GameIdeas.org

Last week I was working on stuff that required a lot of writing and a lot of my time, so I didn’t feel like writing some more in this blog. But that’s pretty much over, so I can come back to updating this site. This week is a return to a random theme too.

So, this week’s theme is:

• Theme: Architecture
• Platform: Xbox 360

There are a few architecture games on the market. I believe The Sims was first planned as an architecture game, until Will Wright figured he had more fun playing with the people in the house than with the house itself. I also remember playing a creative bridge building game called Pontifex a while ago. Still, it would be hard to consider the world of architecture games as overcrowded.

The cool thing about an architecture game is that it leaves a lot of room for players to be creative. So many games are about destroying things, it’s nice to have some titles that are about creating stuff. (Don’t get me wrong, I like blowing stuff up as much as the next guy — probably more than the next guy, actually)

It seems spam filters have reached the point where they cause more problems than they solve. My ISP (Videotron) changed some settings in their spam filter it seems — I didn’t even know that thing was on — and it started killing every single email I received at my pagtech.com and gameideas.org addresses. Basically, nearly all the emails I was sent never reached me — and of course these morons don’t keep any back-up of the filtered emails.

SO, if you’ve tried to email me in the last month or so (or maybe even before) and I didn’t answer, it’s not because I snubbed you but rather because I didn’t receive your email. Please send your message again.
Now I really hate my ISP. I’ve been looking for a job and trying to start a business with non-functioning email for weeks. Not exactly conductive to success.

Link’s parents were the leaders of a small village near the frontier of Hyrule. When Link was little, the king of Hyrule sought to unify the land by invading the neighboring country. During this long war, that country’s army invaded the village. To make sure no rebels would rise, Ganondorf — that country’s king — made an example by killing the village’s leaders, Link’s parents.

Friends of the family sent Link to a faraway village to protect him. Years went past. During all these years, Link trained relentlessly so that one day he could have his revenge and kill Ganondorf with his own hands. Eventually, the war ended and the kingdom was unified.

Today, Ganondorf is still alive. He’s now the leader of the rebels against the king and he’s plotting to kidnap Zelda, Hyrule’s princess. When Link hears rumors of this, he sees this as a golden opportunity to — at last — confront his parents’ murderer and get his revenge…

And so the story of this reinvention of the Legend of Zelda begins.

There are a few things I like about this twist on the original story. First, the game isn’t about saving the world, it’s about Link’s personal quest for revenge. Most games, it seems, are about saving the whole world and I’m tired of it — it’s much more interesting when the story revolves around the hero’s inner motivation.

The second thing I like is that everybody is morally ambiguous. Link isn’t the perfect hero, he’s a guy who wants to avenge the murder of his parents. Ganondorf isn’t generically evil, he’s a former king who tried to protect his realm. And Hyrule’s king isn’t simply wise and generous, he’s a greedy man who wanted to control the whole world. I think characters are more believable and interesting when they aren’t just perfect stereotypes.

The third thing I like is that it gives some background story on characters. You know a bit more about who Link is and what drives him, but also about his past. Fleshing this story into a full game, I’d make sure to expand on all those aspects and make the world more believable and real. I’d also detail Link’s relationship with Zelda more, to give her an actual personality and some strength of character.

Game Structure

Usually, Zelda games are a sequence of dungeons — this game won’t feature any. Why? Because dungeons don’t make any sense. Why would anybody create a sequence of puzzles as the entrance to their lair? Instead, this game will be much more open-ended and made of believable locations.

You’ll get missions from various NPCs all over the world. Each mission you complete raises your notoriety. For new NPCs to become available, you need to get your notoriety high enough. Each NPC will have his own storyline, like when you get missions in Grand Theft Auto (but with less Phil Collins). You won’t have to complete all the missions to progress, so if you get stuck on a mission you can just concentrate on others to get your notoriety.

Combat and Controls

Zelda games feature a lot of combat and this one will feature even more. In fact, the game I have in mind would probably be rated M (if you were 10 years old when you played Ocarina of Time, you’re 18 now after all…). So the game needs an interesting combat system.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to create a more compelling combat system than the current ones. The main problems with current combat systems is that they’re really challenging to use: there are lots of buttons and button combinations to use, and you need excellent reflexes to win. That’s great for hardcore gamers, but new players have a frustrating experience — can you imagine somebody who’s first video game he plays is Ninja Gaiden on Xbox? The other problem is that the combats don’t make use of the environment, or very little.

