The Game Idea Thread

[EdLoen]

How about a game were you play as a butt?

An Assy McGee game perchance?

[evenwolf]

How about a game were you play as a butt?

A butt that has to find a new body.... I like it.   

Definitely lots of fart jokes.  But I think the idea would be better if the ass was a snob and doesn't care for the lowlife asses he has to see everyday.    So he seeks a better life off in a new town... hopefully on a new body.   And he looks down on other asses when they act immaturely.

Typical lines of dialogue: 

"Surely I can find a better specimen than THAT."

"Oh I must reeally get out of this dump."

"You don't think me the kind of ass that ACTS like one, do you?"

"Now THERE's someone I can follow around all day."

[Nagania]

i tried making a game idea thread in a different forum once and people just thought i was an idiot and was trying to steal their ideas!

guess AGS forums are much more friendly! 

[Oddysseus]

I was surprised to see this thread rise from the grave, and also to see how high the bar has now been set.
I don't know how I can compete with "You're a butt trying to find a new body," but I'll give it a try.

These are some ideas for one-room games I came up with after getting burned out on my first (unfeasibly huge) unfinished project:

"Robo, Your Post-Apocalyptic Pal"

You play as a robot designed to help humans with their daily routines: feed them, clean up after them, etc.  Except your humans got killed in a nuclear blast.  Being a robot, you don't really mind, and continue to feed canned food to their well-polished skeletons.  Gameplay would consist of you doing various menial chores like opening canned food (without a can opener! difficulties abound!), re-glueing the skeletons of your deceased masters, and defusing old bombs that litter your otherwise charming kitchen.
The game ends with you taking your owner's remains for a walk (in a little red wagon), revealing that your house is the only remnant of civilization in a charred, dead landscape.
(if the idea sounds familiar to you, that's probably because it's basically stolen from a sci-fi short story I read back in seventh grade... I think it was by Heinlein.  As they say, good artists borrow, great artists steal etc. etc.)


"The Great Cape Catastrophe"

You're a sidekick to a generic city-dwelling superhero (I'm thinkin... the Land Shark?  the Puncher?  the Masked Marmoset?) anyway, you're back in action after almost being blown to bits by Smithereen, AKA the Mad Bomber.  Your fearless leader doesn't think you're prepared to go back yet, but you aim to prove him wrong.  The problem?  Your only supersuit has like 39 bullet holes and knife wounds in it.  You've got to make another suit from random crap in your apartment in time to hit the midnight patrol, or he's gonna team up with someone else (probably that super slut from the Teen Morality Brigade!)  Do you have the courage, the ingenuity, and the sewing skills necessary to complete your task?  Probably not.


"Man's Best Friend"

This one's a little bizarre and creepy, but maybe someone besides me will find it amusing.  You play as the loyal pet dog of a very depressed young man.  In fact, he's so bummed that he's decided to commit suicide.  You must do everything in your power to cheer him up, or you'll never get another bowl of that wet food you like (oh, and your friend will be dead, too).  So, chew up his suicide note, play tug-of-war with his noose, turn on the tv, or just fall on your back and act cute - anything to get your owner's mind off of the crushing pit of soulless drudgery that his life has become.

Okay, internet - your turn.
Give me your best shot!

[MRollins]

Ouija
This game begins with a short cut scene in which your character finds a dusty Ouija board in the attic or an old house or whatever.  Gameplay works using a simple text-parsing system.  The player would type questions into the parser - such questions as (what is your name?, etc - and the game (spirit) would answer some, and also refuse to answer others.  It would be up to the player to ask the right questions in order to move the game further, and at regular points into the game playable flashback scenes would occur where you would learn more about the nature of how the spirit died.  Needless to say it would be horriffic and scary.

These flashback scenes would take the form of a more traditional point-and-click with a puzzle or two and some gory imagery, then once that part of the story has been told gameplay would revert to the text-parser system for more interrogation of the spirit and the questions would become more specific.

I never really got round to writing a story for it, but I've had several ideas, and if one or two people on here fancy taking on the artistic and tecnical duties I would be happy to take the role of writer...

What d'ya think peeps?  Should I put a request in the recruit a team section?

I think this a great idea nad I'd love to work on it if you need a scripter...

[Akatosh]

How about a game were you play as a butt?

