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"If there is a book you want to read and it doesn't exist, then you must write it!" - Somebody
I come up with game ideas from time to time, and other ideas as well. I was just musing over some ideas in my head with my laptop on my chest when I thought, "I should write these down and share them!" and so here we are.
I'm thinking about stuff in the space between Minecraft and Second Life. It's kind of an interesting space, little explored and full of possibilities. Let's think about them for a bit, shall we?
The first thing I was thinking about was, what if you could only carry one or two 'blocks' at once in Minecraft? That would change the game quite a lot wouldn't it? Instead of going down with your pick and shovel and filling your inventory with stacks of dirt and cobblestone, you have to take each block, carry them out of your tunnel or cave, and put them down somewhere before you can mine out another.
That might sound a bit tedious, but if you look at the Minecraft Mod space, it's full of complex mining machines and tools to make things easier. This might sound obvious but when you think about it, if you wanted things to be 'easy' in Minecraft you could just go into creative mode. So these mods are all about rewarding effort with automation. What about a Minecraft cousin built off that principle? On your own you can only do a little work, but with machines and help you can do a lot more! Of course, think of the mountains of debris you would create if you couldn't compress everything you dig into chests full of cobble, or drop them in lava or just on the floor and let them despawn...
Thinking about that, making a harder Minecraft, I thought about the other direction as well.
Multiplayer Minecraft and Second Life have a lot in common. They're both "games" about manipulating and sharing the world around you. Some people play Minecraft in creative mode just to build, and some people play Second Life like that as well, sculpting and programming in things, or importing things they make in tools.
If you made a Venn Diagram of those two games, what would be in the middle? And what would be between that middle, and the two games? I think there's quite the interesting possibility space there.
Besides the people who sculpt things in Creative Minecraft, people take great pride in building epic structures in vanilla Minecraft. It's now possible to export things built in Minecraft to be imported into other games block by block. Or to display those Minecraft structures with high res textures and fancy water and shader effects.
I think that in the possibility space between Minecraft and Second Life you could have a world where people could sculpt fully 3D objects instead of flat blocks. Put together triangles bit by bit if you want to. The key is to making it feel like a game. People already sculpt such neat things in Minecraft together or alone; what if they had better tools?
I think that somewhere between the middle game and Minecraft lies a very interesting game where there are simple modelling tools built in. Something like 3D Dot Game Heroes perhaps, build a man with tiny blocks, and with swivels you could put in for joints. You could use that for creating player bodies, or mobs, or even static and dynamic objects in the game world. New block types of your own design.
It might be interesting to put limits on what the player can create, in order to enforce a certain similarity between players' creations. I remember one of the biggest problems in Second Life was style clash. Cutesy Cartoons and Gothic Space Marines and Spanish Bimbo Barbies don't fit in too well together. Or rather, they could if they were all drawn using the same colour palette and artstyle, which they weren't in Second Life. You could make anything in Second Life as long as it wasn't bigger than... I forget the size but I pushed that limit to its breaking point back in the day! (Literally, my doom fortress shattered)
I don't know if these are games I'll have the time and inclination to make myself but I think they're pretty interesting ideas.
What do you think?
I come up with game ideas from time to time, and other ideas as well. I was just musing over some ideas in my head with my laptop on my chest when I thought, "I should write these down and share them!" and so here we are.
I'm thinking about stuff in the space between Minecraft and Second Life. It's kind of an interesting space, little explored and full of possibilities. Let's think about them for a bit, shall we?
The first thing I was thinking about was, what if you could only carry one or two 'blocks' at once in Minecraft? That would change the game quite a lot wouldn't it? Instead of going down with your pick and shovel and filling your inventory with stacks of dirt and cobblestone, you have to take each block, carry them out of your tunnel or cave, and put them down somewhere before you can mine out another.
That might sound a bit tedious, but if you look at the Minecraft Mod space, it's full of complex mining machines and tools to make things easier. This might sound obvious but when you think about it, if you wanted things to be 'easy' in Minecraft you could just go into creative mode. So these mods are all about rewarding effort with automation. What about a Minecraft cousin built off that principle? On your own you can only do a little work, but with machines and help you can do a lot more! Of course, think of the mountains of debris you would create if you couldn't compress everything you dig into chests full of cobble, or drop them in lava or just on the floor and let them despawn...
Thinking about that, making a harder Minecraft, I thought about the other direction as well.
Multiplayer Minecraft and Second Life have a lot in common. They're both "games" about manipulating and sharing the world around you. Some people play Minecraft in creative mode just to build, and some people play Second Life like that as well, sculpting and programming in things, or importing things they make in tools.
If you made a Venn Diagram of those two games, what would be in the middle? And what would be between that middle, and the two games? I think there's quite the interesting possibility space there.
Besides the people who sculpt things in Creative Minecraft, people take great pride in building epic structures in vanilla Minecraft. It's now possible to export things built in Minecraft to be imported into other games block by block. Or to display those Minecraft structures with high res textures and fancy water and shader effects.
I think that in the possibility space between Minecraft and Second Life you could have a world where people could sculpt fully 3D objects instead of flat blocks. Put together triangles bit by bit if you want to. The key is to making it feel like a game. People already sculpt such neat things in Minecraft together or alone; what if they had better tools?
I think that somewhere between the middle game and Minecraft lies a very interesting game where there are simple modelling tools built in. Something like 3D Dot Game Heroes perhaps, build a man with tiny blocks, and with swivels you could put in for joints. You could use that for creating player bodies, or mobs, or even static and dynamic objects in the game world. New block types of your own design.
It might be interesting to put limits on what the player can create, in order to enforce a certain similarity between players' creations. I remember one of the biggest problems in Second Life was style clash. Cutesy Cartoons and Gothic Space Marines and Spanish Bimbo Barbies don't fit in too well together. Or rather, they could if they were all drawn using the same colour palette and artstyle, which they weren't in Second Life. You could make anything in Second Life as long as it wasn't bigger than... I forget the size but I pushed that limit to its breaking point back in the day! (Literally, my doom fortress shattered)
I don't know if these are games I'll have the time and inclination to make myself but I think they're pretty interesting ideas.
What do you think?
