Your video-game ideas

[FlamingDbag]

I am paranoid to pubically share my ideas since once again I seriously want to get into the gaming industry and would rather not share everything, but...

I had an idea involving a futuristic medieval earth. It in my head it looks/sounds like Brutal Legend, Devil May Cry and Deus Ex combined as one. I get a feeling Mass Effect would have an inspiration onto this too but I still haven't played that yet.

[Jops]

I am paranoid to pubically share my ideas since once again I seriously want to get into the gaming industry and would rather not share everything, but...

I had an idea involving a futuristic medieval earth. It in my head it looks/sounds like Brutal Legend, Devil May Cry and Deus Ex combined as one. I get a feeling Mass Effect would have an inspiration onto this too but I still haven't played that yet.

I'm quoting you, but this is more of a comment to anyone who mentioned about wanting to get in the industry.
Don't take it personally, take this as general guidelines i felt the need to post as i see quite a lot of folks falling for the same mistakes.

The idea you described is basically a world setting. There's no mention, not even briefly, about the gameplay mechanics. Setting and story are important, yeah, but shouldn't be thought much into detail until you nailed down the actual game part. Nobody will hire you as a Game Designer for telling a story or describing a world. You'll need to define how the combat works, what appears in the UI, how skills are balanced and so on.
...and, most importantly, be innovative on this front. Saying something like "the game plays as <insert existing game name here>" is a big no-no.* Because that means you just copy-pasted the gameplay from an other game and shows lack of imagination exactly on the front where you should have more original ideas.

Also, just a fair warning... aside from some very small indie dev teams, no game designer gets to make a game exactly as he envisioned. You gotta deal with the input of the other designers, the directions from the marketing department, the time constraints...
No matter how good your idea is, you're gonna have to compromise A LOT. That much is granted.

*It's okay to the name other titles as an example, but you should still be able to describe your game in details without naming them.

[FlamingDbag]

(I'm tired so parts of this may not make sense.) I am trying very hard to think of ideas that haven't either been done before or not been done in a specific way/extent, so I am being purposely very vague to protect the idea because I am terrified that if it's actually a very good concept and I talk too much about it on the public internet shit happening. The best way I can explain it without someone (doubt it'd happen but you never know) coming along and stealing it is to give extremely basic details, such as giving game names that the gameplay concept is similar to as right now it sounds like a sort of mash up of those games. I really do want to talk about it in proper detail (as rough as it is right now) so I might think it through on how to explain it more properly without revealing too much, because right now I seriously like where this idea could go if I think about all of it properly.

And I do appreciate the guideline comment even though I just tried to defend myself from that. Thank you.

[Jops]

And I do appreciate the guideline comment even though I just tried to defend myself from that. Thank you.

Perfectly understandable.
As i said, it wasn't directed at you specifically but to anyone who expresses the desire to design games professionally. More often than not i see people coming up with a setting, scenario or story idea but didn't put much thought into the actual game mechanics and that's actually the wrong path to take.

Consider that, in a large studio, generally the process follows these steps:

1) Decide on the type of game (open world RPG? shooter (1st or 3rd person)? side-scrolling beat-em-up? ....).
This decision already has to come to terms with what your engine can go and how much you can invest in new technology.
For example, if your engine can't handle vehicle physics, then you've to give up on any idea about driving cars... unless you can afford to have a team to develop vehicle physics for it (and this all depends on time and budget).

2) Pitch the settings, scenarios and visual flavors. As many different ones as you can.
Then, they will be discussed and here the marketing department already steps in. They make their research and start pointing out which settings/themes seem to be more appealing to the audience and likely to sell more. Ultimately the creative director picks one after taking into acocunt all the inputs from the various teams (marketing and creative alike).

3) Expand the game mechanics.
Now you start fleshing out the gameplay details, like designing character "skills", type of enemies, size of the levels... and a crapload of other stuff.
Once core gameplay is done, you have the concept artists and writers move on in defining the visuals and the story.

From this moment on, things should be developed hand in hand. Designers focus on gameplay, artists on the visuals, writers on story and dialogs, (and programmers on... well, a lot of stuff, but we put them aside for the moment). The different teams should keep in touch with each other. You give too much power to the designers and you may end up with something like Uncharted 3, which has some very fun levels and scenarios, but the story, as a whole, is very weak (which, for a game, is generally preferable than the other way 'round).
Anyway, this is when things get real complicated. Game development can change direction multiple times and a dark ghotic horror game may eventually turn out to become as cartoony and humorous as TF2.

