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[Mothra]

I'M TRAPPED UNDER A THOUSAND FEET OF WATER

[James Edward Smith]

So there is a persistent game world, but you can only move around in it by moving in the real world?

Correct, but not if in play testing this proves to be annoying. Although, the idea is that the game will be such that you could play it in just one area and never move and the game would still be fun (Like Dwarf Fortress) but moving around and having terrain be related real world terrain would be a nice novelty.

[jsnlxndrlv]

Thinking about the Mayor's battle/character advancement system, when I realized: at some point, I'd like to see an RPG where the only way to improve your character's stats is by choosing certain dialogue options when talking with NPCs.  Kind of like what Torment did, except minus any sort of equipping or leveling-up.  If you can talk the talk, then your character will walk the walk, etc.

[Koah]

Tangentially inspired by the sub-conversation in the comics thread: Some sort of small-scale Dynasty Warriors (one-on-twelve or thereabouts, we'll say)/third-person moderately non-linear beat-em-up based on a very loose interpretation of Megatokyo, by which I mean "render everything in it down to its most basic element, strip out all the dating sim trappings and turn it into some sort of bastard lovechild of Suda51 and Itagaki."  So from what I remember about the comic it'll basically be about two guys who end up in Japan and need to fight off zombies, highly visible ninja, Japanese secessionist military forces et alumni, using off-brand anime weapons bought from cosplay shops.  Including Guts' massive fucking zweihander, because there's not a game that can't be improved by adding a sword that requires you to use the word "splatter" to describe what happens to people when you hit them with it.

I never said it was a good idea.

[James Edward Smith]

Listening to a podcast of Retronauts, I heard Parish and the Shark musing about how they really should have made a quick-draw centric gunslinger cowboy game for the Wii by now and that it would have been a lot better than Link Has a Crossbow.

This reminded me of how before the Wii ever rose out of the ashes of the gamecube I wanted to make an iaido* game. In my head it would be an arcade game that you would play on a fairly large mat or playing area with a screen on all four sides of you. On every screen would be a dipiction of of your avatar who would come under attack by assailants. You would have a sword controller in your hand that was maybe just a sword hilt with no "blade" on it so that you didn't hit anything in real life and you would have to slash around to defeat your attackers. Because you were actually monitoring the action on the screens in 3rd person, you would beable to exercise the sort of sixth sense people like Musashi probably actually had and there for react to multiple attackers coming at you from all sides in a fairly badassed manner.

The encounters or stages, would be based on the actual iaido katas that iaido practicioners do for gradings. So if you know any iaido, you could actually attempt the levels by performing the real katas only you'd get to see these virtual ronin getting dispatched by your attacks rather than just imagining opponents and what they might be doing. But if you don't know any iaido, it doesn't matter, just react and try to survive. Your performance on each level would be measured on how quickly you killed all your attackers and how hurt you yourself got in doing so. With this in mind, it could be quite possible to get higherscores by coming up with your own techniques that actually kill everyone faster.

I'd have lots of other levels after the main kata based on other less well known katas from less mainstream schools perhaps and other sources, and of course crazy made up ones where you are attacked by giant toad summoning ninja and such of course.

Then the Wii came out and I thought "Hey, you don't need some big arcade set up that only a handfull of big arcades and theme parks would ever bother buying and installing. You could make something like this for everyone and their grandmother to play thanks to the Wii!"

Then I played Red Steel and blocked out this entire idea from my head.

But now with the release of the wiimote upgrade and the glowing reviews I've seen of the sword fighting Mii game that comes with it, I'm thinking something like this might actually be possible again. The Retronauts Clint Eastwood simulator inspired me further into thinking that maybe this could be made even broader and cooler by making it less Japanese swordsmanship edutainment (not that I wanted it to be too heavily that anyway) and more of a crazy anime styled fap fest by making the game about either a samurai and a gunslinger or one character who is both at the same time controlling his sword with one side of the nunchuk and his peacemaker with the wiimote.

It could all be one game where you could use a sword, a six-shooter or hell, maybe even a whip to try and survive ambush after ambush. I'd call it something like Kenjuro the Wanderer, A Stranger Came to Town, Momment of Truth, Life's Edge, Time to Die, Faster than Death, or my favourite; Die Like the Rest.

