Here’s a random idea for a fun topic I just thought of. Ever had a great idea for a video game, but lack the skills, time or motivation to actually make it? Then do we have the topic for you! The aim of the topic is to just give people a space to post their random ideas for video games for other people to comment on. It can be anything from a concept of a game to an idea for a mechanic of a level for the next Banjo Kazooie. Who knows, maybe someone from Nintendo is reading this topic right now.
For me, I just want more board/party games on Steam. Stuff like Fortune Street and Dokapon Kingdom on the Wii that I can play with my friends online. That should would be mad fun.
One idea I’ve always had for a 2D Zelda was to split it into an overworld and underworld. The overworld would be pretty typical, filled with the entrances to Dungeons you’d expect, but all the entrances are just different access points to a grand underworld that spans the entire map, more comparable to something from a Metroid game than Zelda’s separated dungeons. They’d still play out a bit like dungeons, with each region having its own theme, but they’d all be connected, and as you gain different abilities you’ll be able to access more of the underworld.
Most of my ideas so far are based on pre-existing IP, but I’ll be back later with a more original concept!
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Oh god, doing a big Dokapon Kingdom playthrough with a forum community would be amazing. It really is a shame it and more games like it are not on steam.
I want to do a Magical Girl RPG and I have a couple of ideas for VNs I want to try. The VNs seem more possible because things like Tyranosoft is pretty useable from what I can tell. I picked up RPG maker at the Steam Summer Sale, but haven’t had enough time to sit down and see if it is something I can “use”. I don’t really have any experience in that field, but even if it ends up being smaller in scale than it currently sits in my head I feel compelled to at least try and make something.
I also really want to have/make a game with cards and card like abilities like Love Live but without such an emphasis on micro-transactions. I don’t like to complain about it because I respect they need to keep money coming in to keep up on the game events and maintenance but I just want all the random card action with one set price.
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I’ve been making VNs with Ren’py for around a year now (I used the Novelty engine before) and I think having a dev thread or a Ren’py thread would be a cool idea. I personally have extensive programming experience, so I’m encouraged to modify the engine to achieve specific mechanics in my games, but the documentation for “what actually is happening” in Ren’py is nearly nonexistent. I actually have to read the GitHub code to find out how the engine actually works. It’s a very inefficient process since nobody really documents this kind of information.
A place where VN devs can talk (since this is a VN fan forum and people seem interested in making games) would be cool so we could share information about the engine and give advice and stuff.
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Yeah, I think that’s a really great idea! Do you mind if I make such a thread? I’m an amateur Visual Novelist too (my avatar is a character from the game I’m working on,) and I think something like that would be super helpful! Ren’Py’s basics are super easy to grasp, but it’s actually surprisingly difficult to do anything beyond the basics. Even minimalist effects had me googling constantly.
A long time ago, I used to tinker around with Adventure Game Studio a lot. It’s a super easy to use program, and a lot of fun to mess around with, but I don’t know how good it’d be for Visual Novels. The AGS forums used to have a communal game series, too- They had a collection of art and sound assets that were free for anyone to use, and people would use them to make games that all took place within the same canon and continuity. It was a lot of fun, and I think that it would be cool to do something like that with the game boards- Although, that might be too large of an undertaking.
EDIT: Okay, so the AGS game series is called Reality-On-The-Norm, and is apparently still active! (Which is shocking, because I played these games ages ago!)
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Go for it! I think a Ren’py development thread would be a good idea. I think it’s ‘different enough’ from this current thread.
EDIT: Regarding the communal assets, LemmaSoft forums have those, but there’s still plenty for us to talk about.
I dreamt last night of a vr five night’s at freddys thing. Unlike any game I’ve ever ‘played’. It was weird and had a ton of detail to it, and I remember it so clearly I really wish I had the skills to make it. I know vr games of the series are a thing, but this one was different.
Here’s a concept I just came up with, heavily inspired by stuff like the fragments and games like Undertale. I guess it could serve as an interesting narrative experiment.
The idea is that, at first, the game plays out like a completely linear visual novel, ala 07th Expansion’s works. It has a beginning, middle and end. But once you finish it, you unlock a New Game +, where you as the player gain control of an avatar that enters the story, and you’re granted the freedom to change events in the story as you please. There could be a whole heap of different routes the story can take and multiple endings. For example, maybe you weren’t happy with the ending originally, so you want to try to change things to make for a better ending. But what will probably end up happening is you fuck everything up and make a much worse ending. I’d like to play a game that confronts me in this way.
