Quick: Text-Based Platform/Fighting Game

How about a platformer controlled by text input? You type “run right” and the avatar starts running right. You type “jump” and he jumps. You type “stop” and he stops. “Reverse” reverses direction. 

This has big potential in terms of prepping complicated input combinations/controlling things precisely. For instance, you could say like:

“combo” = “run right for 5 seconds” + “jump” + “reverse” + “jump/flip” + “shoot gun”

Then you could type execute(“combo”) to execute it whenever you want. 

Alternatively, you can decide what commands to bind to what keys and when.

Multi-Avatar Gaming

The only games I know which include multiple avatars controlled by the same player are some roleplaying games (like baldur’s gate) and this insanely difficult shooter where you control two ships. Pretty much impossible.

But I like the idea! Morkney and I were talking about some games like this.

One idea would be a platform game with two screens separated horizontally. Maybe you could even control the size of the windows (who knows?). The screens would interact. For instance, you might have the top avatar (T) hit a switch for the bottom (B). T’s switch would open B’s door. But T has to hit the switch fast because B needs to get under a descending spike wall thing which is beyond the door which T is to open. The possibilities of how T and B could interact are endless. You could even occasionally have both guys enter the same world.

Another idea is some sort of space shooter. I started to implement a game involving two ships at some point – basically, the ships get a more concentrated/powerful beam as they get closer and a less powerful though more spread-out beam as they get far apart. FuN? Who knows!?

Any other ideas for multi-avatar games?

Related

How about a game called Aesthetic ?

Side-scrolling platformer. You have various colors of paint in your inventory. There is a central level from which all other areas originate. The central level contains various beings; whether they are allies or enemies is unimportant. There are also various doorways. Each doorway leads to an area, but must first be located. Once the doorway is painted with a color of paint, it opens. If a doorway is painted blue, the area it leads to takes place underwater. Black, at night. White, no enemies. Paint is hard to come by; the only paint available in the central level is brown. The beings can variously be captured, killed, or befriended via various routes. If they are picked up and taken into a doorway, their presence and type (captured, killed, friend) effects the type and presence of enemies in the area. There are only a dozen areas, but effectively about 150 unique combinations of doorway, enemy, and paint. There are puddles of paint here and there that can be jumped in. A temporary power, based on the color of the paint, is granted until the paint drips off.

Quick thought

How about a “living game” mechanic based, upon other things, on keystrokes and other data? For example, if you only hit the jump button rarely, the game takes notice and modifies the next level to require heavy amounts of jumping. Or if the game perceives that you took 95% of the clock to finish the level, and only barely scraped in with 5 seconds to spare, then the next level’s time is halved. And so forth.

Make a Pizza!

This is an ultra-realistic pizza-making simulation with some surreal elements.

Gameplay begins with a small circle of pizza dough held in front of the camera by the player’s game hands. Each hand is controlled independently using a precise control scheme, with complete freedom in 3 dimensions (3 dimensions of phase space, that is – you are restricted by arm length). The player must repeatedly toss the dough in the air, spinning it each time and then catching it as it falls.

If you spin the pizza too slowly it will collapse. If you spin it too quickly it will become so large that it covers you and you suffocate. If you throw it too high it will stick to the ceiling. If you leave it on your hands for too long then it will come alive and attack you (leading to the pizza-fighting mini-game).

Game Frameworks

A framework is a set of orthogonal features (composing a language) which can be combined to create a set of desired behaviors.

A game framework should provide a set of orthogonal features which can be combined to create most of the behaviors we look for in a game.

Let’s let G* be the set of behaviors we are looking to elicit in a game. These behaviors are usually things that can be said about the game:

- As the main character moves across the screen his sprite should change
- If your character touches spikes then he should “die”
- A character’s “death” means that his “number of lives” is decreased by 1 and you restart at some pre-determined point
- An attack does a certain amount of “damage” to an “enemy” if it is “hit.”
etc.

Obviously G* is big. Some people (see e.g. Kuroshi Suicide Salaryman) play around with the elements of G* – “lives,” “enemies,” etc. all attain different meaning. Some relationships between these elements remain, but others change.

The “completion” of a framework is the set of all behaviors which can be illicited by this framework. Turing completeness is not a strong enough notion, because many of the behaviors that we wish to create are time-dependent and hardware-dependent. We can only do so much in a minute, and so our framework cannot make a large trade off in the form of power for abstractness. 

We can also talk about a “semi-completion” or an “n-completion” of the framework – namely, all behaviors which can be created by “small” statements in the framework. For instance, a 100-completion  would be all games which can be created by using 100 elements (e.g. lines) in the framework.

We want our framework’s completion and, probably more correctly, semi-completions, to cover large subsets of G*. 

Next Time

I’ll write about “Fantasy Frameworks.”

Potato Games Future and Goals

I like the name “Potato Games.” I want this to be super-informal and not overly-goal-oriented. Just a place to put ideas about theoretical video/board games.

My desired level of commitment is a post every 2-3 days. I want to be able to just sit down for 1-2 hours and see what comes out. I might post only a short summary of the brainstorm. The post could take any form – I might consider a topic in programming, a hypothetical game, some graphics stuff, who knows? Maybe I’ll try to produce some sprites or something…

Another form that my participation on this blog will take is that I will try to record as much pertinent information as possible from brainstorming sessions with Morkney/Zarvoc. Hopefully such a brainstorming session will take place during my June visit to Zarvoc’s ABODE, but many such sessions should take place before that (avec le Morkney). 

Oh god, I hate the word “session.”

One ultimate fantasy goal is that an actual game comes out of this. I’d really like to create a small demo of a game with one or more of:

1.) Weird concept
2.) Weird graphical design
3.) Weird mechanics

Focus on “weird.” Also on “good.”