The solution I thought of was to really focus on the environment, to make it the center of the game. It seems Peter Molyneux was thinking the same way, but he went further and created a demo of the concept. You can find the video here. Go take a look, it’s pretty cool and it’ll make things clearer. (For the record, yes I did have a similar idea — albeit it never went beyond a concept on a piece of paper. No, I’m not just trying to steal from Molyneux’s thunder )

Under this combat paradigm, controls are pretty easy on the Wii. You have a cursor, and the wiimote works much like a mouse. Click on the ground somewhere and Link walks there, click an enemy and he attacks him, click on a chair and he uses it to defend against the enemy, click with the other button and he uses it to attack. During a fight, Link defends himself automatically: he blocks and counter-attacks without you having to dictate his every move. This default fighting isn’t very powerful however. To gain the upper-hand you must use the environment to move the situation to your advantage.

This control scheme has the advantage of being very powerful and very simple at the same time. It also rewards being creative and smart, rather than just mastering the most powerful combo of the game. Even outside of combat it leaves plenty of room for depth and interesting puzzles — it’s the control scheme that’s the basis for many point & click adventure games after all.

The End of Zelda Begins

So, that concludes that little exercise of reinvention of a classic. I’m sure if that game were actually made that fans of the series would get upset, but I think it would be pretty fun. If it were very well done, it would win the skeptics over and get a lot buzz around the game — it’s not every day a popular franchise gets a make-over.

It’s not likely we’ll see any major change to the Zelda franchise, much less changes of that magnitude, so I guess we’ll never know how it’d play out…

In any case, don’t think that I don’t like the Zelda games based on this. I actually like those games a lot and think they’re extremely well designed. I think it was a fun challenge to come up with a completely different way to look at a popular franchise.

I’ve got less time to spend on this game concept this week, so I don’t have a full concept at this point. I did spend some time on it however, so I decided to make a post about my current thought process.

To reinvent a classic such as Zelda, I think the best way is to seek what’s missing from the game. Good as it is, there are a number of elements that could be improved and questions that could be answered in that game. There’s one question in particular I’m thinking about:

Who Are Those People?

We know very little of the two main characters in Legend of Zelda. Who, exactly, is Link? They show him as some random farm-boy or something, but as soon as you give him a sword he goes slicing through hordes of monsters everybody’s afraid of. Something smells fishy here… How did he become such a killer?

And what about his family? I don’t remember ever seeing his mother or father — in Wind Waker you saw his grand-mother, but no mention of his parents. Suspicious again. You’ve got this guy who’s a prodigy with a sword and whose parents disappeared mysteriously. There’s something to ponder there.

As for Zelda, it’s even worse. Usually her only personality trait is that of a bubble-head damsel in distress. Why is it her legend? She usually doesn’t do anything. I’ve thought about making her the hero in this game — make it her actual legend, rather than the “legend of Link that’s credited to Zelda because she’s royalty”. In any case, I’d like to do something more interesting with her.

A More Realistic World

Another thing I’d like to try is to have a more realistic world. Zelda games are like fairy tales — everybody is happy, the whole population lives in villages with about 10 inhabitants, the king is wise, and so on. It’s fine for what they’re doing, but after so many games it feels like it’s lacking depth. The world doesn’t seem real, it’s just some abstract background created as an excuse for puzzles.
For this remake, I’d like to have a more realistic setting. The gameplay could perhaps be more open-ended, maybe more action-packed. While I want to keep icons of the series (sword, shield, bow and so on), I want to get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense. And change Link’s outfit a bit (hey, it worked for the X-Men) for one that doesn’t make him a gay icon. (I don’t have anything against gays, but men in tights just aren’t cool)
That means no more dungeons in unlikely locations that have no purpose except as a challenge to Link. Villages and towns should be bigger than 3 houses and a graveyard. People should be pissed at you if you go into their house uninvited to break their pots. You shouldn’t get your money by cutting grass with your sword. And so on.
So anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. The most concrete idea for a game I have right now is Prince of Persia meets Assassin’s Creed meets Grand Theft Auto, but I’m not sure what that means exactly, nor how to make that work on the slightly under-powered Wii.