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That could be very interesting. I like the idea of having progressively more fucked up and depressing endings (because I like those for some reason).
When you say an “avatar,” though, do you mean like an RPG where you walk around and do stuff, or you simply enter as a character that can interact with the story and change certain things through, maybe, text choices? Either way would be cool, I’m just trying to get a better idea of what you had in mind.
I don’t have a definite answer to that. It could be either.
EDIT: I just thought of a really good idea while rambling on Twitter.
What if you had an RPG where the final boss was literally unbeatable? You wouldn’t know as you’re playing, but it has unlimited HP, and will never die no matter how long you fight it. As much as you strive for a ‘good ending’, or even an ending at all, the more you’ll be lead toward despair. It’s like the idea of fighting a god at the end of a JRPG. Normally, you wouldn’t be able to defeat a god. In this case, the god is an allegory for the inevitability of death. No matter what you do, it will win eventually. That and it’s just amusing how it would fuck with players.
Then I got thinking of how I can expand this to an actual game concept, and I remembered Majora’s Mask. Like that, you could design this game around a time limit. After 3 days, the god of destruction will descend upon the world and destroy you and everyone else. The game might even give the illusion that if you collect the seven mcguffins, you’ll gain the power to defeat the final boss. But in the end, it’s nothing more than an illusion, a false hope the humans come up with to cope with the situation.
From there, it’s only once the player accepts the inevitability of destruction that they can begin to seek out their own fulfilment from the game. Fill the world with interesting characters, each with their own story to tell, and give the player that playground. Again, think Majora’s Mask. The game wouldn’t have an ending, but it would be full of things to do, stories you can influence and change.
I guess it sorta ties into my other idea, but I think something like this could be really interesting as a video game narrative. Rather, it’s the kind of narrative that only a video game can accomplish.
The video game “80 Days” does something like this. It plays around with the supposition that the player is always able to exert control over the events of the game. There are several dozen NPCs with their own lives, and you are frequently led on to believe that your choices will “give them happy endings.” But that’s a harmful perception to hold. You are not a big fuckin’ hero. You are just a person. You do not have complete agency over this world and its people. Some of the game’s challenges are not meant to be solved. At least, not by you.
This is a really great talk on the matter by one of the game’s authors that goes into this idea even deeper. It might be a useful reference point!
(This talk is a feminist take on the topic of fairness in video games — it’s a fascinating discussion imo. Specifically when we consider this a commentary on meritocracy in videogames: namely that “all games should be beatable if you’re good enough.”
Meritocracy in the real world is usually a straight, white male ideology. If you work hard enough at something, you will succeed. But for other races and genders, this is simply not a reality. The game purposefully frames its challenges as “those you can fix” but the deck is always stacked against you. It’s a clever commentary imo.)
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Right? Games are predominantly meritocratic, because that’s what people want when they play a game. A game that isn’t meritocratic is usually criticised as a bad game at best, practically blasphemy to the genre. But I feel like the market calls for games like that, which challenge our perceptions of what a game should be.
In all seriousness, could you post some citations please (for both the race and the gender thing)? On matters like these the only thing I see people bring up is the resume study, which I can try to counter if you want me to.
Also I feel that the idea of a game you can’t beat is already a concept that has been explored a lot (games where you have to survive as long as you can against endless waves of enemies are reasonably common), they’re just never expanded on in the narrative too much. The main problem with the idea is that most stories need to have a climax, and if the whole “unbeatable final boss” thing was ever done it would either clash with all the themes of the narrative up to that point, or be incredibly obvious that it’s coming and not really be a twist.
Sure it might be surprising in a meta way, but if the player enjoys the gameplay enough, then this final struggle against god could become very engaging for them. It’s likely a whole community would spring up based on surviving against him for as long as possible. Which would then clash with the whole trying to make the player feel despair thing. And you can’t make the point of the moment be how the player is enjoying the battle, because people who care about story and these kinds of moments in games would be alienated too. It’s a really hard sell, almost an impossible one.
“all games should be beatable if you’re good enough” aren’t they? Even if a game has literally no end point, people will come up with self defined challenges. Even if a game has incredibly strict RNG checks in your way, the determined will do it.
