Choosing a Game to Make

By March 15th, 2019 I want to start focusing on my next big game project. Today, I’m getting questions about the next game I’m going to build. I need a better answer than “I’ve got lots of ideas”. I’ve always had lots of ideas. I want to commit to an idea or a set of ideas. One of the best articles you can read on game development is this beauty by Derek Yu (Spelunky). Right now I’m at stage 1. Choose an idea with potential. I’ve developed and released a game (Eyebowl). It has more potential, but not enough to justify my continued work on it right now. I agree with Derek, that games that have a good chance of getting completed fall into three categories. Games I want to make (Desire), Games I want to have made (Envy) and Games I’m good at making (Ability). So what I’m going to do now is dump a lot of my ideas, talk about them and score them in each of those categories. I plan on sharing this post with a lot of people and hearing feedback on what games people would like to see.

• Space Station 13. (Desire 6/10), (Envy 8/10), (Ability 4/10)
  • Space Station 13, is an odd gem of a game. It was a highly moddable traitor game, where the general idea was you live on a space station where you had a job to do. The jobs were incredibly complex and it was really easy to accidentally kill yourself, blow up chunks of the space station or generally make life worse for everyone. On top of that a few randomly selected traitors would have some harmful mission to accomplish, steal something, kill somebody or blow up everything. Graphics were terrible, controls were awful and the networking was clunky. The capacity for fun was extremely high though.
  • Many people have tried to remake Space Station 13, the most recent example being Stationeers, which at this time is still in early access on Steam. Most of the failures seem to be from trying to recreate exactly what Space Station 13 is. The amount of user created content makes a complete rebuild a very difficult project. I would expect it to take a team multiple years, and probably building a whole game engine to accomplish exactly what Space Station 13 already is.
  • For my project, I’d try to create a similar game that captures the same feelings that Space Station 13 had. It would be a round-based life simulator, with traitors and/or catastrophic events. I’d probably stay away from space, because I want to avoid complicated physics on a high number of unique objects wherever possible. I’d want to have a hostile environment surrounding whatever castle/colony/work pod to keep everyone confined to a resource limited symbiotic relationship.

• Gang Wizards. (Desire 4/10), (Envy 3/10), (Ability 9/10)
  • Gang Wizards was a game I submitted to my second game jam. I didn’t have time to complete the prototype in the allotted time. It was basically Worms the board game. When it’s your turn you play your next available wizard, roll the dice, move somewhere along the grid based side view board then cast a spell.
  • I have since finished the prototype, but I liked EyeBowl better so I stalled the project. I could easily pick it up again, and get it to a playable state. Or better I could rebuild it with scalability in mind so that I can release it in early access and add features to it as long as it remains popular.
  • My project was intended to be a mobile game, I didn’t like the mobile market very much. So I think I would redo the gameplay and controls to be more pc friendly. I would definitely have procedural generated arenas.

• XMen/My Hero Academia. (Desire 8/10), (Envy 4/10), (Ability 3/10)
  • One of my favorite concepts is the idea of being born with unique abilities (mutations/quirks). So an idea for a game I have is based around discovering you have super powers, then going to a school/training facility to learn how to master your powers while periodically being called to missions to save the village/town/world/school.
  • This is one of the most difficult projects for me to do. Because I don’t have anything nailed down. My idea is for a feeling, not a game. It’s a green field/blue sky project where I can’t communicate anything to collaborators/stake holders because I’m okay with anything as long as it has the superhero theme with the following feelings: Discovery, Advancement, Survival, Renown.
  • The game could be a multiplayer game villains vs. heroes I picture a strategy layer like General Chaos (for Sega Genisis) and a battle system like Wizardry 101. Where missions are one team has a plan and the other team tries to foil them. I like the teams being a subset of 4ish players randomly chosen from the pool. So perhaps a mission phase where plans/teams are randomly chosen from leadership/dispatch. It could also be a roguelike singleplayer game somewhere between nethack/ftl where during your run you discover your power/mutate. Where you do your best to survive long enough to be the greatest hero of all time.

• Battle Cribbage (Desire 5/10), (Envy 3/10), (Ability 10/10)
  • It’s the card game cribbage, with a sleek fighting game veneer. I’ve actually already attempted this as one of my first video games ever. I made a lot of really silly rookie mistakes, backed myself into a corner and never finished the game.
  • It’s so easy. Cribbage is done, I can google the open source code and copy paste it into my game. What I’m really doing is designing a UI and one or more cribbage playing AI.
  • Cribbage for those who don’t know is a traditional poker deck card game, where the objective is to be the first to get to 121 points. Consider the points as hit points represented by a life bar and progress going the other direction, from 121 hit points down to 0. There are two point scoring phases, one is a low scoring back and forth one card at a time piece and the final scoring phase where you can get many points at once. It feels like a fighting game with it’s constant back and forth. Just imagine every scoring event translating to a fighting game move displayed on the screen. Cribbage is already fun, but it could finally LOOK interesting too.