You can proceed to flame me for destroying your childhood

Yesterday I went to see Casino Royale with a friend of mine. It’s a great movie that puts a great new twist on James Bond. It’s similar enough that you recognize the suave spy, but different enough that it feels like a breath of fresh air. When the movie ended, the first thing I said to my friend was: “That’s exactly what Nintendo should be doing with Zelda. They need to reinvent that franchise.”

My gripe with the Zelda games is that they’re all the same: same character, saving the same princess, with the same tools over and over again. Nintendo is putting all their creativity in new controllers; it seems they have none left when it comes to making games in old franchises. Zelda needs a breath of fresh air.

Nintendo isn’t likely to to reinvent one of their top franchises — the rabid fans wouldn’t let them (quote from a forum: “Five Pieces of Heart to make a Heart Container? BLASPHEMY!”). So I decided to do it. My goal this week is to take the whole Zelda franchise and transform it into something cool and different — like taking Adam West Batman and turning it into Batman Begins. The platform will be the Wii, of course.

My other site got Digged earlier this week, so I spent yesterday tweaking that site and writing a new article for it, rather than updating this site. So that explains the absence of update yesterday.

Today, I’ve listed the missions of the Pancho Villa game. All of these missions are based on Villa’s life — or the wikipedia version of it anyway. His life required surprisingly little adaptation to make fit in a game format, so this game could be fairly historically accurate.

So, here’s the mission sequence. A few years usually pass between each mission as the game doesn’t cover every single even in Pancho Villa’s life.

1. Tutorial. Doroteo Arango, a young peasant, returns to his native village to avenge her sister who was abused by an hacienda owner’s son. As you control Doroteo, you must find and kill that man, then steal a horse to escape the pursuing police. The mission ends when you reach the mountains, where you become one of the bandits living there.
2. Now a well established bandit, Doroteo participates in a raid where the band leader gets killed by the police. You must lead the charge with what remains of the gang to return to the camp, where you become the new chief of the gang. That’s when young Doroteo changes his name for Francisco “Pancho” Villa.
3. Pancho Villa meets Abraham Gonzalez, who becomes his mentor and convinces Villa and his gang to fight in the Mexican Revolution, against the dictator Diaz at Juarez. This mission is the first military battle mission, with large numbers of troops fighting each other.
4. Victoriano Huerta, another general in the revolution, is getting jealous of Villa’s success and falsely accuses him of stealing a horse. Villa is sentenced to execution. As he is standing in front of the firing squad, waiting to be shot, a telegram arrives changing the sentence to imprisonment. Your mission: escape from prison.
5. The revolution is a success: Diaz is defeated. General Huerta sees this as an opportunity to seize power — he kills the new president and Gonzalez, Villa’s mentor. Villa joins the revolt against Huerta, led by Venustiano Carranza. But he needs money to fund his army. In this mission you steal a train containing 122 silver ingots.
6. Searching for more funds, Villa makes a deal with Hollywood to appear in a few movies. Your goal in this mission is to lead an attack while looking good for the camera. You have a certain amount of money to accumulate and each nice move you do give you a bit more.
7. Villa now has enough money for his army, but Carranza wants the honor of occupying Mexico City for himself. Pancho Villa is ordered not to attack the capital. Instead, he attacks Zacatecas, a strategic mountainous city considered nearly impregnable. Zacatecas was the source of much of Mexico’s silver, and thus a supply of funds for whomever held it.
8. Huerta is defeated and Carranza is in Mexico City, but he must soon leave the city. Villa takes the opportunity to take over the capital.
9. Pancho Villa’s stay there isn’t without trouble, however. After problems with the local population and Carranza’s return with an army equipped with modern machine gun, he’s forced to leave. Your mission is to get out of Mexico city alive under the attack of Carranza’s troops.
10. The USA support Carranza, seeing him as the quickest path to a stable Mexican government. They refuse to send weapons to Villa. In retaliation, Villa attacks Columbus, New Mexico — inside American territory.
11. The USA send thousands of troops to search after Villa. Your mission is to avoid capture and return safely to your home.

