I devoted all of yesterday to coming up with an idea, then sleeping on what I thought was the best idea.  This post is not about what that “best idea” is, as I’ll be able to show it off in later posts.  Instead, this post is to describe some of the ideas I had; some are very similar to others I’ve seen on here, others are not.

I started off thinking of ways to make a non-computer game into a computer game.  I thought, “how would you use chess pieces as weapons,” or “how would you use playing cards as weapons?”  Although I don’t really have good answers to the above questions, they did get me thinking that the closest thing to a non-computer game is likely a board game.  Something where you only do one thing throughout the entirety of the game.  This is a common theme throughout many casual games: take Tetris, for instance, where nothing changes but the difficulty (speed).

So, what kind of casual game can be made with enemies as weapons?  I first thought of the most successful casual genre, the “match 3,” and how I might do a play off that in an interesting way.  I thought to have enemies of different types (in this case, elemental, i.e. fire, earth, air, water), and when one enemy is selected, other enemies of that type nearby are sucked in.  So, basically you turn an enemy into a vortex against his own kind.

I liked this concept a lot, but decided that there are too many issues with it.  Namely, if the enemies are walking from the top of the screen to the player at the bottom, they would either have to a) walk at differing speeds or b) take a meandering path, so as not to overwhelm the player before enough same-typed enemies got nearby.  One possibility to solve this is to have the player move, but that increases the learning curve and makes it significantly harder to play.

So, that idea got nixed.

Another idea was similar to the game Chu Chu Rocket, where your goal is, instead of getting players from point A to B, to destroy all enemies.  Basically you set up different blocks which make enemies go certain routes, then press play to see them enact out the scene.

I dropped this idea for several reasons: a) robots (which just seemed most likely to be in that situation) seem to be a widely adopted choice by other LDers this time around, b) I sincerely doubt I could create fun puzzles, and c) I would rather have something real-time.

A different play on this was to have it in real-time, but have robots which follow precomputed steps (e.g. continue until you hit a wall, turn left).  The idea was that you can pick up the robots and drop them down where ever you want, and they would then continue happily on their path.  However, it seemed like timing the robots would be hell, and puzzles would be even more difficult to create.

Other ideas I’ve toyed with but haven’t really given much thought:

• Making enemies somehow eat other enemies
• Standard beat-em-up with enemy tossing
• A God game where clicking on an enemy makes him go berserk

So, now off to work on my real game!  Good luck, everyone else!