First Day Thoughts

10 minutes before class started I started jotting down some quirky throw away ideas based on other games I liked while scrolling down the wikipedia article for list of game genres. None of these ideas have much depth or replay-ability but they eventually led to an idea I consider good.

I liked how the game "Half Minute Hero" turned the whole genre of "Role Playing Games" on its head by removing some of its key stereotype. RPG's can be very long, it's not uncommon to have them take between 30 and 80 hours to complete, during this time the player usually becomes very attatched to the story of the world and the characters they are progressing. However each level half minute hero cleverly compresses a whole RPG into 30 seconds.

I began by reversing the genre of "fighting games" into "stop people fighting games"  where you perhaps play a bouncer at a gig or club and the other player maybe picks a boxing referee and you see who is better at splitting up fights.

Then I fought of the terms "shoot em up" and "beat em up" both of those terms are very violent, how about "heal em up" or "help em up" what is you play some sort of healing magic character helping fallen knights or soldiers.
"Rail Shooters" are linear first person shooters in which the player only controls the aim of the main character but not the movement, how about a game with all different types of trains that you can load out with weapons and battle other deadly trains on the railway.

My mind was thinking "card games" and "board games" when the table top games society was mentioned, then I thought "cardboard game" a game where you use cardboard in the most productive way you can.

I then thought of "online" games, how about a game where you are on a line perhaps a tightrope walking game.

How about the genre of "party games" instead of games that are designed to pick up and play with friends visiting a simulation game in which you organise parties.
Or "handheld games" a game in which you hold hands.

For a character I thought of fish tanks and then I thought of a fish who is also a industrial war tank.

This actually reminded me of a tank game that has been in my head for years that was grid based and players could create their own maps, I really thought and still do that this game existed but I have never been able to find it, I'm starting to convince myself that I thought of it in my head which I may have while thinking it exists.

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I was thinking how about make a game that I could use all of these throw away ideas that I thought of on the spot and many more in at once.

Something I have noticed that a lot of people enjoy that is in high demand that doesn't happen too often is Game Jams, events in which game designers meet up and create something in a short space of time. Game Jams are quite difficult to set up and organise however. Developing games is relatively hard to get into and making a game is a job even though it might be fun, however Game Maker is software that is very easy to use to start making games but very hard to master.

I was thinking of an online game where you get matched up with other players (lets say 4) where you perhaps use a tool like game maker to make a game withing a time limit (lets say an hour) after this every player in the group plays and rates everyone elses game. the incentive is to get high ratings on your games or come up with game ideas you like and could develop further.

The game "Draw Something" for iphone inspired this idea:

Two players take turns drawing a picture to convey the guessword for his/her partner to guess. The person drawing is provided three random words, arbitrarily ranked by difficulty (a star is easier to draw than a lion), earning one to three coins if their partner guesses correctly.

After the player has finished drawing, the guesser will view a stroke by stroke replay of the drawing, without the pauses in between. The guesser is given a number of blank spaces representing the number of letters in the word, and a selection of scrambled letters.

Some people can play Draw Something and get by drawing stick figures, but some people can go nuts and create beautiful pieces of art with the tool set of the game this is what I wanted my idea to be like.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_Something
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres