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[James Edward Smith]

I'm prototyping a new game for a handheld touchscreen device at work. The device handles multi-touch and you can press down the whole screen like a big button to make a pushthrough event happen at that xy-location.

My idea is a game about exploring and building in a little top-down game world with little powered tools. I'm not sure whether I want this to be a puzzle game, or a sim game or what have you yet, but my basic idea is that you have all these little tools that are like little trucks. You might have a few tools that can't move or can't move on their own, like a generator perhaps, but most of your tools are like little trucks and can. If you click on one of the trucks, it starts up and it's pistons start chugging, and you can drive it around by dragging it with your finger. In addition to driving around, each tool-truck has a job it performs. Some are simple and require no further interaction to perform their job. For instance, the bulldozer pushes shit around just by you dragging it into stuff, the drill-truck bores through earth as you drag it through it.

Other trucks are slightly more complicated and require the use of two fingers. For instance, the crane requires you to move its arm around with your other finger, it then picks up and drops off thing either automatically due to context like the winch in Urban Strike and Desert Strike, or perhaps lifts with context and lowers with a finger tap.

An other possible concept is the idea that use of your tools drains power. Power is either drained by moving and using your tools or maybe just from actually doing their job. For example, maybe driving the drill around doesn't use power, but actually digging with it does. Energy could be recouped slowly over time or faster by charging at your generator/battery station. The generator could be hooked up to contructed windmills, constructed waterwheels. It could also be brought fuel to burn from your clearing jobs. When your buzzsaw truck cuts down vegetation, lumber is left over and when your drill bores through mountains it can sometimes find coal. This fuels can be picked up with your crane and loaded into your dumptruck and then brought to your generator for burning.

I'd like to see if anyone here has any other ideas for trucks or stationary tools, or just for game play mechanics in general. My basic idea is just to make this a puzzle game, but I think that if you add in the concept of little plebs who you don't directly control you could have a neat sim game wherein they build stuff based on what you do to the land around them with your tools.

[Guild]

Won't your finger be in the way of the trucks?

[Brentai]

That's what your momma said.

[James Edward Smith]

Won't your finger be in the way of the trucks?

Uhm, yes, but why does that matter? You know where the truck is, it's under your finger, doofus. As long as it does it's job properly, why do you have to be able to see the whole truck? I'm sure the artist's sprites or models for them won't be that engrossing awesome looking that you'll cry every time you have to cover most of the truck with your finger to use it.

In most cases the tool part of the truck will be sitting out infront of it anyway, so who cares? I mean, I'll be sure to have a lot of animation frames going on around the outside of the truck like a little exhaust trail when you move certain ones and/or truck specific tracks left behind that fade quickly. But I really don't see what your point is.

[LaserBeing]

what if you have really fat fingers

[Classic]

Perhaps they could make the truck fatter.

[Kazz]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwn1NTK-50

[James Edward Smith]

Well, this has been very helpful. I'd like to thank everyone who brought their ideas to the table and to remind everyone that there are no bad ideas here. The only ideas that hurt this process are those that go unsaid. Uhm, just to help everyone out here I'd like to provide my compiled list of ideas that we've generated so far.

• You have to touch things in a touch screen game so won't that mean you can't see what is directly under where you are touching. (Guild)
• Our mother (Brentai)
• People might have fat fingers (LaserBeing)
• The trucks could indeed be large enough to be seen dispite finger size (Classic)
• It's possible to get caught up in the crossfire, at least some of the time anyway (Kazz)

Now, looking all of these, I think I'm probably going to proceed with Kazz's idea since it seems to be fairly tested in the real world already and with promising results. Once again though, I want to thank all of the contributers.

[Shinra]

oh man think who you were asking for serious advice here dude.

I think a good way to do a game like that would be objective based Sim. Think the Sims 2 standalone packs. You've got a 'main objective' like scenario and then once you complete it you should be able to do whatever. See also, Sim city's starter cities that all have crazy problems like godzillas and fires. The objectives would be part puzzle but mostly just 'build shit', with different objectives. For a nonserious example, let's say you have a map set in new orleans post katrina. You have to rebuild as much of the city as possible within x amount of time, competing against other construction firms. But you have to be careful to balance the size of your operation with the amount of power and resources you have, or else you won't be able to efficiently build your buildings and either the qualtiy will slip, or it will take too long and you'll lose your contract. But you still have to expand your operation quickly to beat the competition. A successful scenario ends with you having rebuilt more than 40% of the proposed area. For such scenarios you could have different difficulty levels that scale down the efficiency of your operation and scale up the efficiency of other operations, by increasing the power, and lowering the operation costs.

[James Edward Smith]

Yeah, I hadn't concidered that yet, having it be vaguely or perhaps completely sandbox-like and then just setting certain, specific goals for each level. I'd probably want to do is so that each level or at least every few levels happened on a different map and the goals for that map had something to do with aspects of that map that made it unique.

An other idea I had for it was having things like trains or ferries that automatically went between waypoints on the map (trainstations, harbors). You could hitch a right on these with your trucks to get to places faster, or while conserving energy/fuel, or just to get to places you couldn't ordinarily. These conveyances would either be perminant fixtures of the map or things that you could build and set up.

[Royal☭]

That Crossfire commercial gives us a grim look into the future, after global warming.  The future is going to be very, very dull.

[James Edward Smith]

Heh, I brought up trains and then someone derailed the thread. GET IT!?

[Royal☭]

I AM THROWING IDEAS AT YOU

WITH MY FISTS