Ludum Dare

Posts Tagged ‘ideas’

It’s 11:30 am and our team is still looking for ideas.

It will be a 2D game, probably a shoot’em up but we’re still hesitating. Also how will it fits to the theme ? There’s so many questions…

…I have an idea: An inverted King-Kong designed like a dobule-screen Game&Watch machine.

I was looking some actual G&W screens, and they where really small. A single screen machine that fits in a 640×480 window has a screen of 320×240. So a double-screened machine is even smaller (640×960 window is not a good idea).

Of course I’ll not create a exactly copy of a machine, so I can change proportions so it can fit and have a fair big screen. But I want to show the classic G&W look.

Let see this afternoon.

Hey Ludum Dare Community!

A long while ago I made a game idea generator which combines two games at random and gives you an elevator pitch. I recently came back to it and remembered it existed, and felt I should share it with everyone here!

Best of all, I’m looking for you to submit your games to this website, to better help those who are using it. If you’ve made any game projects, or know of some other indie games, feel free to submit those games to be included in the shuffling list.

Anyways, that’s all! Feel free to check it out here and share some of your favorite combinations!

http://mudry.me/game-generator/

Thanks!

– Nick

Alright, here are the reasons:

The theme is terrible. For the people of the future, LD#31’s theme is “Entire Game on one Screen”. This is terrible because it does not spark creative and interesting game ideas. It sparks 2000 games that are all very similar, just like the other bad themes of the past. A few other bad themes are:
1. “Minimalism”, because LD is minimalistic by design. How did it happen TWICE?
2. “10 Seconds”, because it has a very strong obvious meaning. There were way too many games with essentially the same game mechanic
3. “You Only Get One” was bad because it is a restrictive theme. Restrictive themes make you feel like you have to force the game into fitting the theme.
All the good themes this LD were ranked lowest. Let’s take a look at some of them:
1. “Deja Vu” would be a good theme because there’s a lot of things you can do with it. Yes, there are better themes, but this one’s a good one. You could have “Deja Vu” be something a character says and it would be normal. You could have the player experience deja vu somehow, or have the character experience it.
2. “Chaos,” because the possibilities of chaotic games are endless
3. “Playing Both Sides” would be an incredible theme. You could have all kinds of plot elements, gameplay mechanics, and user interface with this sort of theme.
I don’t want to play any of my ideas. None of them seem very fun and worth making a game for to me. My ideas as of writing this are:
1. At the start of the game, there’s a cutscene. Guy 1 is sitting in a chair in front of a computer, Guy 2 is behind him. Dialog goes as follows:
  1. Guy 1: “I got this new game, want to check it out?”
  2. Guy 2: “Sure”
  3. Guy 1: “Kay, lemme load it up”
  Then, the game zooms in on his screen and you play in there, with maybe the occasional thing happening in the “real” game world
2. Some kind of metroidvania where every level is the size of the screen. No scrolling.
3. At the end of the game, there’s a huge boss called “Game” that takes up almost the entire screen
I don’t want to make any of my ideas, either.

I beleive that the root of all these is that people chose a bad theme. It does not inspire creativity. It does not fill your head with lots of brilliant ideas, and it feels too much like a restriction! It’s be great if the theme voting had a -5 button so we don’t get stupid themes like this.

If anyone wants to steal any of my themes, go ahead, but leave a comment. I might decide to participate after all tomorrow and might need one of these ideas.

…

zzzzzzzzzz

Getting up at 3am was totally worth it!

As soon as I got back to bed the ideas were popping up one after the other:

– a 10 seconds to defuse the bomb game,

– a memory game with 10 seconds to look at the solution

– a light-cycle race in which you need to turn once every 10 seconds or loose

– a bomberman-like two-player game in which the walls grow every 10 seconds

– a shooter in which the enemy can only be seen briefly every 10 seconds or if he fires a weapon

– and the last idea, which I’m not going to tell you right now (:P) because I’ve got to build a prototype first …

At 3 and a half hours in, the game idea has been brewing well, and once again, I decided to create a platformer game. This one will explore a creature from outside of time, entering a world in which humankind spends 10 seconds doing things, and carries on normally, while the game character experiences chunks of 10 seconds at a time in slow motion throughout the progress of the game.

I haven’t gathered enough life events yet that would take 10 seconds. However, the plan is going very very well for the time I have spent so far.

Thankful for a colleague to be keeping me company on the livestream! It helps to know that there is someone on the other end of the chat experiencing the same Ludum Dare crunch as myself.

I decided to head to bed for now, sleep on my idea, and gather level ideas for tomorrow. So far, this is progressing better than I had hoped! WOW!

(obligatory screenshot)

All the pieces laid out on the desktop. Progressing very nicely! ^_^

I found an idea so I thought I’d share all those I won’t use…

Not earth seconds? Can make them last as long as I want…
Second = unit of time? Nah…can be whatever the heck I want
10 seconds to complete a level?
10 seconds to live?
10 seconds to complete puzzles?
Every 10 seconds…
10 seconds later…
10 seconds love
10 seconds adventure
10 seconds is too long
What can we do in 10 seconds?
The longest 10 seconds of my life
Stop time for 10 seconds (does that even make sense?)
Go back 10 seconds in time
Rythm, music
10 seconds to save the world
Five seconds rule
Climax
I destroyed my life in 10 seconds
X
10 seconds to escape
Kiss
10 seconds exploration exploration of what?
Laugh
Next fly within ten seconds
Sleep
10 seconds day
10 seconds at different points in space
Run for the shelter? / Hide ?
10 second to build/make something….
Fix time
Oxygen
10 seconds delay? no that would suck

Something different from “10 seconds to [do something]”
Come on brain, be creative….

