So here’s what I’ve got.
First, take Smash TV.
Now imagine you’re a dude who has a gun chassis. It’s not actually, like, a gun. It just has potential to be a gun. You could turn it into a gun, if you had parts for it, of course.
You also have a vacuum tube. It can suck up monsters. And turn them into gun parts! Random gun parts. Some monsters will have notifiers for what parts they’ll turn into, but if the parts you need aren’t around – like, say, you’re completely out of ammo – you might have to just suck up random monsters and pray. Sucking up a monster is going to be a bit difficult and leave you vulnerable, so if you have to suck up a bunch of monsters gambling, you’re in bad shape.
To make it worse, your gun degenerates over time. The various parts stop working as well, and eventually break entirely. You can’t use a broken gun so you’d better replace those parts before they fail completely, rather than after they fail completely.
Guns are currently made up of four different parts:
* Ammo – what you fire. Divided into three major categories, Bullet, Canister, and Energy. Ammo governs the behavior of your weapon – you might want to switch from Standard bullets to Penetrating bullets, for example, if you’re up against real big meaty monsters.
* Magazine – what stores the ammo. Also divided into those three categories. You can’t store ammo if you’re not using a magazine of the right type, and if you grab a new wrong-type magazine, all your ammo goes bye-bye. Magazines can also make your gun fall apart more quickly or less quickly, though of course the more conservative magazine types also have a lower ammo capacity.
* Feeds – what delivers ammo to the barrel. This changes how your gun behaves, from a standard medium-fire feed to a burst-fire feed, an ultra-burst shotgun-type feed, or a full gatling cannon feed.
* Barrel – what outputs ammo. This will affect how the projectile behaves when it leaves the barrel, including curved or homing shots, slow/fast shots, wide spread or narrow spread.
So it’s a frantic race to keep your gun working as well as possible while killing monsters with, let’s be honest, whatever you have handy.
Controls will be WASD for movement, mouse/clicking for aim and fire. That’s the plan. Let’s see if it works!
I have some platforming and a basic ‘click on stuff to make sentences’ thing so far, and the different words are tied to their respective object or meaning, so ‘executing’ the sentence shouldn’t be too tricky, but may require a little AI, nothing too fancy though 
Just a keyboard, mouse, headphones, and 23″ widescreen monitor.
