Needless to say farside cow uses “cow tools” as weapons
10 Likes
so, over the course of a belt scroll bat em up on normal difficulty, you might fight like, 2-300 enemies, right? maybe if you make it a slower, more deliberate game with slightly tougher enemies, you could make that 1-200.
and among those enemies, there’ll be say 10-15 basic enemy types, plus a boss for each stage. so it wouldn’t be totally unfeasible to have a beat em up with say, four stages, where every enemy is a unique character.
for each of the basic enemy types, you use the same body, and make a bunch of heads. the heads don’t have to be super different, either: each enemy type could have a small pool of a few hairstyles and noses to mix and match. with a game resolution of 320x240, that should be enough detail to make them look different. then you use a name generator to come up with a name for every enemy that’s not important.
5 Likes
i say reduce this even further: 1 enemy per stage, each totally unique. hell, with only one enemy on the screen, you can get rid of some of the more annoying things about belt scrollers, like accidentally facing the wrong direction or being on the wrong Z plane to attack them. And since each enemy is unique and there aren’t that many of them, they can be really complex. i’m talking special moves, hidden attacks, complex AI, multiple death animations, even victory poses and quotes and shit.
i bet if you added enough complexity you could just make each enemy playable as well, like the Devil Bottles mode hidden in Banjo Tooie. you’d likely need to use some arcane button combinations to fit all that complexity on a controller but i think it could work. that’d be kind of a cool easter egg.
7 Likes
why i oughtta
6 Likes
So it’s a Persona 345 kinda setup with a time management VN portion feeding into a jRPG dungeon crawler or some other bit, who cares, we’re here to talk about the VN portion. The protagonist is followed around by some invisible emotion fairy who is extracting little shards of emotion from the protagonist’s emotional responses to events that is used as currency in upgrading stuff for the dungeon part- the idea being that more positive (or purer) emotions make better weapons or the like. So you want to do things that make your protagonist happier, or at least experiencing usefully pleasant emotions.
Problem is, it turns out that the protagonist is completely miserable and has a rich internal life and backstory that have never been communicated to you, the player. You can pick what they do day-to-day and what their answers are to dialogue options, but in order to get the shards you want (and, thus, emotional growth for the mute protagonist) you need to come to understand this character and what they want and need in life.
2 Likes
Cave Story II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold
3 Likes
Cave Story 65
4 Likes
Clay Story 63 1/3
1 Like
arkanoid bowling
3 Likes
You wake up in a, let’s say Animal Crossing, kinda town without any sense of purpose or place. You wander around and find that the entire village of characters seem to be suffering from amnesia. A villager holds a shell… “I think this meant something…I have a lot of them…?” and you have the option of assigning it value, like maybe you start with a set number of Actions (Take, Give, Trade, Destroy) and your choice of Action alters the significance of the shell (you can Trade, thus establishing a value system as things progress, Take would do likewise in a different way…or you can Destroy, thereby making the shell undesirable (morally bad or just inconvenient? (or something mourned over by the NPC thus resulting in…))) and basically you end up shaping this village and the meaning of the life for its inhabitants through your choices. Maybe it all ends with everyone killing each other for shells, or in some kind of utopia only to be exposed as a system created by your whims, with a sceptic/detective character tracing your footsteps. Maybe there’s a Big Mystery to solve about why no one can remember how anything was before you woke up. I don’t even know, but why not have a Meaning Simulator to create philosophical and existential mayhem in the way GTA does for physical violence?
5 Likes
i recently got a copy of weapons of the gods, and though the levels are just called rank 5 - rank 1, it’s still pretty close to this concept, and wouldn’t take much reflavouring to make it so
2 Likes
Not sure if this is the thread for it, but I’ve been having some thoughts about those alt-history console concepts (like the Famicube) and had an idea for a Game Boy cassette adaptor (as a portable equivalent to the FDS). I’m sure that it would be imminently stylish, but aggrivating to actually play.
2 Likes
the games would have to either be very very small in size, or maybe it could have some system where you preload games into some kind of onboard digital storage from tape. (which would also have had to be very small, considering the limitations of the time)
(i think the pc engine’s storage for game saves is like 2kb?)
1 Like
A chess app for random-player chess. Each game, every turn on both sides of the board are played by a random different player. Players accrue ranking points by taking moves and by being in the winning side of a finished game.
4 Likes
mario game where the levels in the special world have names like “poggers”, “based”, “on fleek”, etc.
5 Likes
Dark Souls on Roller Skates
4 Likes
metrovania with a rival character also exploring the place.
they might get unique items before you do, possibly making areas of the map temporarily or permanently inaccessible! also maybe there’s some kind of gimmick where their relationship to the player charcter depends on when/where you first meet them (friends? enemies? frenimies? enemies-to-lovers slow burn?). when you complete the game maybe you could play as them, getting the items and seeing the areas you were unable to on your first playthrough, too?
11 Likes
Mutant football but you put both genders on the field.
So, like, you have however many races of sexual dimorphism as you want, right? Maybe giant spider ladies and big orc bros hoook up to make the hugest running back you’ve ever seen, right? OK I don’t knowe anything about football, but I know you need big guys and you need fast guys and you neeed accurate guys all together on the same field and you do that as fantasy races and you can just throw every dang gender on the field and when they play next to each other they get friendly like. I’m sure fire emblem has resoled this issue more gracefully but
sports seems to be about the generation of the future making up for the failures of the generation of the present and you can do that. You can just put that math in games and it becomes more emotional than just the math
I had too much whiskey and I assure you and am drinking water to get through this.
5 Likes
expansion for the my little pony ttrpg where the player characters are 00s deviantart sparkledogs
1 Like
a game where you play as a neat bug
4 Likes