Once upon a time, i wanted to participate to that contest, but wisely after a few weeks, i decided it would be conflicting too much with my main project, Infinity, so i abandonned the idea.
Now that the contest is over, i can safely post the game idea i had for my 4E4 entry.
I wanted to make a kind of "intelligent" cross between Lemmings and a RTS game. The setting: a city, populated by 3 races: humans, robots and zombies. The player is controling either the robots, either the zombies (the other one being controlled by the AI) and they fight for the natural resource: humans (which are "neutral", and also controlled by the AI).
The goal is simple: the zombie player tries to infect as many humans as possible. A simple contact is enough, and a human is transformed into a zombie. They cannot do anything to robots.
The goal of the robots is simple: following the 3 laws of robotics, they have to protect the humans.. at all costs. But they cannot agress the zombies, since these are still too similar to humans. If a human is hit by a zombie in the field of view of a robot, that last one self-destructs.
The humans, well.. they just move around and panic when they see a zombie coming close.
The city is generated more or less randomly, to renew any game.
The player (whether he controls the robots or the zombies), can only give "indirect" orders to his minions (that's where the Lemmings part is coming in). For example, you can place a bait (english?) somewhere, that will attract zombies in that direction. You can suggest orders to robots, but not control exactly what they're doing.. etc..
I thought the concept was pretty neat, but there was balance issues, and i was running out of good ideas for possible "actions" for the robots or the zombies. But maybe.. for the next RvNvPvZ contest.. ?
It was basically an island management game, where as the ruler you had to manage the four factions of pirates, ninja, inventors (who make robot servants) and voodoo priestesses (who make zombie servants). If one side ticked off another by too much, then the whole island would erupt in revolt.
Playing the game through in my mind it was pretty cool (mostly because the pirates were always drunk, I guess), but for a first game it was too much too soon.