• Keyforge (Desire 5/10), (Envy 9/10), (Ability 6/10)
  • My last blog post was about keyforge, so I’ll try not to drone on too much. Keyforge is a procedural generated card game, like magic the gathering. I want to call it a trading card game, but you specifically can’t trade cards. In any case I’ve been mad jealous since the game come out. It might be just the new hotness and I’ll lose my interest soon, but I love procedural generation, and I love traditional games.
  • While I do love traditional games, I almost always wish they were video games. Complex rulesets, resource management and the amount of time it takes to play the game are all vastly improved with the magical power of computers. You lose the social aspect, but people have lives and things to do. Sometimes I want to experience board games and card games without arranging a play date.
  • My project would be single player focused. Probably a fantasy themed unique deck roguelike. With a high level of randomness like Keyforge provides, I can expend tons of energy trying to balance for fairness. Or I can accept the fact that it often won’t be fair. It would be more suited for a rogue-like where there are good runs and bad runs. I picture a fantasy setting, where themes(like houses in keyforge) could exist around race/class/subclass or equipment or abilities. It would have to be really short like a 8-16 person bracket tournament, or I’d have to have some way to progress your character, increase difficulty like slay the spire or faster than light..

• Battle Royale Board Game (Desire 7/10), (Envy 2/10), (Ability 8/10)
  • Shortly after I saw the movie Battle Royale for the first time a thousand years ago, I thought it would make an amazing video game. I’m sure a million other people thought the same thing. Because I assume that’s the inspiration behind PUBG, and it’s clearly why the emerging Genre is being called “Battle Royale”. My envy level is very low, because although PUBG/Fortnite and the like are really good games. It’s actually very different from the game I imagined.
  • My very first attempt at making a video game, was trying to make this game. I was halfway through college and it was beyond my ability at the time. I did teach myself a little PyGame though which was fun and rewarding. The game itself has very simple mechanics that I could etch in stone very quickly. The main thing that held me up was art/animation, and I had a procedural generated board that I didn’t do as well as I could. A recurring theme you might have picked up on, I love procedural generation and I love traditional games.
  • The title is the best description of what my project would be; A Battle Royale Board Game. Players would spawn on a random space with a random item, very similar to the movie, items could be useless (spoon, paper fan, etc), weapons (sword, handgun, etc) or utility items (kevlar, binoculars, etc). When you kill somebody else you can pick up their items. I’d probably have a cap on the amount of things you can carry. There would be a degree of lethality to any weapon you have, combat would default to unarmed when you don’t have an actual weapon. where it is always possible to get really lucky and kill somebody with your bare hands. There’s a fog of war element, where if you’re quiet or moving slow you’re hard to find. On the other hand if you’re moving fast you’re harder to ambush. I have all the mechanics in my mind, I just need to try them out to see if they’re actually fun.

• The Awful Green Things (Desire 8/10), (Envy 6/10), (Ability 9/10)
  • The Awful Green Things from Outer Space was an old two player board game from 1979. One player played the crew of a spaceship, and another player played the Awful Green Things. The Green Things would reproduce rapidly and try to eat the crew, the crew would try to wipe out the green things, or failing that, self destruct the ship and escape. That premise alone makes the game exciting, but one more twist that I really like is the improvised weapons the crew would use had a random effect on the Green Things. They could kill them, stun them, shrink them, cause them to lay eggs or blow them into pieces that grew into even more Green Things.
  • What I love about this game is the suspense of being backed into a corner. From the crew perspective you feel like an underdog from the very beginning. Even if you are in the best position at the start, the lack of information makes every action a risk. Even halfway through, if you have a way to fight the Green Things do you stop taking risks with new weapons even if they may be more effective? And then again at the end, do you have a chance? Do you cut your losses and run? The game is really good at what it does. It wouldn’t be very difficult to implement at all, because I don’t want to change much about the game mechanics. There was a video game made, closely resembling it. “Space Station Zulu” back in 1982. I might name my game in a way that acknowledges it. “Space Station Whiskey” Or some other NATO phonetic variation that shows up on steam searches.
  • My project would probably be a single player turn based squad game. I picture the gui and combat layout to be similar to Darkest Dungeon. I would do my best to implement the game in a way to be able to support a versus multiplayer later. But if the game grew beyond a one-shot board game, I think the next step I would take is creating a campaign, with some choices matter aspect. The spaceship will be replaced by something a little easier to design with tiles/board game spaces. I would want to replace improvised weapons with different ammunition to cut down on necessary animations. I’d like to make it easy to import sprites, tiles and animations to support theme mods and user created content. But again, I would want to start very simple and just plan to make the game scale out for a very long time.