Does this game sound fun?

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2 comments, last by Azaral 11 years ago

I'm just looking for some outside feed back beyond me and my friend for a game we hope to make.

It is a 2D, top down, action shooter, for the PC. The art styling is basically everything being made from neon lights. There are two modes of play planned, single player and dual player (not the same as two player). The player(s) fly a ship around and explore the world. If there are two players, they are both controlling the ship, just different parts of it. One player, using the mouse and key board, would be a gunner and would be able to shoot weapons that are on turrets by aiming with the mouse. The other player, using a gamepad or joystick, would be the pilot and would fly the ship and be able to fire any weapons that are fixed forward.

The world is comprised of zones, each zone just being a large circular region. Anything that goes out of bounds is destroyed. Anything in the 'danger zone' takes damage until it leaves the zone or is destroyed. Travel between zones is facilitated by going through portals, which will take you to a new zone.

Each zone would contain various things. There will be other ships flying about, moving objects like giant rocks, stationary objects, gravity and anti-gravity wells, 'jelly fields' and 'slick fields' which are field that slow down or speed up, respectively, anything that moves through them, until they leave then they are returned to the speed they were before they entered. There would also be 'docks' where the player can go to repair, resupply, upgrade, and buy/make new equipment.

The players would collect Pips, which are money. A pip would be a colored glowing disc. They come in different denominations which is dictated by their color. There would also be item drops.


A ship's capabilities would be determined by the different slots it has and how many of them it has. Slots are things like weapons, power generators, engines, armor.

Weapons are a grouping of two different things, a projectile and a launcher. The projectile is what the launcher shoots. Each can have their own different attributes that effect the total item of weapon. For example, you could have a launcher with the scattershot attribute which would cause it to fire multiple projectiles. The projectiles could have the MIRV attribute which causes them to split apart after a bit and each new smaller part would go in seperate directions. This would be a different weapon than a launcher that fired projectiles that were not MIRV projectiles or a weapon that fired MIRV projectiles but did not have scattershot attribute.

The player would be able to craft their own weapons and components by selecting the attributes that make up the two halves as well as determine the numbers that go along with it. The cost to make would be calculated based on the attributes and the size of the numbers they choose.

The player(s) would fly around and explore the world, fight enemies, and eventually we would want to add RPG elements like quests/missions/tasks, stories.

The game world would be generated procedurally. the further the player gets from the starting zone in 'real' distance, not just how many zones away. So you could have one zone that has a portal that goes further away into a disproportionally difficult zone for instance, just to make things interesting.

So any thoughts you have on how fun you might think this game would be would be appreciated.

To ward off the feasibility issues people may raise, we are going to make it in 'layers' based on priority. Priority 1 items would be completed first and those are the things that are core to actually playing the game. Then would come a time of bug fixing, balancing and tweaking, then we would begin priority two, and so on and so forth. Make the whole project a bite (maybe big ones) at a time.

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It was quite fun as far as I remember. But I'm not sure RPG elements would fit there, it's about shooting at things, not about customizing you vessel (especially since there are 2 players and only one ship which presents a dilemma who is going to decide on upgrades).

The bigger problem is the players mentality, nowadays people don't play on the same computer, it's done via the net. It sounds as if that game would do better on consoles (people/family sitting on the same couch).

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You seem to come from the technical side to game design, your post is very detailed in a good way. I like it, but you didn't come here for praise so I get right to my critique.

This sentence is very interesting:

The player(s) would fly around and explore the world, fight enemies, and eventually we would want to add RPG elements like quests/missions/tasks, stories.

This is something that apparently happens in game development, a team is working on a game and very late in the process somebody gets the job of writing a story for it. If you do it like this the story will feel like it just happened to be there and may not even fit. The problem here is that all your game mechanics, your turrets, upgrade system, enemies etc tell a story too. You story would feel disconnected from the game if you aren't careful. The player may not put it's finger on it, but he would say it is bad writing, even if your actual story would be solid.

Which brings me to my next point.

You seem to have the individual pieces pinned down accurately, but I can't see that you have to thought about how these mechanics connect, what impact it has on the player or why he will play your game, what the gamer should get out of it (Exploring, crafting, challenging space fights?). So I would advise you to find out what lies at the core of your game idea and then focus on it. Only add parts that fit to the core, just because games tend to have a quest system in this season, doesn't mean you need one too.

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Setting fire to these damn cows one entry at a time!

You seem to come from the technical side to game design, your post is very detailed in a good way. I like it, but you didn't come here for praise so I get right to my critique.

This sentence is very interesting:

The player(s) would fly around and explore the world, fight enemies, and eventually we would want to add RPG elements like quests/missions/tasks, stories.

This is something that apparently happens in game development, a team is working on a game and very late in the process somebody gets the job of writing a story for it. If you do it like this the story will feel like it just happened to be there and may not even fit. The problem here is that all your game mechanics, your turrets, upgrade system, enemies etc tell a story too. You story would feel disconnected from the game if you aren't careful. The player may not put it's finger on it, but he would say it is bad writing, even if your actual story would be solid.

Which brings me to my next point.

You seem to have the individual pieces pinned down accurately, but I can't see that you have to thought about how these mechanics connect, what impact it has on the player or why he will play your game, what the gamer should get out of it (Exploring, crafting, challenging space fights?). So I would advise you to find out what lies at the core of your game idea and then focus on it. Only add parts that fit to the core, just because games tend to have a quest system in this season, doesn't mean you need one too.



Yeah, this is one concern I have. The reason for the iteration though would be to make the actual development easier. One thought I had would be to have a separate game mode for the RPG elements added in. Anyone that had been playing previous could import their 'character' into the RPG mode.

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