Well, I'm new to game design. I have been on a team before that tried to make a game, but I decided to leave the team after waiting for a month and having seen no progress on the design doc. Now I have my own design idea, and I was wondering how 'good' it might be. So please comment on it as you see fit. Unnamed, by Charles Jeffries: The game is played by two players from an overhead perspective, looking down on the 'map.' Both players are wizards, starting on opposite sides of the map, and throughout the game, both players are immobile. The majority of the action in the game is controlled by the player pushing the buttons on the numeric keypad in patterns to generate spells, which are cast by pressing the space bar. Fights are won by simply killing the other wizard. But you have a range of spells, going from defensive to offensive, and including summoning spells. There is no direct control of the summoned creatures either, instead the player can issue orders to all of the creatures at one time, like 'advance' which tells them to fan out and move toward the other side of the board, 'halt' which obviously makes all the creatures stop in their tracks, and 'defense' which makes them all move in a straight line towards their creator. To add some kind of endurance to the game, I was planning on limiting the player's casting ability by adding an RPG element to it, and having the player gain ability as the game progresses. Experience points would be gained through the successful use of spells, and not specifically on killing your opponents. Gaining 'levels', a standard convention in all RPGs, would be very slow, and for each level the player earned, they would be allowed to add one more spell 'word' to the chain. Killing opponents would result in gaining rune stones, which embody one of the six spell elements. These are what limits the variety of spells that the player can cast, and should be fairly rare. I havent completed a list for specific spells, but I am hoping that I can create general spell formulas to compensate for the nearly infinite varieties that can be created. There will be a total of 9 spell buttons, and they will be listed here: Fire* Water* Ice* Lightning* Black* White* Friend Foe Power* (*)--Needs rune stones The friend/foe buttons are non-runeword modifiers, and dont count towards the player's total when linking a spell. A few examples: Firespark--press foe and 1 fire, and then cast Static Shield-- Friend+Lightning summons would require special combos, and I havent quite figured any good ones out yet. [edit] Also, the player would have a mana store to deal with, that would regenerate, to limit the amount of spells the player can cast, and prevent someone from using a very powerful spell to annihilate the opponent. [/edit] That pretty much sums up the whole idea. If you have any questions, please ask and I'll try to clear em up. Copyright 2002 Charles Jeffries Please respect my property and dont use it without my permission. Edited by - WyldeSnake on February 21, 2002 4:29:25 PM

So it''s basically a wizards'' duel (like in Disney''s "The Sword and the Stone" if you''ve seen it?...)? It sounds like a neat idea. You''d have to give a reason for making the wizards immobile (could be as simple as announcing it in the rules before the match).

Circles of Protection

Take care,
Bill

Well, Terabyte, the difference in this concept is that unlike magic, there are no specific spells to gather, just the elements to create them. Unfortunately I never got to play battlemage, although I aim to create something that is not on any gaming console.

I''ll explain my spell categories here in more detail actually, since I have the time:

Fire, Ice, Water, Lightning: These are all fairly obvious...they add that element to the spell.
Black: Non-elemental damage spells, not necessarily limited to just damage and death spells though
White: Healing, but also not just limited to healing and protecting

And the ''Power'' button...uses a magic ''power'' stone, very similar to the other 6 categories, but all it does is magnify the spell''s power. Could be used to create a firebolt out of a flame spark, for example. But I will try to make it so that the power stones are just the easy way to boost a spell''s power, and make it so that the only way to get really strong spells is to mix&match the elements in the right orders.

I might actually rework my idea on the creatures too...make it so that the map that the game is played on has mana nodes or something that you can hold to increase your mana recharge rate. That might add a bit of length to the game, and prevent players from finishing the fights in too short a time span.

The mouse may be used also as a control, to select creatures and give them specific move orders, to complement the mana node idea. The mouse would also be used in targeting the spells, maybe instead of pressing spacebar, the rightclick would cast the spell in that direction. Spacebar would fire the spell either directly at the enemy mage, or at yourself, depending on the spell''s properties.

That''s the addendum to my idea.