The game ends as a semi-retired Pancho Villa gets assassinated. His last words: “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

Wrapping Up

So, that finishes this week’s “Mexico” challenge. I think this Pancho Villa game could be cool and with a different feel than the typical post-apocalyptic setting we see so much of these days. Nevertheless, I feel this game lacks a little je ne sais quoi, it’s just not as creative as the result of the previous challenges. It may just be that it was the easiest challenge so far, though.

I’ll probably be using my now finely honed pitching skills at the great Canadian video game competition. As such, I’ll probably spend less time on this site than I have so far. I’ll try to keep updating it regularly, but the updates may be shorter and simpler.

In any case, return next week to see the next challenge and don’t hesitate to tell what you think of this one in the comments!

At its core, the concept for this game is a third person shooter, like Gears of War but with more sombreros. The innovation is more in the historical setting and the feel of the game than in technical gameplay aspects. Nevertheless, a few game mechanics are worth detailing.

Horseback Riding

Pancho Villa is renowned for his daring cavalry raids. Indeed, every man in his army had a horse — there was no infantry. As such, it’s obvious that a large part of the game will occur on horseback.

Controls while riding will be as close as possible to controls while on foot. As such, moving the horse will be similar to movement on foot: pressing a direction will make the horse move in that direction.

In Oblivion, horses are controlled like cars: left and right turn the horse but don’t make it advance, while up makes it go forward in the direction it’s facing. I find this hard to use and confusing — why are the controls different than on foot? So in this game, the horse will move like vehicles in Halo. That is, the left thumbstick will dictate direct movement relative to the current camera orientation.

Weapons and Ammo

There will be 4 types of weapons in the game that Pancho can carry with him. Each will be based on real weapons:

• Pistols (with unlimited ammo)
• Riffles
• Shotguns
• Dynamite (like a grenade)
• Knife (only used in stealthier missions)

As for ammo, I dislike the tendency of most games of putting it all over the place in random locations. Why are ammo crates laying on the ground in the middle of nowhere?

To avoid this, ammunition will be located in logical places in the game. Luckily for us, the game takes place during a war so there are plenty of locations where ammunition can be found. You’ll also be able to ask for spare ammo from fellow soldiers — another good reason to keep them alive.

Health

I really like the HUD-less approach to health that’s popular these days. You don’t have a health bar, but if you get hit the screen becomes red. If you can avoid getting hit for a few seconds, your health quickly returns to normal. It’s more immersive because you don’t have an abstract health icon on screen and levels aren’t filled with improbable healing items.

The problem with that method is that you can get close to death repeatedly and just hide for a while each time. It removes some of the stress of combat. To avoid this, the time it takes before you regenerate gets longer each time you do regenerate. Only if you avoid being hit for a very long time does this time return to normal. This makes it a dangerous proposition to get hurt too often.

Moreover, the difficulty should self-adjust. The game should detect how easy or hard a time the player is having (by how often he gets hurt, how many headshots he makes, how many enemies he kills and so on) and adjust enemies by giving more or less health, making them shoot more or less precisely and so on. This keeps the game fun for both experts and beginners.

Death

I hate redoing a part of a game over and over. It’s just frustrating to backtrack because you were surprised by some unseen enemies, especially if you haven’t saved in an hour. Frequent checkpoints are good for this, but I preferred the solution used in Prey better — So I’m going to steal it shamelessly.

When you die, a skeleton Pancho Villa will find himself in a Day of the Dead themed underworld (think Grim Fandango), being harassed by spirits to bring him to his grave. Villa isn’t one to give up on life so easily! You’re being pulled slowly toward your coffin, but if you can shoot enough spirits before you reach it, your return to life.

Each time you die in a level, you get pulled toward the coffin a bit faster. If you fail to shoot enough spirits in time, you really die and return to the last saved checkpoints. Regular checkpoints need to be saved anyway to make sure the player doesn’t lose too much progress if he real life intervenes and he has to stop playing before the end of the level.
Controls

Controls is one thing I prefer to keep standard if at all possible. If you use controls similar to those of a popular game, you make it much easier to jump in for those who have played it. In this case I’ll use controls similar to those of Gears of War.