[alu]

I fiddled with an idea for a game a while back that I'd eventually like to come back to. It's a hack'n'slash RPG about Gods, prophecies, and intertwining creation myths that you'd discover as you travel the globe on your quests and such. You'd play as two Gods (Ink and Milk), and you can switch controls for different situations that would suit their abilities. Of course, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the gist of it.

I also worked on a stupid little game about a palace guard when I had the trial version of RPGmaker xp. It was fun, although I didn't quite work out the kinks before the trial expired, I would still recommend the program to anyone who just wants to fool around with gameplay.

[itsjustaar]

I'm still open to the idea of working on a "Best of..." Kemco ROM hack which combines the stories of Uninvited/Shadowgate/Deja Vu.

It'd still play as they have been, but there'd be additional RPG elements such as EXP to gain and different story paths. The basic gist being that you're guiding Ace Harding, the 40's detective of Deja Vu, on a trip that spans both a very gothic/demonic castle which eventually transports him to the Shadowgate timeline using descendants of the Uninvited universe. Spells would return, addresses would be replaced by the EXP and health system to keep track of, as well as phone numbers to keep tabs on alibis or assistants.

Most of the dialogue would be true in vein to the original games, and the humor, too.

I posted some mock screencaps on April 1st. Maybe one day when there is truly nothing else left to do, I'll take a crack at it.

[Tiquitoc]

Actually, I finished the ideas for the fatalities, but I only have around 10 or 12 characters, if I can finish all my projects, maybe I can do something...

[darkenergy]

I wanted to make a pigeon dating sim...but it's already been doooone /been reading about Hatoful all day

...I've actually never thought about it. Dunno why, but I'm pretty satisfied with what's out there. I'd rather rewrite the dialogue.

[Warlin]

FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODS.

This is kind of a throw-away idea since I'm obviously bogarting all of the good ones, but basically, you take the role of this guy who was abandoned in a random forest as a baby. Which y'know, usually spells death unless a wolf-pack comes along. In which case, still usually spells death. Anyways, the natural gods of the world raise you up to the point to where you can survive on your own. Then a few years after that, bamf. Some people decide to start chainsawin' down the forest you grew up in. You decide the best way to confront this problem, is of course, to murder said people. For the love of the gods, even! The game's story actually starts to get a little more complicated when this guy decides to think about what he's doing more solidly. Plus there's ruins exploration, and trippy stuff because shit yes, trippy stuff.

Anyways, to the technical aspect, it'd be a pretty simple turn-based RPG consisting of a one-person... party. If you can call it that. Whenever you kill a monster or an animal, if you pray at their corpse, you get BONUSES. The bonuses are permanent, and it's one of the only ways of getting stronger, as opposed to leveling because leveling is old-hat. Since I'm all into customization, you'd get plenty of chances to do that, especially in the realm of stats so you can sort of decide what all is important to you n' what not.

(And look: An early early early early early early early alpha screenshot from my Pythoning.)

And if you wouldn't believe, for someone like me that took forever to code :l Though this is just engine stuff. Once I actually get all of the important stuff to work, I'll start adding in graphics and get rid of the text-nonsense. (And get rid of the level stuff.)

Edit:
P.s.
When I say adding in graphics, I mean, I'm totally using graphics libraries that have already been coded because hohoh, screw that.

[MarioKong]

Hmmmm, if I should help making a game, I would go for character (and mostly enemy) design. Ive made enough enemy designs to make a goddamn comic just showing of those designs.

[MarioKong]

MegaMan Generations.
Similar to Sonic Generations, but with MegaMan!

[The Bearded Man]

Partial gameplay idea for a kind of beat them all & potentially partly third person shooter game about badasses with amazing martial art skills:


Prelude:
There's something that has been bothering me allot through my years of gaming (which is still forgivable given that it is the simplest way of doing things) which is when a character gets hit by a bullet or any blunt or sharp weapons and stays intact. Of course, some may say:"It's just a game." but it doesn't mean we can't build something fresh and amazing through the resolving of this seemingly "minor" issue. Now, how do we avoid making a game where the only consequence to a critical strike to the body is a moaning accompanied with a relative "HP" loss.? (Not to forget that a blade often just go through the character while emitting some silly light (probably to make the blade and the shock more visible) and the character would often stay without a scratch or any realistic change to his appearance while in real life he'd be cut in two and would die on the instant)

The big idea:
Of course, a game where the character "realistically" die at the first damage taken would be too hard and less exciting (in the instance the enemy would be nerfed down in order to make the game more playable).

The solution would lie in a game contextualized in a story of amazing heroes able to par the attacks of any enemy easily.

