T-machine.org

Next week is the 7DFPS challenge – design, code, ship a game in 7 Days, on the theme of “first person shooter”. I want to do something unique and interesting. Here’s one of my ideas.

(if you like this idea, please re-tweet this to vote for it – I’ll decide which to do based on which one(s) people like most) Other ideas: “Runners”, “Follow”)

Title: “Metamorphosis”

Premise: what makes an FPS unique/special among games is the visceral, immersive nature.

But our FPS’s today all project the same, boring, 1:1 flat rectangle as our window on the world.

What if we had eyes on the side of our head? (a la most herbivores – you can see to both sides, and halfway behind you – but have a blindspot dead-ahead. This is why some birds flick their heads left and right all the time – they physically can’t look directly ahead!)

What if you were a Beholder – with 360 simultaneous vision. Looking ahead, behind, up and down all at once?

What does the world look like when your camera is 2 inches off the ground? (a rat’s-eye-view) … or upside-down, attached to the ceiling? (a spider’s…)

Core gameplay

In Metamorphosis, you start in a lab with one way out: a small mouse-hole in the skirting-board. A theft gone wrong, a wizard about to catch you “in flagrante”. You have only one chance: a giant bubbling flask labelled “Rat”. You gobble the potion, dive through the hole, and escape.

…but now you’re a rat, loose in a dungeon full of nasties. Absolutely everything out there is bigger, meaner, and (often) uglier than you. And sadly: loot won’t be much good, since you’re too small to wear armour, and have no hands to hold a sword.

Special effects

It’s a dungeon-hack with a difference: you’re looking for magic potions that metamorphose you into new and useful creatures. When you metamorphose, everything changes:

• the lighting (some creatures see by light, bats echo-locate and see only monochrome, other creates have infra-vision/heat-sensitive vision)
• the viewpoint (high, low, upside-down)
• the number of simultaneous “cameras” (one per eyeball…)
• the “lens shape” of each eyeball (normal, fisheye, warped, 360-degrees…)
• your strength/speed/vulnerability (heavy/light, low hitpoints / high hitpoints, regeneration…)
• movement abilities (walk, jump (rats jump so high they almost fly…), fly, wall-walk, etc)

Practicality…

An old friend of mine wrote a real-time 360-degree FPS projection 15 years ago, and kindly dug out his original source code + demo app for me. With his permission, I’ll post it here ASAP, but suffice it to say: this stuff is doable, it may sound a bit crazy, but I’ve experimented with it (a little) before.

Upgrades and weapons

…entirely dictated by the creature you’re currently polymorphed into.

Summary

I like this idea because:

• …polymorphing is fun.
• …there’s historically been very little experimentation with FPS cameras – the best you can hope for is some post-processing screen effets (depth of field, over-saturation, blur, desaturation)

Next week is the 7DFPS challenge – design, code, ship a game in 7 Days, on the theme of “first person shooter”. I want to do something unique and interesting. Here’s one of my ideas.

(if you like this idea, please re-tweet this to vote for it – I’ll decide which to do based on which one(s) people like most) Other ideas: “Follow”, “Metamorphosis”)

Title: “Runners”

Premise: what makes an FPS unique/special among games is the visceral, immersive nature. How many Oculus Rift games are not first-person?

One thing FPS’s should be particularly good at is wish-fulfillment. Well, something I’ve “wished” I could do ever since seeing the opening sequence of The Matrix … is superhuman jumps from rooftop to rooftop. (YouTube: the ‘jump’ program and YouTube: the opening sequence)

(I especially like the second clip – this is the point at which we first get proof that the film can’t quite be real; it’s the first leap down the rabbit-hole…)

Core gameplay

Runners is simply an excuse to do desperate, death-defying, running jumps from rooftop to rooftop, while being shot at (and shooting back).

That’s it!

Challenges to the player

Moment to moment during the game, the player has the following decisions:

1. Big jumps require big runups; you get faster the longer you run (Super Mario Bros stylee). Better plan your run-up, and don’t chicken-out and slowdown at the last minute!
2. It’s easy to stand-still and snipe: so we make you invulnerable while in mid-air, and create lots of obstacles on the rooftops, that prevent “easy” shots from a distance
3. You can’t jump forever (remember the bad old days of deathmatch quake bunnyhopping? Ugh). You have a fatigue meter that forces you to periodically stop and hide while you get your breath back
4. “Guns. Lots of guns” – long distance, wide-open spaces, enclosed target areas? This is a perfect excuse for overblow weapons of insane destruction. Remember Syndicate’s supremely over-the-top Gauss Gun? Oh yeah!

Decisions, decisions

Three conflicting tensions (no upgrades in this one! Just choice of weapons):

1. Movement: speed, jump-distance, acceleration (run-ups) … heavy weapons = fail
2. Accuracy: sniping and head-shots requires keeping still, keeping fatigue at a minimum (no jumping for a while!)
3. Positioning: is it better to circle round behind an enemy and catch them unawares (lots of jumping, weak weapons) … or go straight at them, guns blazing, and try to scare them into running while tired (they fall to their death)?

Summary

I like this idea because:

• …who doesn’t want to play in The Matrix?
• …”Canabalt … with guns”
• …most FPS’s give you infinite mass and infinite acceleration … this one makes things a lot more realistic and interesting
• …level-design will be easy! (procedurally generating skyscraper-roofs = WIN)