* samurai sword techniques were the openning move is an attack straight from the scabbard and then the final motion is to return the sword to it

[Kazz]

the civilization games are very good, but i think that managing so many units in the late game is very cumbersome.  i feel like military actions should be abstracted.

[sei]

I've managed more units in RTS games and it's been less cumbersome.  Unit grouping would be a part of it, but I found military procedure in Civ 4 somewhat agonizing in general.

[Koah]

Some sort of action game set in a major city twenty minutes into the future, wherein you play as a psychic and must do some heroic thing or another; overthrow a corrupt government or corporation or invading army or something like that.  Mostly it would be you in urban settings versus soldiers, tanks, small-scale powered-armor, helicopters, et cetera.  This part needs more work; the next doesn't (comparatively).

There'd be branching skill trees with several different abilities and modifications to said abilities that you could pick and choose from depending on how you wanted to play.  For instance, you could put a few points in the Telekinetics tree and start pitching around barrels to knock people out, then upgrade it and start throwing around cars, catching missiles, et cetera.  Dump a few in Clairsentience and you get a more detailed map to work with; add a few more and you can pinpoint the locations of enemies you can't see visually.  A power in Presience might give you a chance to automatically avoid some incoming attacks, while another would let you see where enemies were going before they even went there.  Telepathy would let you either distract or overwhelm the senses of people you're fighting, and later powers would let you mentally dominate entire squads and boss them around a la Kingdom Under Fire, or maybe just make them all turn their guns on themselves.

Something like that.

[Saturn]

the civilization games are very good, but i think that managing so many units in the late game is very cumbersome.  i feel like military actions should be abstracted.

Some sort of KILL THAT GUY button?

[Kazz]

the civilization games are very good, but i think that managing so many units in the late game is very cumbersome.  i feel like military actions should be abstracted.

Some sort of KILL THAT GUY button?

Just, like, here's your troop amount, here's your tech level, here's your balance between hardy rocks, damaging papers and quick-moving scissors.  Click where you want your forces to attack.

Shit, it even opens the game up for better tactical options, because you can choose to attack all-out, or set up a siege, or rampage around destroying improvements first, without having to issue each individual goddamned order to each individual goddamned unit.  Do you want your scissors to chase down injured units or stay with the group?  Do you want to risk everything on one assault, or attack incrementally, taking and fortifying city territory as you go?  Just radio buttons would do.

[Kazz]

Another post for another thought:

A lot of concepts haven't been done to my satisfaction just yet.  How about a multiplayer FPS where you start one guy (or a small team) at one corner of an open-ended urban map, and tell him to get to the other corner within X minutes?  And then make the other team hunt you down through the city and stop you.

The big popping-out problem is that the defenders would just camp the goal, but that's easy to fix.  Just weight points for defenders, based on how distant you are from the goal when you make the kill,   That way, they want to go out into the city and actually find the attackers.

Also, perhaps make it so that the defenders only know the vague neighborhood of the goal, while the attackers know its exact location.

I just like the idea of a large urban environment where people could be hiding in any given spot, anywhere in the map.  12 players would be great for a game like this; I am tired of games with maps that are tremendously large but have 64 players filling up the entire damned place.  It's too chaotic.

[James Edward Smith]

Just, like, here's your troop amount, here's your tech level, here's your balance between hardy rocks, damaging papers and quick-moving scissors.  Click where you want your forces to attack.

Shit, it even opens the game up for better tactical options, because you can choose to attack all-out, or set up a siege, or rampage around destroying improvements first, without having to issue each individual goddamned order to each individual goddamned unit.  Do you want your scissors to chase down injured units or stay with the group?  Do you want to risk everything on one assault, or attack incrementally, taking and fortifying city territory as you go?  Just radio buttons would do.

It seems like what you're asking for might get pretty complicated and open for problems when you run into the amount of randomness Civ terrain can throw at you. But perhaps you could have some sort of system where you can give high level commands like that and then the same logic that is used for enemy AI tries to follow your Doctrine lets call it.

What I think is needed is for it to just suggest all these moves and then you can look them over quick and authorize the turn or go in and make alterations and then authorize it with your changes.

The big popping-out problem is that the defenders would just camp the goal, but that's easy to fix.  Just weight points for defenders, based on how distant you are from the goal when you make the kill,   That way, they want to go out into the city and actually find the attackers.