• Left thumbstick: Move
• Right thumbstick: Move the camera
• Right trigger: Shoot
• Right trigger button: Reload
• Left trigger: Move camera to first person to aim precisely
• D-pad: Each direction is assigned a weapon type, pressing that direction switches to the current weapon of that type
• A: Run
• X: Action (use item, pick up, get on or off horse, ask for ammo, etc.)
• Y: Look at a point of interest (used to bring important objects to the player’s attention)
• B: Melee attack (pistol whip, knife strike, etc.)
• Start: Pause (shows a menu, the map and current objectives)

Listed like this, it can seem a bit daunting but it’s quite simple really. The sticks move the character and view, the right trigger shoots, you choose weapons with the d-pad — that’s the basics you really need to know. Other important actions can have a pop-up appear on the screen to tell you which button to press (eg. “X: Ride horse”) and the other actions can be mastered as you progress in the game, they’re not critical.

The theme for this week’s game is “Mexico”, a pretty broad subject indeed. After spending some time thinking about it, I remembered a popular bandit and hero of the Mexican revolution: Pancho Villa!

There haven’t been many games based on the lives of real people for some reason. I think it can be a great way to add some realism to a game: having real people makes the whole game seem more real. Villa’s life is filled with action and adventure — he’d make a great game character.
Pancho Who?

Who was Pancho Villa? For those of you who may not be experts in Mexican history, here’s a summary from the Pancho Villa Page:

No one can be said to be more synonymous with the wild side of Mexico than Pancho Villa - the rebel general of the Mexican Revolution who invaded US territory and led American soldiers on a wild goose chase all over the harsh Mexican countryside for months.

Along with Emiliano Zapata and Francisco I. Madero, Villa led peasant armies to a swift victory over the corrupt and repressive regime of the aging dictator, Porfirio Diaz, only to see Madero betrayed by reactionary plotters. Undaunted, the rebel generals led their armies in another uprising against the usurpers, routing them at every stage and ultimately driving them into exile.

In two words, he’s really cool. He started as a peasant, then became a bandit, then a general who could have become the president of Mexico.

Some trivia about the man (check out Wikipedia for much more information):

• He appeared in Hollywood movies to get money to fund the revolution
• He printed his own money to pay his troops
• He invented the tactic of maquina loca (Crazy Locomotive), namely hijacking a locomotive behind enemy lines, packing it with explosives, then sending it with the throttle tied down into the rows of railroad cars at the enemy’s rear
• A true womanizer, he married many women, maybe as many as 24
• To escape from US troops looking for him, he reportedly hid by having himself sewn inside the body of a dead horse
• Years after his death, his skull was stolen and is now (according to rumors) held by the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University (former president George Bush was a member of that secret society)

The man was larger than life and lived a life of adventure. He’s the perfect subject for a game.

What Kind of Game?

This game will be an action-adventure game following Villa’s life, from when he left his village to become a bandit to his victories as a Mexican general. The story will follow the main events of his life and you’ll see him age slowly from mission to mission.

You’ll control Villa directly, whether on foot or on horse. While he was a general, the game will focus on his personal heroics and not on military strategy. As such, a large part of the game will play as a third-person shooter.

Each mission will focus on an important event in Pancho Villa’s life. Some mission will be about him acting alone, in others he’ll have to fight his way through a battlefield filled with hundreds of warring friends and foes. During these missions he’ll be backed by other soldiers.

As I mentioned above, his life is filled with adventure, making for a great variety in missions. You’ll be robbing trains, evading US troops, fighting wars, escaping from prison and so on. Best thing is, Pancho Villa really did all of these things, so you get cool missions and a (relatively) historically accurate story!

First of all, sorry for the lack of update last Friday. I was away most of the day and updating would have meant rushing it. I figured no update was better than a crappy update.