Here is an example of how it could work:
"The main protagonist is an amazing swordsman equipped with an indestructible (or not) sword and perhaps a gun. He has to face an army of bad dudes with weapons ranging from swords through rifles to mounted heavy guns. Automatically, the character would par any attacks coming onto him without the player having to control anything. If someone strike with a blade, he will block, if someone shoots at him, he will block too with a swift movement of his blade.

Now, the player will be able to make the character move, jump, attack (and perhaps make combos), add a counter-attack to one of the automatic parring and any other command aside from parring (unless we add a player-controlled parring specific to some slow bosses for example). What ever the player is doing, the parring will keep on going every time an attack is directed onto him.

Then where will be the challenge if you are practically invincible? The big idea is of course to avoid an unrealistic HP system and make any unblocked attack lethal or handicapping. There comes in play the concentration gauge. Given that the character is inhumanly skilled yet can still be overrun, the idea would be that each action takes up part of the concentration gauge which represents the amount of task the hero can handle at once. The more parring and blocking he has to do & add up to that the amount of jumping and running around or any other action, the lower the concentration gauge will be and the more likely he would make mistakes.

For example, if there is a literal platoon of soldiers shooting at him and he does not find cover, he will fail to block some of the bullets and will likely die shortly or get injured and incapacitated. This would also include missing a step and falling down, missing a jump, missing an attack or tripping (which themselves would result in a great loss of concentration too).

So the game would be about:
Keeping your concentration in check by limitating your actions while getting overrun & taking pressure off of you while owning your enemies with your techniques and combos like any BTA game (of course, the enemies too would die at the first lethal blow unless they are given a concentration gauge too but I see that happening more with some bosses than the minions.)

[Seven Rain]

MegaMan Generations.
Similar to Sonic Generations, but with MegaMan!

That's basically what Mega Man Universe was, though that didn't really look like it was gonna live up to it's potential anyway.
And try to avoid double-posting, homie.

[robybang]

A tower defense game that allows you to play as the offensive side. Basically, you would buy specific kinds of soldiers that would travel the path, some with specific roles for countering the tower attacks (i.e. A soldier with ground to air missiles to take out turrets, bomb disposal units that take out landmines.) The game would let you choose a defense army or an offense army and you could choose to battle any online opposing armies for money to buy more units and XP. To counter grinding or high level armies taking down beginners, there could be some sort of formula to calculate the rewards that rewards people taking out same or higher level armies more than taking out noobs:

Spoiler! :

XPt=(XPw/XPl) * Ml

XPt=Total XP awarded for the winner
XPw=Current XP of the winner
XPl=Current XP of the loser
Ml=Total amount of money the loser currently has

The money awarded could be the total cost of the army defeated. Both would encourage players to take out stronger opponents since better units and upgrades would cost a lot and require certain amounts of XP to unlock.

As for setting, I don't know, western, space, war? Western Space War? The only reason I'm mentioning it here instead of saving it for myself is because of the difficulties that would be involved setting up servers to handle the online battles and the fact that exclusively online games require a large playerbase to even make them fun. Hell, might as well make it even more impossible and suggest the option to play first person style for defense and offense. As offense, you could control a character to move ahead and take out threats and defense could play as a turret gunner and gun for certain enemies before they become a threat. I honestly don't like tower defense because once you set everything down, the game plays itself, and in some cases, not even that well. I figure some of this could shake up the genre.

[MarioKong]

A tower defense game that allows you to play as the offensive side. Basically, you would buy specific kinds of soldiers that would travel the path, some with specific roles for countering the tower attacks (i.e. A soldier with ground to air missiles to take out turrets, bomb disposal units that take out landmines.) The game would let you choose a defense army or an offense army and you could choose to battle any online opposing armies for money to buy more units and XP. To counter grinding or high level armies taking down beginners, there could be some sort of formula to calculate the rewards that rewards people taking out same or higher level armies more than taking out noobs:

Spoiler! :

XPt=(XPw/XPl) * Ml

XPt=Total XP awarded for the winner
XPw=Current XP of the winner
XPl=Current XP of the loser
Ml=Total amount of money the loser currently has

The money awarded could be the total cost of the army defeated. Both would encourage players to take out stronger opponents since better units and upgrades would cost a lot and require certain amounts of XP to unlock.

As for setting, I don't know, western, space, war? Western Space War? The only reason I'm mentioning it here instead of saving it for myself is because of the difficulties that would be involved setting up servers to handle the online battles and the fact that exclusively online games require a large playerbase to even make them fun. Hell, might as well make it even more impossible and suggest the option to play first person style for defense and offense. As offense, you could control a character to move ahead and take out threats and defense could play as a turret gunner and gun for certain enemies before they become a threat. I honestly don't like tower defense because once you set everything down, the game plays itself, and in some cases, not even that well. I figure some of this could shake up the genre.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/576124