You can just do it like Man Tracker; only the prey know where the goal is and the hunters have no idea. Although your suggestion where the hunters have a general idea is okay too.

I think it might work pretty well if it worked just like Mantracker though; The prey start in the middle of the map and have to get to a specified point on the map that can be in any direction from the start. The hunters spawn a set time after the prey and have to find out which direction they went and find them before they get to their goal which they as the hunters have no knowledge of. Some mechanics where the prey leave signs of their passing could make it interesting.

[Disposable Ninja]

Just came up with a little RPG idea: a noir-style murder mystery set in an alternet universe where magic is real. You play a detective of your own creation, and you have quite a bit of freedom in how you go about solving the case: you can, of course, play good cop and acquire all your evidence  through entirely legal means, or you could go the Jack Bauer route and use more questionable methods, or you could even play a crooked cop and take bribes and plant evidence.

And of course there's all the fun ways magic plays into the picture. You'd be able to use low-level empathic magics to determine if your interrogation subject is telling the truth (legal) or, if that doesn't work, mind probe them (illegal). And, of course, the validity of all magically-learned information becomes questionable if your detective's magics aren't as powerful as the suspect's.

[Kazz]

civ 4 combat stuff

I had a much simpler idea.  Just make it so that the strength of a unit is relative to the time you spend building it.  That way, a single unit serves just as well as a stack of twenty of the same unit, as long as you commit enough time to it.  You can split up the unit as you like, and you can set many cities to send production to the city where the unit pops out.

[James Edward Smith]

Yeah, to be honest, smarter unit combining like that seems perfect. It does force you to make large amounts of one type of unit to take advantage of though as you'd want even similar units to have their own stacks due to their differences. But even if I make 8 swordsmen, 8 spearmen, and 8 axemen and then say split up the spear men into two units with the strength of 4 at one point due to two chariot units attacking me from either side, that's still far more desirable, having 4 uber-units to move rather than 24 units every turn.

It might be interesting to think about how you want combat to resolve with those uber-units though. Do you want to just stick to how civ 4 would already handle it if they were just a stack or would you want a smarter system that tries to take size of units and possible flanking into account? I wouldn't mind a system where you can attack a unit or uber unit with smaller units from different directions and all at once.

[Kazz]

I wouldn't want to ruin that system by encouraging smaller unit groups in the combat calculation.

[Bongo Bill]

I need an approximate, but less-buzzwordy synonym for "Web 2.0" (here meaning the use of Internet-style technologies in services where you trick your users into creating all your content for you), or else I won't be able to make this post without feeling like a tool.

[Detonator]

I won't be able to make this post without feeling like a tool.

Too late.

[Bongo Bill]

Well, anyway, I was thinking of a way to make a (Tactical?) RPG with characters, dungeons/encounters, stories, and such, provided by users, and imported selectively into one's own "copy" of the game according to such fancy metrics as ratings, tags, and whether your buddy was the person who made it. A TRPG is better, I think, because then you can get more mileage out of character and map editors, without the threat of the game turning into the penis hell that would result from allowing (or worse, requiring) user-provided graphics.

[Brentai]

Well, anyway, I was thinking of a way to make a (Tactical?) RPG with characters, dungeons/encounters, stories, and such, provided by users, and imported selectively into one's own "copy" of the game according to such fancy metrics as ratings, tags, and whether your buddy was the person who made it. A TRPG is better, I think, because then you can get more mileage out of character and map editors, without the threat of the game turning into the penis hell that would result from allowing (or worse, requiring) user-provided graphics.

I like this idea.  Thinking of it mainly in terms of FF Tactics, where instead of a bunch of randomly-named rubes popping up in the recruitment halls/battlefield you get a bunch of user-generated rubes popping up in the recruitment halls/battlefield.  Give achievements to users whose characters seem to be kicking bunches of ass - it encourages creative, competitive character building, and in well-enoughed balanced tactical environment tends to backfire badly on people who rely too heavily on a powerful but popular build with known weak points.

Then again, it may just turn into WoW.  Shadow Priest kekekekeke.

EDIT: WHY AM I ALWAYS AFTER THE PAGE BREAK mumble mumble modify quote submit