperative first person horror/puzzle game.

I loved your idea! People’s response to this theme has been wonderful, maybe we got something really promising here?

A cooperative 3D beat ‘em up.

Yes, while I did say “no RPG elements”, I suppose I could say I worded that out badly. What I meant to say was something more like “no permanent character development”, or maybe that the only advantage experienced players would have in this game would be their skill, with new players having access to the same movesets and those having the same efficiency as expert players’. The prospect of leveling while on a single run of the game (that being reset after the match is over) would naturally fit into this idea, as it has been seen on Grief Syndrome. I did not know League of Legends used such system.

But I wouldn’t fear for replayability. Just look at Contra, Streets of Rage, and other games that involved mindless shooting/punching while running through a level. They’ve got a high replayability rate, even though they offer nothing new on different runs. I will not pretend to know why that is, but I can say that I don’t worry for such subject while writing down my ideas here. User input would be what leads me towards a game people want to play over and over again anyway.

alittlegamesentiment:

Every few weeks I go through a phase where I try to write down an idea for a new game each day on a single page of a notepad. I might try writing them on here instead and at least then they might get some healthy criticism. Plus I’m pretty sure I’m not going to come up with something groundbreaking and have it stolen.

Please do. We are all looking forward to hearing more ideas!

Source: lessie2d