Been there, done that. 

[darrkchylde]

yea, wel how bout a game where you play as a terorist trying to attak somethin

[Akatosh]

Better suggestion, but still nuh-uh. 

[The Meek Geek]

8)  AWESOME IDEAS ALERT!!!  8)


Idea #1: A point and click Adventure style, Magic the Gathering/Age of Empires/Risk/Starcraft/etc...Science Fiction or Fantasy Turn based strategy game. You can pick your own nation/empire/alien race. Single or Multi-player (you could take turns with friends at the computer). You can build your own castles/space stations and fight battles. Your goal: Conquer!

Idea #2: A bizarre Game Show set in a Dystopian Future, similar to The Running Man and movies like that, you could go through a Obstacle Course of Doom and/or answer real Trivia Questions where you will be given a great prize or if you lose, you fall in a deadly trapdoor. Or something like that.

[blueskirt]

Squidi posted 2 adventures gameplay ideas on his Three Hundred website this week. Here they are:

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=87
http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=89

In case you don't know what Squidi's Three Hundred project is, the project's premise was to post 300 unique gameplay mechanics in 300 days, and while it failed after 50 days, Squidi still updates his website from time to time with new gameplay mechanics.

[Za_Uvek]

I love all the remakes that are coming out these days of all the lucas and sierra games, Kings quest, police quest, QFG, Manic Mans! How about some of the one not as popular, like Codename: iceman or conquest for camalot. But i think one of the best would be manhunter all VGA'd up.
OOOOOOOoooooooo, and someone should give the old monkey islands a crack, do up 1 and 2. That would be sick mate! hehe.

[zabnat]

Well Za_Uvek, you are welcome to make a remake of those games
Nobody dares to touch the monkey islands, because firstly they are tabu (the remake need to be nearly perfect or it will be said "you ruined it you bastard") and secondly they already have beautiful vga graphics, so why remake?

[radiowaves]

I recently got an awesome game idea.

There is a boy who had a donut. Then the evil monster came and stole his donut. You have to get your donut back.

[Za_Uvek]

Well Za_Uvek, you are welcome to make a remake of those games
Nobody dares to touch the monkey islands, because firstly they are tabu (the remake need to be nearly perfect or it will be said "you ruined it you bastard") and secondly they already have beautiful vga graphics, so why remake?

Hey!! Its an idea!! I know thoughs games are average and thats why someone should remake em. Unlike Monkey Island, you could bend the game to your will and no one would care. Thats why they would be great to ramp up. 

As for Monkey Isl, I would not agree with "beautiful" VGA graphics, I always thought they could have looked better, even for VGA. But yeah I see where your coming from when its tabu, Monley Isl is a bit too great for anyone to even make a single stuff up. Thats like IA doing SQ2, I cant wait but if they stuff it grrrrrrrrrrr  . (Only cause SQ2 was like the first adventure game I ever played).

I do have another idea though. I think the book "Assassins Apprentice"  :o from the Farseer Trilogy would make a great adven game. Theres not exactly enough action to make it with a modern day engine, and there are plenty of ways you can incorporate the story into a adven game.

[olafmoriarty]

One idea I think would be pretty exciting for an adventure game, would be to make a game where you don't have a primary objective. You do, however, have a bunch of optional side quests. In that way, the game wouldn't be so much about moving from start to end as it would be about exploring the game world.

For instance: You are trapped somewhere -- let's use the old cliché of a desert island, even though the idea could work perfectly with other scenarios as well. Fortunately you have a radio transmitter, so you manage to call for help, and you're told that a boat will arrive to pick you up in, say, six hours (much less if it's a small game, maybe more if it's a huge game). Now, that is six hours real-time -- not that you have to sit and play six hours in a row, the in-game time will pause when you're not playing.