Like. People play games. To master systems. That is what people like about gameplay. The human brain is wired to enjoy unpredictable outcomes, along with us becoming more able to succeed more often. This is, the literal primary appeal of video games rather than other art forms. To me 80 days just sounds like a poor man’s FTL strapped to a story about lapping the world.
Think about a game like Spacechem. This is the No. 1 example of where a game’s gameplay gets in the way of it’s story. That game has a pretty decent plot. The amount of people who have seen the end of that plot is so absurdly low I don’t even holy shit.Graph Ignore the yellow bars (they’re optional levels), keep in mind that you need to beat the previous level to reach the next one, each bars displays % of people who beat the level after reaching it and only look at the core campaign section. It got SO bad that a year after release the dev just text dumped the whole of the plot on his website so people could read to the end if they dropped the game.
If you want the No. 1 example of a game where it’s story gets in the way of it’s gameplay then just think Half Life 2! Oh god that game. Just stand here for ten minutes Gordan while we talk about stuff. BTW! nooooo skip button!
Like, aside from meta stuff, I can’t think of a single story thing that can be accomplished in a video game that can’t be done in another art form (like visual novels).
BTW if you do reply to me on the political thing at the top, maybe make it a new thread or whatever. Otherwise Asp might kill us.
If I may offer another couple of games where gameplay really detracted from the story were the original Wind Waker game and Alpha Sapphire, and the mechanic of gameplay that held both of them back were the same thing: sailing/surfing. Wind Waker is my favorite console-only Zelda game, but you can’t deny that in the old version, the sailing was such a chore (as was a certain infamous REQUIRED endgame quest). It took me years to finish the game because once I got to that part, the gameplay was extremely tedious and doing that for so many hours is a toll on the player’s interest, and you WANT players to get to the end of a game so they can appreciate it. (Luckily, the remake for the WiiU made that quest easier and I’m just slacking off in the game to explore the world more since the sailing mechanic is fun now and the figure gallery is easier to do now.) Anyway, one review for Alpha Sapphire said “too much water” and that became a meme, but honestly, it’s a valid criticism? You don’t get the ability to Fly until late in the game and you Surf so much in both the main game and Delta Episode (plus any other post game stuff). In fact, it bores me so much that I haven’t really played Omega Ruby much in spite of being off to a better start because I dread the Surfing. (I do hope for Sun and Moon, Surfing is reduced, Hawaiians don’t take boats between islands anymore!)
And in the past, there have been games where very few, if any, players have beaten extremely difficult old school games. Think of them as Mario the Lost Levels as their easiest level and all the difficulties in the world plus a few more to spite the player as the advancement of levels.
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I actually don’t mind the surfing in the Pokemon games, except for one thing: I hate those parts where you can only go in one direction because the current pushes you or something. So you have to go around a million times to get where you want to go…that, or have a walkthrough map.
I haven’t played Wind Waker since I was a kid, I think I last played it in 2007? Maybe? But I feel that the boat stuff wasn’t too bad. There was stuff to do while sailing, like dodging barrels and stuff, so it wasn’t all entirely mindless. And it was low risk enough that it felt kind of carefree, and the music made it feel really adventurous.
I know I’d hate it now, but I hate most Zelda games now, so I doubt I’d find anything of value in Wind Waker. Still I think they succeeded in what they set out to do, make seamless transition between islands, that had stuff going on but wasn’t too stressful, and I think they pulled it off.
I honestly dislike Surf as it was in Hoenn because I’m always hit with the RNG and it’s tedious to me (and even with my hilariously overleveled Sceptile, I do not have enough money to buy a bunch of Repels just to get to that damn island several routes away, running away doesn’t always work, and even my Sceptile has his limits on how often he can use moves). If other people liked it, that’s fine, but the constant Surfing is something I’ve and a good lot of other people on the internet were put off by. The Delta Episode was great, don’t get me wrong, but Surfing definitely hampered my enjoyment.
And the same probably goes for Wind Waker, too. It’s my favorite console-only Zelda game, I love the story and how the new Link becomes his own kind of hero and the characters (I have the biggest soft spot for Makar). But even though I played the remake and went through the dungeons up to the Triumph Forks quest part solely on memory, I’m glad that the remake made it a lot easier to sail (and that there’s actually now at least one thing to do in each sector besides fill the map out and the moonlit ship). Because the thing that most people remember IS the Triumph Forks quest rather than the story itself. It was definitely a revolutionary game (and I personally think the cartoonish thing makes it easier and less dark for no reason in spite of the story being pretty dark).