I had an idea for a video game design, a 1 Dimensional video game, possibly presented as a web site. The player can go right or left, and there's slope, gravity, and other player-like objects. The player gets points for going one way and loses points for going the other way, and the game is played with multiple players that spawn close to each other and can push on each other. Clicking faster pushes harder or moves faster.

A 10 dimensional video game (as opposed to the normal 3, or old fashioned 2) could only be done via text, so a web site C# / ASP.NET program would probably be a good way, or php or whatever, but the key here is that there's no video card functions to render vertices/lines/points with 10 variables, instead of 2 or 3. Thus, each player's location is stored in a 10-variable vector, and the user must see his location numerically. The player could have a velocity in the 10th dimension, as well as a size, radius, or even 10-axis shape, although it is not possible to visualize so a sphere or blob (a simple radius to each other object is the easiest distance check, and should work fine in 10 dimensions even with mathematics that have been historically limited to 2 or 3 dimensions/axis), and gameplay could consist of navigating around on 10 axis either by clicking on any of the 10 axis + a positive or negative direction to accelerate or step. Barriers could be placed inside a 10-dimensional internal array that the player can or cannot pass through to form a 10-d interior structure/box/maze that could potentially be navigated by lots of players, and maybe throw in some other standard game mechanics like combat, construction, chatting, and whatnot in the 10-d text based setting.

Also on a side note, currently most "3d" video cards render 3d-objects onto a 2D screen, so in a sense we have the technology to display a 3D object on a 2D surface. I did see "Avatar" in 3D, and was impressed by the non-surface based 3D presentation. I was just pondering that it may be theoretically possible to render a 4-dimensional object graphically on a true 3D display using the 3D->2D rendering technique, except with some sort of extra dimensional upgrade, thus allowing people to visualize the fourth spatial dimension, assuming such a dimension exists and is practicable and/or relevant.

Given some constraints, its possible tp project a higher-dimensional space onto any lower-dimensional space, IIRC. Much like the 3D->2D displays of most gaming technology today. 4-dimentional representations are possible to be displayed on a 2D display and quite common (Google for Hypercube images), although there aren't so many examples for higher-dimensional spaces into 2D.

I'm a bit of a C# programmer, and was thinking about building these games...maybe a quick 1D game or even maybe a 4D puzzle/maze game...would anybody be interested in navigating a 4D maze in single player either on a web site or via a downloaded program, or rather in playing a 1D MMO game that is downloaded or on a web site, or none of the above?

Well, I made the 4D maze game, it's a windows application written in C#, and I just wrote and tested it on my computer, and then made a quick blog about it on blogger.com and posted the game, along with the C# source as well for use with Microsoft Visual C# 2008 (free or fee versions ok) if you want to read/edit the code. Neat game, 5 levels of navigating through increasingly large and challenging mazes in 4 spatial dimensions (up/down, left/right, in/out, azimuth/zen) with free downloads and screenshots at http://samsprograms.blogspot.com ... if anybody wants to help me test it out, you can try it and comment here or there or over on gamedev! :)

If all ten dimensions are spatial and have the same size, then it will be difficult to defeat gravity in that setting, as force has the same number of dimensions. Just mentioning in case you plan to adapt a physics engine.

Yes, gravity is an important element in nature...one of the problems with modeling nature in a computer game though is programmer skill and effort! That being said, I noticed that all the free 2D mmo games have a low view distance. I think it would be neat to have a 2D game / mmo with a high viewing distance and gravity, and was thinking of possibly making that. One important feature would be the ability to zoom in and out, you can see some c# source code for zoom in zoom out 2D using direct3D at http://spaceracer2025.blogspot.com . I should note the technique for large 2D with zoom in and zoom out is pretty simple, just make a 3D object that is a square or rectangle in D3D, and always set the z axis to 0 and have the rectangles facing the camera with a sprite-texture mapped to them. For a simple tutorial for doing this in C#, I recommed googling for the "Riemer" directx tutorials, I found them to be concise and useful, along with good code references. He also has C++ and XNA directX tutorials, however XNA uses models and not vertices so for 2D "hack" 3D, it looks like c# is slightly better. Might not really matter, although c++ code tends to contain more bugs on the first coding and requires about 8000% more debugging time on average, at least for me. Anyways then to acheive the zoom you move the camera backwards and forwards along the third axis.

I think a neat 2D mmo with gravity would be a very large circular planet like object, with small 2D people-like objects controlled by players. I think it would be neat if the players could do all the "lemmings" like activities, including digging downward at 45 degree angles and maybe the "worms" activities too, like firing guns that explode on impact and/or homing missiles, maybe with some MMO stylings and mined resources that are actually under the surface. Plus the round 2D planet should be big enough to look flat when zoomed in on a player to play normally, and may even have a way to get spaceships to travel to other flat looking planets that are very far away, or maybe even a way to remain 2D and enter the third dimension, using some sort of dimensional shifting machine instead of simple movement.