Another fantasy scenario is that we make some sort of major critical contribution to the world of gaming. I think that “The Game” as cultural object has not been explored satisfactorily. 

Some ideas for posts in this vein:

1.) Criticism/review/investigation of “significant” existing video games/video game systems
2.) Description of video game theory - what makes a game “fun?” What makes a game “weird?” 
3.) Personal description – what are our relations to video games? How have our ideas changed?

I’d be interested to hear what you guys hope to accomplish (no pressure!) I created this blog and didn’t exactly ask if you wanted to be part of it, so I’m not expecting anything more than zero (please don’t try to sabotage Potato Games). But if you want to make a commitment, I’d be happy

Zombie Heist / Native Species

Birds’ eye view.

The main character is a criminal who works his way up the crime ladder, progressively getting involved in more intricate and difficult-to-pull-off heists. In the first level, for example, he needs to steal money from a bank vault in a small country town. He has special zombie-seeing vision that allows him to see all the cameras’ and witnesses’ lines of sight. Note that the criminal himself is not a zombie, but all of the cameras and other people are. That’s right. Zombie cameras (although technically it’s the security guards watching the cameras that are causing the cameras to broadcast the “zombie” signal).

This heist’s easy – there’s a camera above the door that rotates back and forth, a few zombie clerks and people waiting in line, and people passing by outside. He goes to the back window, closest to the vault. Waits for a gap in the foot traffic outside, silently springs the window. He times his entrance for when the cameras and tellers are facing away. He moves back into the vault, gets to the vault’s door, begins to break it open. This takes X seconds, which requires unbroken concentration, so of course eventually a zombie bank tellers happens by and sees him. The alarm goes off, and the game goes into the second phase.

It turns out that the criminal planted helpers in the crowd; one at the front door, one at the window outside. Zombie police shuffle in and the helpers open fire; the zombies have no guns, but mindlessly run towards the vault, trying to get to the criminal. The helpers are placed so that both of them can fire at both openings. They can’t be controlled by the player, but are positioned based on a blueprint of the bank before the level begins, and their firing patterns are dictated by the game. The main criminal finally opens the vault, grabs the stash, and breaks out of a different window and makes his way over to the getaway car, which must lose the zombie police cars before returning to the hideout. There, it is revealed that the stash from the vault is actually zombie anti-serum, which is administered to some captured zombies who revert into more helpers and getaway car drivers for the criminal. That’s good, because the next bank is in a larger town. Leftover anti-serum is sold to other members of the resistance for ammunition and sweet guns and shit. And so forth.

——

You’re a wolfpack that has been hired by alien invaders to capture various other species for analysis. You are no specific wolf, but control all of the wolves as a pack, giving them commands like “one runs at the sheep while two come in from the side”, “spread out”, and so forth. First, you’re in Scotland, cornering sheep. You have to take out the shepherds without suffering too many wolf casualties and fatalities from their hooked canes. Then, surround the sheep and push them against the cliff, into a densely concentrated group, where they can be beamed up. (The alien beam’s diameter is limited by their alien technology). The aliens leave 10%, per your agreement, for feasting and general devourment.

Next, you’re NYC, where you control one wolf at a time, hunting out stray cats and picking them up to bring to a central area. You must avoid taxis and crazy homeless men with knives and such. Capturing babies from strollers is extra points. Finally, you’re in the Karakoram range of northern Pakistan, and you must move as a group, leaving one wolf as bait, in order to capture the 2-meter wingspanned Golden Eagle. Of course, all this time, you must eat to maintain your (as in the pack’s) health.

Stages 4-6; you’re a brigade (?) of Golden Eagles, who surround flying lemurs in Madagascar, bats outside the caves of Bornea, and pirahna fish (wtf) from the Amazon. Stages 7-9; you are pirahnas. Of course, for level 2 you could have chosen the sheep, and herded antelopes in Namibia. Or choose the bats in stage 5 and subsequently collect glowworms from the roof of the cave while avoiding getting tangled in their sticky webs. And so forth.

Mrs. Bingle

This game centers on the interactions between a preocious asshole junior-high student Bob and his teacher (Mrs. Bingle). 

Basically, the game is separated into stages where Bob is terrorizing Mrs. Bingle. Each stage can be a different “kind of game.”

In the first stage, Bob is in Mrs. Bingle’s class, and he has to annoy her while keeping the other students happy with him, until she gets so angry that she tries to kill him.

This causes Mrs. Bingle to enter the second stage – Jail. Bob commits some horrible crime so that he can enter the same Jail as Mrs. Bingle and basically annoy her (set the other inmates against her, etc.)

This causes Mrs. Bingle to kill Bob, and be sent to solitary confinement. In this stage, you play the Bob in her crazy thoughts, terrorizing her from within. 

Finally, Mrs. Bingle, borderline-schizophrenic, pulling out her hair, indulging horrible fantasies about Bob and murder, kills herself. But death be not quiet! Bob chases Mrs. Bingle from the gates of heaven down to the fires of hell (chase game).

Finally, in the last scene, you play Mrs. Bingle in a sort of platform/adventure game, eventually making your way to the Final Castle. The level is composed of bits of Bob’s anatomy (many of Bob’s heads – truly creepy stuff). In the Final Castle you approach the throne to find a huge, buff version of Bob sitting there in a large golden suit of armor. 

At this point the game screen flips horizontally, and you play the boss Bob just totally kicking the crap out of Mrs. Bingle. 

This game shouldn’t be too hard. The focus should be on the atomsphere/creepiness/weirdness. 

-Bigsley

Games

This be a blog harr. We postin the game information, mateys. We be bigsley, morkney, and zarvoc, yarrr. 

-The Potato Games Team