Anyway, as usual I picked a platform and a theme at random and will use them as the basis for this week’s game design. They are:

• Platform: Xbox 360
• Theme: Mexico

The platform is great: I was hoping to get a challenge on a next-generation console soon. I love designing for handhelds, but a Xbox 360 is so powerful it removes most technical constraints. The budget for next-gen games are huge (often over 20 millions bucks) so that also allows for bigger ideas.

As for the theme, it’s very broad — lots of possibilities. Possible approaches, off the top of my head:

• The Mayan culture
• The movie Desperado
• Spicy food
• Grim Fandango
• etc.

I think it’ll be interesting: few games are set in Mexico, but it has a very interesting culture. Lots of potential, but the challenge is to choose the best way to do it. Come back tomorrow to see what approach I’ll choose!

Brem mentioned in yesterday’s comment that he’d like to know more about the storyline. Indeed, I haven’t talked about it much so far, so that’s my subject for today. Let’s start with the world’s story and then continue with how the story progresses in-game.

Background Story

Super-hero worlds really gain from having a reason why there are many super-heroes. It’s just plain easier to say “there’s a bunch of mutants in the world” like in the X-Men, rather than have to find a unique story for each character. That story needs to make some sense, but it can’t be realistic: no matter how much human evolves, nobody’s ever going to blast laser from their eyes. So here’s the story for this world…

It all starts in the near future, two weeks before the USA presidential elections. Terrorists have obtained the deadliest and most advanced weapon of mass destruction available: a grey-goo nanotechnological bomb. This bomb is in fast a mass of self-replicating molecular-sized robots: each robot creates replicas of itself by picking individual atoms around them, eventually transforming all matter into a shapeless mass of nano-bots. This bomb was detonated right in the middle of Washington DC.

Luckily for humanity, the Pentagon was working on a solution to this type of crisis. Their solution was a mass of reverse nano-bots that decompose the grey-goo bots and returns the original atoms in their original location. They’re able to stop the grey-goo effect, but not after it has engulfed most of Congress. Global catastrophe is averted, but the government falls into chaos as most leaders are now dead (the President escaped this fate as he was elsewhere that day). Elections were post-poned until the situation would stabilize — none have occurred in the years since.

Some nano-bots still roam free, destroying the environment they encounter, but their effect is undone rapidly by the counter-bots in the environment. The counter-bots sometimes make mistake — when they affect humans, these mistakes are often fatal. But sometimes, they rearrange the person’s body in novel ways, giving them strange powers. Our hero is such a man.

Storyline

Now, what about the storyline while playing the game? Continuing with the idea of giving control to the player, I’d like to generate the story automatically as he plays, giving a custom experience each time.

When I played pen & paper role-playing games as a game master, I rarely had a detailed story to guide players through — I was much too lazy for that. Instead, I had an overall idea of what I wanted to do, but adapted it to the actions of the player. That’s the process I’d like to emulate with this game.

The idea is to generate the story based on the current situation of the player based on story patterns. The game would look at things like whether the player is good or evil, whether he causes a lot of damage to the city or not, whether he cares about his girlfriend and so on. Based on that, pieces of story are woven together to create a mission. If the player is close to his girlfriend, the game could select the “save kidnapped girlfriend” scenario along with an appropriate villain and location.

Most short stories would be composed of 3 missions, each corresponding to an act in the typical three acts structure. Missions are generated by creating an interesting problem, but leaving the player free to find his own solution to it.

Multiple stories would be woven together, a bit like a TV show. You play the first part of the story, but then complete the final part of another one in progress and so on. Stories could involve each aspect of the game: work, love and super-hero life.

Generating the story automatically has the advantage of making it easy to automatically adapt the difficulty to the player. That way, everybody gets a fun and balanced challenge. You can also continue the story even if the player fails. He isn’t able to stop the villain from running away with his girlfriend? There’s no “Try Again” screen, the game just generates another mission where the player has the chance to save his sweetheart.

Conclusion

Admittedly, this approach is risky technically — generating stories is pretty complex, so there’s a good chance these ideas wouldn’t work in an interesting way. But hey, this project isn’t likely to be realized so I can have fun coming up with dangerous ideas from time to time!

I’ll try posting tomorrow, but it may be shorter than usual as I plan on going to the Arcadia festival in town.