Time:

Space-time
Stop time
Decay time
Entropy
Linear?
Energy
Time travel
Light
End of time
Expiration time
Hourglass
Memory
Gravity
Fractal
Anti-time

Anyone reading this and still looking for the game idea? Check out this guy for tons of inspiration. And remember:

creativity rule #1

Well, that was quick to get down on virtual paper. My idea is a top-down scrolling shooter, in which throughout each level, your weapons and functions go offline, one by one, and during the final level, you would get them all back throughout the level. Where does the “minimalist” theme come in? Your ship’s skill set gets more minimal throughout each level, up until the halfway point of the second-to-last level, where it’s as minimalist as it can get. I was thinking of having a mother ship power one of the abilities, but then I just felt that it was too gimmicky and too hard to program, and didn’t fit with the “minimalist” theme overall. So, yeah, that’s my idea. I’d welcome any comments and constructive criticism on the idea, as well as any improvements of the overall idea.

Mostly just finished ideation… and I’ve chosen my winner.

I haven’t started any audio/graphics/code yet! Oi vey! I need to get going.

Ideas:

Batman
Where in the world
Michael Bolton running naked being chased by zombies
reverse guitar hero
symphony -> guy going around messing up others
symphony -> be the conductor and force others to mess up
Your mother
music notes knocking other music notes off the page
tanya harding
dr evil
darth vader
wreck it ralph
guy messing up clothes in a store (which were folded)
just a “solid asshole”
dr w/cure for something and you want to destroy it
fire hydrants with music (winner)!
robbing a bank

I probably won’t do anything, so I’m giving free ideas away:

Ludumception: a game that mixes gameplay with the evolution of themes of past Ludum Dares: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludumdare/.
Example: #1 the theme was “Guardian”, #2 “Construction” and #4 Infection. You have to kill the Guardian that is guarding a construction, and avoid the infection. And go on with all other themes. Could be a platformer mixing the themes.
FPS that goes from retro <-> modern look: some scenario is similar to DOOM, other with bump mapping, lightning, etc. Straightforward to do with Unity.
Graphical evolution Cube eater: a Pacman like where you have to eat an element that has the same graphical specs than your level (1-bit, 8-bit, vector, etc).
Expanding Blob: jumping forever, eats and gets bigger. You have to puke if you are too big in order to go through thin paths.

Ok, so I spent the time until now brainstorming to get what I want to do for the game. I got the main gameplay mechanics down and the feel I want to do for the game.

PARTICLES EVERYWHERE

That is all, but yeah. 3:45am it is now so I feel as though it would be best to sleep on the ideas and start progress tomorrow! There will also be a stream up! so look forward to that.

I thought I’d upload a few of my sketches from the game design process.

A list of initial game ideas on the theme "Tiny World". I ended up combining the "tower defense with pixel sized monsters" and "Insect cowboys on a bug ranch" ideas into one game.

Here are some variations on how the cowboy bug game might have worked. My favorite was one where the cowboy is rounding up ants into a coral. I would have liked to do all of them and make it a bug rodeo!

These notes show the gameplay that I ultimately went with. At one point there was a sort of terraced hill that the bugs would crawl up. That didn't seem to match the theme so I changed it to magnifying glasses.

I hope you guys find this helpful and interesting!

Hi fellow entrants

I’m feeling a little under the weather at the moment but that’s not going to stop me taking part! I have decided to go low-tech this time though, to make things a little easier for myself. So I’m planning to make a very simple command-line text adventure in plain old Python.

The theme is an awkward one, in my opinion, because it pretty much dictates a backstory rather than possible game mechanics, and all that springs to mind at first are artsy, depressing, story-based exploration affairs. I did manage to think further than that, so if like me you’re struggling for ideas a bit, how about these:

Alone doesn’t necessarily mean physically alone (Nobody understands me! I’m the last of my people!)
The aim might be to become alone (Hounded by papparazi? Defending your hermit cave? Looking for a quiet place to revert back to your gelatenous state?)

Anyway, my tools of choice are:

Python
Curses, maybe
Nano
Paper
PyInstaller

My goal this weekend is just to finish something, even if it totally sucks.

OK so the theme is “Alone” (you probably know that).

So here are my thoughts after 1 hour of waking up/brainstorming:

Survival horror, rather obvious but it’s still my #1 idea. It might be a lot of fun to create. I can make ZBrush zombies and monsters which I love to do 😀 But a decent 3D environment takes a lot of time and I’ll probably end up with a not very polished game (as usual).
SETI. Find out if you’re alone in the universe. Nice but what would the gameplay be like? All I can think of is rather simulationy and GUI heavy which is not my style. (or shmup, now that you’ve found life, exterminate it! :D)
“Home alone” themed tower defense. Might be fun
Dating sim / visual novel. 😀 But I don’t have the right skill set for that (my drawings are horrible)

So I guess I’ll get started on the survival horror to avoid getting stuck doing nothing.

Breakfast of champions

Posts Tagged ‘ideas’

Brainstorming

And few hours later…

Need A Game Idea? Try This Game Idea Generator!

Why I’ve Decided Not to Participate in Ludum Dare #31

My IDEAS

Ideas, ideas…

Humble Beginnings

Sharing my research

Some minimalistic game ideas for you

And already I have an idea.

Idea gen

Some free ideas. What about Ludumception?

Idea.Get() returns Success! Now time for Sleep()

Design Sketches

Let’s Roll

Alone in the LD