• Home
  • Professional Experience
    • Teacher
    • Programmer
    • Animator
    • Designer
  • Personal Experience
    • Creative
    • Press
    • Web Projects
  • Entrepreneural Experience
  • Discarded Ideas Blog

GAME IDEA

7/10/2014

0 Comments

 

Planet X

Picture
You are a lone researcher on an outpost planet. You are contacted by mission control to tell you that a rogue planet has entered your solar system and will collide with your planet. That’s the bad news, the worse news is that they can’t get a rescue ship to you in time.  Oh and it is going to continue to take out the moon orbiting the planet and several other planets in the system.

Your only hope of survival is to find a way of hopping from one celestial body to another staying one step ahead of Planet X.

Inspired by a short story by Italo Calvino, “The Distance of the Moon”  http://www.aleastory.co.uk/The-Distance-of-the-Moon.pdf


“This is how we did the job: in the boat we had a ladder: one of us held it, another climbed to the top, and a third, at the oars, rowed until we were right under the Moon; that’s why there had to be so many of us… from the top of the ladder, standing erect on the last rung, you could just touch the Moon if you held your arms up…. I would cling first with one hand, then with both, and immediately I would feel ladder and boat drifting away from below me, and the motion of the Moon would tear me from the Earth’s attraction. Yes, the Moon was so strong that she pulled you up; you realized this the moment you passed from one to the other: you had to swing up abruptly, with a kind of somersault, grabbing the scales, throwing your legs over your head, until your feet were on the Moon’s surface.”

The solar system that you are in is very compressed and and each planet has multiple moons with wildly elliptical orbits, which at times take them so close to their planets and each other that they are almost touching.  

So the game play is to build structures to be able to transfer from one body to another when they cross each other’s path.  Each Planet/Moon being a level with it own unique problems (i.e. different gravity, raw materials, distances to transverse, lack of oxygen, etc.)

0 Comments

GAME MECHANIC IDEA

7/8/2014

0 Comments

 

Immortal Combat

Picture
Fighting game where all contestants have a wolverine-like ability to heal. You would have to create a fighting system where the player models could be cut(deformed) and sliced(cut in pieces).  If a player's arm or leg is sliced or blown off, it starts growing back. You would need a system that adjusts the fighting moves dynamically based on the body condition, and a system to manage the body model. 

You could probably build the body in segments and create versions of each segment that animate the segment's growth.  The body would use a dynamic IK system to string together the pieces to form the whole.

You have to take the head to win, the theory being that if you sever the connection between the head and the heart, you break the ability to regenerate... that is why severed limbs don't grow into a copy of the original.

0 Comments

GAME IDEA

7/4/2014

0 Comments

 

Primitive Worlds

Picture
A scifi-based version of Minecraft with more of a story-oriented approach.

Background/Framing Device:
Man has developed wormhole technology that will allow him to instantly travel to any of the millions of planets orbiting distant stars. That's the good news, the bad news is that our home planet of Earth is in chaos. Suffering from centuries of overpopulation and the horrific effects of global warming, this new technology is initially seen as a solution. Millions of applicants signed up for the first colonial expeditions. Within six months of the first 10,000 colonists stepping foot on one of a handful of planets, they were all gone, along with the several billion invested to send them there. Between disease, starvation, and the violent threat from local alien life forms, it was quickly determined that a new approach would have to be taken. That is where you come in.

You play Twenytu, short for 94100422. You are a death row inmate from Canamexico, and you've been in a high security Ubermax Prison so long you don't recall your real name.

The deal is simple, you and a million other prisoners are getting out... way out.

Instead of putting 1,000 people on 10 planets, the new plan is to put 10 prisoners on 100,000 planets. It reduces the prison population, increases the chances of finding habitable resource-rich worlds, and risks nothing. (Psst... You are the nothing)

You are dropped on a randomly generated planet with 2 days of food, a pick, a shovel, an axe, and a 3D printer. The printer is the smallest one available to keep costs low, but it can print the parts for a larger version. Your initial job is to create a secure base camp and start gathering the raw materials. Your long term goals are to survive and gather enough raw materials to buy your way off this planet and return to Earth a free man





0 Comments

GAME IDEA

7/3/2014

0 Comments

 

Black Hole Salvage

Turn-based strategy game where players assume to role of mining ship captain.  


Instead of traveling the huge distance between planets, salvage teams park themselves on the outskirts of a black hole and mine planets, asteroids, clouds of gas for rich mineral deposits before they descend into the black hole.  


The player must balance time spent mining on a planet with fuel spent escaping the black hole when they leave. 


Fuel costs, mineral prices, mining equipment upgrades, cargo bay size, ship upgrades… all must be taken into account when you are mining the edge of oblivion.
0 Comments

BOARD GAME IDEA

6/20/2014

0 Comments

 

Playground Rules!