You *know* that the game will end in six hours, whether you accomplish anything in that time or not, so you might as well spend the time exploring, right? Now, the island could contain tons of puzzles and minigames, all of which add up to the total score, but there's nothing you actually HAVE to accomplish in your time on the island (if the game is very huge and the total playtime is closer to ten or twelve or twenty hours, you may give the mandatory mission of finding food and water, though I suggest that this should be very easy and that there are several ways of doing so). With a cleverly designed game, you have so many options and possibilities that most players probably won't get to them all in their first sit, so which puzzles to solve and which to ignore is completely up to the player. Maybe there's a cave nearby where you find some strange cave paintings you want to decipher? Maybe you need to figure out how to climb a palm, to get coconuts or get an overview of the island or whatever? Maybe one of your fellow castaways has deep emotional problems and you want to help them figure things out? Maybe you have a crush on another castaway? Maybe there's a fallen tree blocking the road to the other side of the island? Maybe you want to find a way to kill a passing seagull for its meat? There are tons of available options here, but NONE of them are mandatory. Whatever the player chooses to do has nothing to do with getting any closer to the ending (which can be done by sitting idle on the beach in six hours); everything they do, they do to get familiar with the environment on the island. Optionally, you add a cutscene after leaving the island where having a high score pays off. For instance, you go straight from the island to a job interview where your "high survival skills" can help you score the job.

(This is possibly done before.)

[blueskirt]

And Squidi strike again with yet another adventure game gameplay idea:

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=90

[Ultra Magnus]

I had an idea. Not sure how original it is, but anyway...

Player character plays an adventure game where people are locked in a hotel and start dying one by one (the standard).
They then go on holiday and soon discover that the events of the game are actually happening to them, so they know what's going to happen where, when and to whom and are just running around trying to stop it.
Like whoever is doing it to them made the game as a kind of blueprint for their ideas.

Now I think about it a bit more, maybe it's been a few years since the character played the game, so they've forgotten most of the details.
This could be where the puzzles come in - they have to figure out and/or remember what's going to happen in time to prevent it.
Kinda like that Squidi mechanic blueskirt posted a while back, actually.

I'm not sure how suited to a game this might be.
Maybe it'd be better as a short story or film, but there you have it.

[olafmoriarty]

Here's a couple of game ideas I have been fiddling with, but which are pretty abandoned by now. (But if you want to pick them up, I'd be happy to help out with script, dialogue and coding!)



You wake up in a distant location, not remembering anything about how you got there. You have to find your way home and maybe solve a big mystery on the way. Oh, and by the way, you are blind. When you start out the game, everything in the game is black except for the outline of the player character. You have to walk around and feel things, talk to people and listen to sounds to make walls and objects visible -- you have an exceptional memory, so once you collide in a wall you will always remember that there is a wall there, thus it will be drawn onto your screen (though you don't see its colour, unless an NPC actually tells you what it is). Some parts of the game would require sound to solve (e.g. listen for a signal to know when you can cross the road).



You have tons of business ideas and want to get rich. However, you live in the Stone age. You and the rest of your tribe have enough to eat as long as you only eat grass, but people want something better. Climb the Maslow pyramid as you invent new items, discover and evolve concepts and use these to find new resources. When you start the game you have access to unlimited sticks and stones and a few other items, but you must use your mind to combine these things and find that stick + stick = fire, stick + rock + vine = axe, long stick + vine + a berry = fishing pole or log + more logs + the concept of a roof protecting you from rainstorms (which you get from examining the cave) = house. Find ways of getting what people want, and you can get them to work for you. Go on like this until you've found every invention possible and used them to create a better world for the people ... and a huge stack of cash for yourself.



You are a little Kansas girl whose house is sucked away by a tornado, and you wind up in a distant country called Oz. You have to find a mysterious wizard to ... wait, you know that story. The idea is: Make a game based on Frank L. Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" -- the copyrights are expired, and I think it makes a wicked adventure game plot. The Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion would become playable characters the moment they joined your team. In MY incarnation, the game would be faithful to the original book -- that plot is very much better than the movie's, I think. Some of the chapters make excellent minigames, for instance the scene where Tin Woodman has to kill forty wolves.



That's what I have now ... And I have no time whatsoever to actually make games out of them. At least not alone ... So if anyone can use them, be my guest.

[blueskirt]

Since I see the "stranded on a desert island" or "stone age" idea pretty often, some of you will probably be happy to know that this idea has already been done in a much better way than a traditionnal point and click adventure game. Simply download Stranded 2 from this site:

http://www.stranded.unrealsoftware.de/

[darrkchylde]

you play as a guys shadow and the guy gets murdred so you haveto find the killr by slidin under doors and avoiding lamps.