Well... not really day 1 of the design, but day 1 of blogging and throwing my ideas out into the open.
[Beginning bit]
So at this point in time, I've got three contenders for my first game. Obviously depending on how things go, one will end up becoming my focus and the others will either be scrapped as time goes on or be put onto the back-burner. I've got a notebook I've been scrawling in for about a week with the rough outlines of mechanics, themes and also research on other designers. I'm thorough... ish.
Okay, so, let's throw them out there. I've got a rough name for each, but these are in no way final.
[Idea 1: Colony]
Colony is set in the future; you and your fellow players each have been assigned a planet to terraform and prepare for human colonisation by your respective fleets. Each fleet requires resources to fuel the engines, materials to make repairs, etc. You can mine the resources from your assigned planet whilst the terraformer machines work and ship these back to your fleet, and the travel time becomes shorter as the game progresses. However, there's a catch; you don't have all the resources that your fleet needs.
Every player can produce Fuel, used to send trading ships or supply vessels back and forth between each other and the various fleets. Of the remaining four resources, each player can only produce two, and must trade for the others.
I have rough outlines for how the scoring works, but I'm struggling a bit in figuring out a way to make the trading more of a worthwhile thing. At the moment I can solitaire the game in my mind so that if you do NO trading, you end up with the same score as everyone else, but I can't wrap my head around prolific trading and where the scores would end... I've played with random resource generation mechanics where zero-production is very rare, but still has a compensation, and I think it could go somewhere. I need to think on it more, pretty much!
[Idea 2: Monster Closets]
Monster Closets is a procedurally-generated map game in the ilk of Zombies!!!, Betrayal at House on the Hill, etc, with elements of things like Space Hulk and Alien. Basically, I thought of it as a dungeon-explorer in space for loot and salvage for points (Loot for the Loot Throne!) but I'm struggling with the feeling that it's coming out in my mind too much like BAHOTH... This might just be because it's the most recent and well-received version of this type of game but I'm doubting myself a fair bit. I haven't really worked on it much simply because of that niggling voice at the back of my head, however Tuesday and Thursday are my days off this week, so I'll be giving it some more thought then and will post results here.
[Idea 3: Super Mega Ultra-Robo Fight]
SMURF is probably one of my more insane ideas to date; who doesn't love Mecha animé? Giant robots fighting hordes of OTHER giant robots, and facing off against a supremely powerful Big Bad whilst special powers and weapons seemingly work by voice-activation and screaming?
Inspired a little bit by the ship-building mechanic at the beginning of Galaxy Trucker (and a heavy session of cramming a bunch of Macross, Evangelion and Gundam fight scenes on YouTube), SMURF is a game where you choose a Giant Mecha at the beginning of the game (Light, Medium or Heavy) and outfit it with various different weapons and Special Abilities. Each weapon you choose will have a cost to it, and this will directly impact your character card (which will work with sliders, yay!). Obviously, certain weapons will end up being more powerful with certain Mecha chassis, but they'll cost more.
The game would ideally be asymmetrical, with one player taking the part of the Big Bad. The player gets to build their OWN Mecha, which is more powerful and scales with the number of opponents. I was playing around with a scoring system so that the Big Bad has a supply of minions they can use to send after the heroes in waves; each wave they use reduces the Big Bad's score, but can cause damage and makes the heroes use up their special abilities, making the Final Battle easier! At any point, the Big Bad can choose to engage in combat with the heroes. So, to recap; the sooner the Big Bad goes out, the more points he scores, but the stronger and more well-equipped the heroes will be in order to be on a more even keel...
[Conclusion-like part]
So, there we go. Those are my three ideas at present and I leave them in your capable hands... your capable, shredding hands that tear things apart and glue them together and gnaw upon the- Yeah, so...
I've got themes, rough (ROUGH) ideas for mechanics and resource-management and scoring elements, and I'm happy to have you guys pretty much say what you want. Thanks very much for your time!