Picture
Old school board game idea. 

The board is a top-down drawing of a playground with a hex grid overlaid on it.  player tokens represent kids.

T
here are special areas on the board that create blocked sections so that it is not just an open playing field. 

The board is essentially an open slate and you provide rules for a dozen different schoolyard games that could be played on the board. 

Everything from Tag and Dodgeball to Zombie outbreak, with players rolling dice and either pursuing or evading other players. 

Rainy day fun!

0 Comments

PRODUCT IDEA

6/18/2014

0 Comments

 

Machinema 2.0

Picture
All the game engines are going to a monthly subscription model. It was $300,000 to license the Unreal Engine in 1999 when we were looking at it for Jumpgate, today it is $19.99/month. The barrier to entry is so much lower now.

Even so, making a game is expensive, time consuming, and risky… so you don’t want to do that.

… but if you made a machinima building platform, you could go to all the studios and gamemakers and say, drop all your game assets in this software that is built on the same platform as your games and develop scripted/interactive content based on your existing IP.  It’s another revenue stream for them without have to start over.

The interface would look like flash/aftereffects and would control object tweening and animations, sound cues, camera and lighting keyframing.

Then on top of that, you build the netflix for machinima. real-time rendered & streaming content based on the exact assets of the game. Perfect for Hollywood movie game properties.

0 Comments

GAME IDEA

6/10/2014

0 Comments

 

Asteroid Command

Picture
The scientists of Earth have been tracking Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and discovered two, larger than the ones that killed the dinosaurs, that will cross Earth's path.  Initially there was no concern because they were not on a collision course with Earth, but it has been discovered that they will collide with each other.  The specific outcome of this collision is unknown, but it will likely create a cloud of thousands of smaller asteroids with trajectories on a collision course with Earth.

Asteroid Command has been set up through an international consortium in a race to save the human race...

They will not be able to destroy them all, people will die, cities will be wiped out... Can man escape the fate of the dinosaurs?

gameplay
A real-time strategy and arcade game paying homage to the classic coin op Missile Command, the player needs to identify and destroy or deflect any object large enough to create mass destruction.  They will have a series of tools at their disposal, some of which (in development) will not come online until well into the game...
--------------------------
Written intro... Then the game begins with the two asteroids impacting (the outcome different every time you play the game).

The first phase is analysis.  The computers identify all the pieces on a crash course for earth or the moon.  The list is filtered for only those large enough to take out small cities.

The second phase is planning, which resources to allot to which types of response.  Also, resources must be allocated for civil defense (evacuation, sheltering in place, providing emergency infrastructure).  This is a cost-effective mitigation measure for saving lives from the smallest NEO impact events and is a necessary part of mitigation for larger events. This phase plays like a resource management sim.

The third phase is action, target and launch missiles with the goal of destroying or altering the course of the asteroid.  This phase plays like a space flight sim.

The final phase is final contact.  Part of the defense is to launch laser satellites at key points in geosynchronous orbit over major continents to take out any remaining threats. This would be played arcade style shooting asteroids on their approach, as satellites become available with the rotation of the earth. Any missed asteroids would spawn animation of destruction and estimated body counts.

Playtime would be roughly an hour. 5 mins for analysis, 10 mins for planning, 30 mins for action, and 15 mins for final contact.


0 Comments

Play A Game, Tell Your Fortune

3/29/2011

0 Comments

 
Evil thought of the day .

BACKGROUND: The classic psychic/tarot con works by divining small bits of information through questions or educated guesses and giving vague advice/predictions and letting the sucker fill in the blanks...

THE IDEA:  You could totally do the facebook version because you have access to so much information... i.e. a seemingly simple game, concentration, but the card that they flip are tarot cards... when they make a match, the card flies into a tarot-esque pattern...

When the game is over, it 'analyzes the deal' and gives you a fortune, something like, it checks the friend you most interact with and says "Today you will have thoughts about whether 'Chris Cullop' has been completely truthful with you" or someone you have not checked in with "'Ben Davis' might have some good news for you... you should contact him in the next 72 hours"

Then somewhere in there you start asking for money orders made out to 'cash'.  Only .000001% of the people would give you money, but there are 500 million people on facebook... :0)
0 Comments

    Author

    Hello.  I'm a creative sort of a fellow, and I'm always coming up with ideas.  I have notebooks filled with them.  I'll be posting them here from time to time.  If you like one and wish to adopt it, feel free.

    Archives

    July 2014
    June 2014
    February 2013
    November 2012
    April 2012
    May 2011
    March 2011
    January 2011
    October 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010

    Categories

    All
    3D Printing
    Art
    Book
    Con
    Facebook
    Food
    Game
    Hygene
    Jobs
    Phone
    Programming
    Software
    Tv Show
    Unemployment
    Work

    RSS Feed