game concepts

[symbioidlj]

I've been thinking recently about vesicular's post about gaming and my reply for a desire for more innovative games.

And I was pondering one idea that I had hinted on, which is the concept of altering the fabric of space-time itself. Then I envisioned a sort of puzzle game with a translucent grid, and in each cube, you could choose to "implode space" as it were. Draw the fabric of the gamespace into itself, and draw objects together by imploding spaces in this spatial-matrix. I don't have a clue how, exactly this could be made into an interesting game mechanic, but I see some potential there. It would most assuredly be puzzle oriented. I don't see how it could be otherwise.

The other idea I had came from thinking about our old OM competition. Brent, you remember? The one about balsa wood towers? I saw a bridge construction set called pontifex that uses real-world physics incorporated into it. I imagined some sort of architecture kit of balsa wood that allowed you to build a structure and have a competition online with other groups. It could be such a geek thing. I don't know how accurate you could get with the physics, but I'm thinking that with todays computers, you can do alright. to model such a thing.

Finally, I was thinking about collecting games. I think there needs to be more games dealing with such a thing. Animal Crossing is one of the most well known ones(although aside from that and the new Vib-Ripple, I don't really know of any others)....

I always imagined an exploration game, just to create a world of vast landscapes and places to explore. No fighting creatures. I initially imagined a photography type game(based upon the pilotwings concept), but then I thought about animal crossing, and thought about actually collecting items as you explore. Rocks and flowers, and insects. But maybe somethings would be best captured as a photograph. That may be the best idea for it. There was that aspect in Beyond Good and Evil, which I think is a great game, but I have to get back into it.

Anyways, aside from my hexbgon game concept, these are the best ideas i can imagine right now.

Comments

[vesicular.livejournal.com]

Actually incorporating the collection aspect into the tower structure would be interesting. Give people a place to find "stuff". Could be anything, twigs, rocks, coins, pins, etc. You could scavage around collecting things, perhaps you could only have a certain amount of stuff, or would have to barter your want into some places, or do some puzzle to get way to the top of a place to find something more exotic. Shit you could even let people use weird stuff, like dogs, or flowers. Make it real wacky.

Then you could use all this junk to build a structure in 3D, try to make it strong, and each piece would have certain properties so you could see what might work better with other pieces. Then you could do the weight test. Or maybe there are a bunch of different tests. Like a wind tunnel test, or a fire test. Then there could be an overall winner for best aggrigate score.

I sort of like the "build it then let it run" games. There aren't many of them actually. A co-worker of mine made a life game like this for an art show (http://lifevslife.com). It's great, you can build any life pattern you want and then pit them against any of the ones someone else made. But you never know the outcome until you battle them. You'll beat some and lose to others. It's a great little game, and is addictive.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

have you seen corewars? it's a simluation of a simple array of virtual computer memory, and you program using a specialized machine language, and you enter these programs/v-life creatures into the arena(the memory array), and which ever creature can fill the array wins.

It looks interesting, but I don't think I have enough skills to figure it all out. You may be interested in it, though. I'd recommend looking it up.