Underrepresented Genre Suggestions
Now that the holidays are upon us (in some parts of the world), I suddenly have a bit of free time and a desire to try to cobble together a game.But I don't want to do something that everyone else and their kid brothers have already done.
No offense intended. :)
What are some of the more drastically underrepresented genres and themes that you'd like to see explored in a game?
I'll throw in an example. Naval Combat simulators. Especially those set during the Age of Sail where weather and resupply makes as much of a difference as the actual engagements. Port Royale is probably the closest to this, but they (understandably) simplify a lot of the actual sailing elements in order to reach a broader audience.
I'm not making any promises, but I'm hoping if we all suggest some things we don't have time (or know-how) to code, maybe someone else can use the idea?
[910 byte] By [
TheDavida] at [2007-9-29 19:58:37]
I think one genre that doesn't get enough attention is action/adventure. Note that I don't mean RPG. Anyone can make a tile-based map with a tiny character and move them around a screen without scrolling and call it an RPG.
What about those scrolling 2D games? Mario-based games are great ones to make with moving enemies, items, levels, bosses, etc. But around here lately all we have is fake-RPG and remakes of arcade remakes! Just look at that Nibbles game floating around here lately. I'm not saying it's a bad game, in fact I think he did a good job with it, but it's just another arcade game. Can't we get more genres?!
2D scrollers are not underdeveloped, but few new ones are coming out, and I'm sure if you write a good one people will enjoy it and thank you.
Port Quake 3 into a Java Applet
Porting Quake3 into applet?my.... that's what I would call... 'ambitious' f(^_^;)anyway, how about good old adventure(s), they're dying out... and maybe TBS (Turn-based strategy) game
i got inspired by masters of orion which is the kinda game im trying to make for java right now
nothing to spectacular but it should be cool if i can keep my mind on it long enough to finish
most of my projects i start then dont finish i trash them
cause i learn something new and decide to redo everything.
then never pick it back up lol
let me see a show of hands
I had an idea to make an online turn-based business sim. The setting was the .com boom and you got to run a software company. The cool part was that everybody got to play against each other in the virtual economy, and much of the game revolved around using your IP leverage and capitol to drive you competition out of business. I think it could be fun.
I've created two iterations of a Fantasy RPG / Sports Management Simulation. I've never finished it, but I think it's a great genre combination. The basic premise is that you manage teams of fantasy characters in an arena league where your characters fight against other characters. As GM of your team, you have to draft characters, set salaries, equip the team, buy spells and training, and, of course, trade characters for other characters. With the large number of character classes, I think assembling the right team through trading, drafting, and free-agency would be quite challenging (and multiplayer on-line leagues would be great too!). I'd love to see if someone could pull this game off! My two versions are close, but need a lot more work (and time which I don't have).
Michael
I reckon you could write something really intriguing using a lot of AI and evolutionary programming type principles - the only games I can think of that work this way at the moment are perhaps Creatures and maybe Black and White- I am strongly convinced that nowadays anyone can do awesome graphics and that big AI is going to be the way forward.
How about a sick game!
I had an idea for a racing babies game some time back where the babies crawl to a finish line. They intermitently stop and suck their thumbs or suddenly start crying, or they start giggling then they speed up and from time-to-time turn around and go in the wrong direction. You bet on the winning baby first and also buy things each round to try and slow them up, encourage them to turn around, stop them eg: by throwing stones making them cry or speed them up with a remote tickle. There's a lot of scope here for other things - eg: hot water pistols, bombs to make them fall in a hole (blowing them up is not allowed), toys to distract them etc. The direction for all these is contolled with the mouse (though a little bit harder than simple point and click) me and the strength to make in land in the right place is a continuous up-and-down slidy thing.
Each of the babies also have its own character description, eg: baby 'A' - reliable, steady but slow, has the habit of speeding up with any event but can go in any direction: baby B - quite fast though highly fractious, sometimes responds well to tickling etc and so on - I never got around to making it, but its pretty much unique and you're welcome to steal the idea if you like it.
After reading your post about the sports management simulator, it got me to thinking about a game that I used to play when it was a board game, but moved to the Java version once someone decided to code it in Java. The game: Blood Bowl.
For those that don't know Blood Bowl, it is a game produced by Games Workshop (GW), a UK-based fantasy gaming company. The game is a board game that allows you to play a graphic form of football/rugby. Over the course of 16 turns (8 per half for each player), you block, dodge, pass, handoff, and brutalize your opponent all in an attempt to score touchdowns. The game accounts for weather conditions and some cheats (there were cards with the game that you could play before the game started and at the half to give yourself an edge over the other player). Also, the rabid fans that "line" the gameboard are a factor in the game as well. Anyhow, like all GW games, this game has the ability to be carried out over many seasons. Your players earn Star Player Points by doing certain things in-game like completing a pass or killing an opponent, and they can earn skill or attribute advances after they earn enough points.
Anyhow, you get the idea. And if you don't, go and look up the Blood Bowl Living Rulebook and educate yourself.
Eventually, someone came out with a Java version of this game that is slightly primitive but functional, and there is are online leagues for it as well (the one I play on is at http://fumbbl.com/). You may be able to turn Blood Bowl into a sports management simulator complete with player stats/skills/advances and the whole gamut. Personally, since I am not acquainted with those sorts of game, I'm not familiar with what would be the "winning" and "losing" conditions of a simulator, but I'm sure an enterprising individual could figure these out.
-Dok
> How about a sick game!
>
How is that a sick game? I think Colonic Wars ws grosser than that....
If you really wanted to make something sick, you could make a game where you were skating too close to a trash-can fire, and fell in and had your lower legs melted, forging your torso to the skateboard. Now you have to skate around the streets (pushing the ground with your hands), and steal peoples wallets until you can afford enough money for a surgery and prosthesis. You have to avoid dogs urinating on fire hydrants and other things that 2 and 1/2 foot people do. Also, because you have no lower torso, you have no pockets, so you have to cleverly hide the wallets you steal around the town.
Or how about a childrens classic, "A Nightmare on Sesame Street" where you have to find out which muppet is a serial axe murderer before your number is up!
Or how about a game where you are the president of a big construction company, and you have to tear down the rainforests and pave over them with roads and buildings before the world becomes overpopulated with endangered animals!
Here are some more ideas I had posted that, sadly, never got implemented..not all of them are games, but some may intrigue you!
-How about a program that takes existing photos of siamese twins and separates them into 2 people? After you perfect it, you can sell it to Photoshop as a plug-in...
-How about a game featuring the rap artist 50 cent? You can have pennies (cents) fall from the sky, and he has to catch 50 of them to win!
-How about an application that organizes pictures of people dressed up in muppet costumes. Then you could be able to search on a muppet, pull up all the pics of people dressed like them, then rate them for who looks the most realistic.
-How about a game which pits the old Star Trek USS Enterprise crew against the new one? Then once and for all, people will know who is better...Captain Kirk, or Captain Piccard!
-How about a game where you try to put a tophat on a walrus before he escapes back to sea. The rest of the game pretty much writes itself!
-Make a screen saver that gives people motion sickness. You could call it 'Virtual Vomit'!
-How about a voice analyzer for porcupines? Finally mankind will understand the wise sayings the porcupines have been trying to portray to us for years!
-How bout a virtual version of that board game 'Operation'. Where you take tweezers and pull out bones from the body without touching the sides. Except make sure you code the mouse to skip when people try to extract bones. That way they kill the patients and the game is over quicker.
-How bout a virtual grass growing program. You can watch grass grow! That should take up your 6 - 9 month window you were talking about. Also, you can take snapshots of the grass at any given time, so you can compare them later to other photos of the grass.
-Why don't you make a program that remaps all the keys on the keyboard to alphabetical order. Then start a timer and see how long it takes the user to realize this. Then install it on someone elses computer and see if they can beat your record.
