I have a few really cool ideas, but all are a bit experimental and not fleshed out. I kind of wanted to do something simple and well-tread, with maybe a twist, as I haven’t really been making games in a long time. But I don’t have any simple, well-tread ideas that I care to put any time into. So awkward and experimental it is, if the mini-ld 28 is to be at all.

First idea – a “troop movement” game. In this game, you command a small squad of units, who are trying to achieve some objective. Your only controls are to change their formation, and choose when they halt or advance. I imagine the structure of the game to be similar to a scrolling shooter, but the gameplay is a bit simulation-ish, since you don’t actually control the units.

Example: you are in wide formation marching through a field. A few enemy units pop up but they are quickly taken down. A tank rolls across the top of the screen, taking out the top half of your units. Should have switched to a compressed formation! Your units would be sort of like health and firepower combined, and throughout the level you would have opportunities to call in various reinforcements. There will be terrain elements such as trenches or towers that have some advantage when they are used.

Second idea – war prevention god game. Two civilizations are being built in close proximity to each other. They get angry at each other at the slightest provocation. If one city makes fire before the other one, the raw meat eaters are likely to try and take out the guys with fire – with a bad outcome.As the game progresses, the cities get larger, so it takes more work to take them out, but they also get stronger weapons, making them more destructive.

You play a god who wants to try and keep both civilizations alive for a certain amount of time. You have certain powers, like raising mountains (to slow army attacks), raining down food when they are hungry so they forget about fighting, or raining down destruction to keep a potentially more bloodthirsty civilization from gaining too much of an upper hand. You have to temper your use of power though. If you rain down food on one city, they may worship you, but the other city will grow jealous, and all of a sudden the two nations are at war over you.

Hmph. The formation shooter will be easier to make, but hard to make well I think. The sim game will be hard to do everything I want to do in a short amount of time, as well as being even more experimental and difficult to determine if the gameplay even works. I am leaning toward the god game, but worried that like most of the sims I have made in the past, it will feel like you pretty much just watch stuff happen and there is not much gameplay.

Anyone have any advice?

On the technical side I’m torn between trying something new like flash, or sticking with my trusty python+pygame. Overall I expect more trouble with the game design than with any technical problems.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2011 at 11:38 pm and is filed under MiniLD #28. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.