Of course, there's always "Torture the Cynic."
Why don't you make a program that remaps all the keys on the keyboard to alphabetical order. Then start a timer and see how long it takes the user to realize this. Then install it on someone elses computer and see if they can beat your record.
haha thats really good :) I did that to my parents once, I have a qbasic exe that I wrote somewhere around here.. It doesn't measuer how much time it takes for them to figure it out though. It just really messes up your computer. I had to write a program to fix it :(
back to topic... I have a space trader in the works with scrolling, multiplayer, etc...also have an RPG with full isometric scrolling and plans for large and small maps.as per the norm they are works in progress.
That sounds really cool. I'm in the middle of my own rpg as a first attempt at a complex program. So far I don't think I've had more than 3 classes in any game, so now I'm taking it up a notch, and trying to keep it organized in code as well as in my head all at the same time =D Fun stuff!
Personally, I would love to see someone redo the PC game "Legal Crime", only give it a real single-player version as well as multi-player capability. In the original game, the single-player mode was primarily for tutorial purposes, so the single-player aspects of that game were never really explored.
David, have you come to any sort of conclusion about what next to create yet? Or are you just going to leave us in suspense? :)
-Dok
I haven't decided yet.
I really do like the Blood Bowl suggestion because at one time, I contemplated making a gladiator/boxer management simulation akin to the old Play By Mail games, the only difference was this would be web based and you could get results of the fights in any supported medium you chose (including pager alerts). I eventually dropped the idea because I wasn't sure if the concept would be popular enough to justify setting up a web site, eventually leasing a high speed bandwidth line and so forth.
Breakfast also has a really good point in that we should probably try to focus on AI and making a challenging opponent, and in that vein, Deltabox's business simulator would be kind of interesting. Before I go down that path though, I want to find out why the various commercial games like Merchant Prince (I think) and Patrician III, fail.
But in general, I do want to try something that's easy to grasp the concept of, but very deep - like Nethack (which admittingly, is probably more of an adventure than the genres I discussed just now).
Don't let me discourage any of you though - people say we should make games that we find fun, but it would be more accurate to say we should make games that we and our friends find fun. :)
There was a web based graphical game of buying ans selling businesses on the web a while back, lots of traffic. I started, but never finished a java based nethack/cyberspace mud like game for telnet, but never finished.
Blood Bowl would be cool, I used to paly Warhammer 40k by the same people.
Good luck
I'm not sure that you are still looking for suggestions to code, but you could try architecting a game based on one of the many collectible card games that are out there like Magic: The Gathering (MtG), Heresy, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc. Most of these games, especially MtG (that I am aware of), would be rather challenging because their rule system for how play gets resolved is an evolving process. Collectible card games that are popular as card games, I think, are rather underrepresented as playable video games because not only of the evolving rule system but the fact that there are constantly new expansions coming out.
Coding a game like this, I think, would have a lot of interesting challenges. While these games would be very simple graphically, the kind of AI it would take to make a decent computer opponent for this kind of game would be interesting. Also, making an extensible rule architecture could be a challenge such that when the rules change (due to new expansions of the real card game being released) your game could keep pace. And with kind of information you are dealing with as far as card images, text, rules, and so on, there would be some interesting challenges in terms of organizing the information and making that structure extensible for future expansions (or even making such text and whatnot localized). Moreover, making these kinds of games multiplayer could get interesting, though I don't know exactly how.
Since there are so many of these kinds of card games out there, you could easily find one that is in a flavor to your liking and go from there.
-Dok
I believe there are a few japanese RPGs that use a card system for deciding combat, which is a really interesting idea but I don't think it has been widely exported to the west. It might well be worth a try though.
Magic: the Gathering (MtG) was released in two "off the shelf" games a few years back. I have the first and it was weak. I heard the second was pretty good. Online trading of cards, etc...Still would be a neat "adventure" in programming!
