Paranoia...

In the dead winter nights, deep into the third year of a war that will decimate your world, you manage to slip away from the crowded death march you've been forced into. You can hear the guards behind you, and their dogs scent your tracks even in the dark. Somehow you've managed to spirit away a small blade and a few tiny rations. As you head into the mountains, you wonder how you'll survive the elements and man's own cruelty to his fellow man.

Executive summary: You will, as the main character, attempt to avoid detection by the authorities that pursue you through a vast, tractless mountain range. Cover your footsteps and learn to wait in silence while your potential captors pass within inches of you. Armed only with meager rations and a small hunting knife, you will kill game and keep yourself warm through the harsh winter months as you seek your own freedom.

The ultimate stealth game is one played not as the pursuer, but as the pursued.

Idea 3

No title as of yet

Taking no action is still a moral decision. In this game, you'll start out in your village by creating a home and starting a family as a young man/woman. You can tend to your fields or create wares to sell in the bazaar. All is good and ideal, except for the displaced refugees from the next village overcrowding into your town's square. You can ignore them and work around them, or leave your family and life behind and quest to discover what has been ravaging the adjacent village. But you cannot choose both. If you leave the path of a simple merchant or farmer, your life will never be the same...

Idea 2

Title: Deckhands

Executive Summary: As a new recruit aboard the world's most elite fishing vessel, you will be charged with assisting in repairs, baiting hooks, and scaling rigging. You'll live life on the high seas and keep your ship afloat, all at the direction of your Deck Master. Use the intuitive controls of the Wii to turn cranks, wire consoles, and repair hydraulic rigging. Patch the deck with a twist of your hand, and scramble to keep up with your captains orders, all the while defending against boarding by pirates on the high seas

Setting: Mild fantasy with steampunk tinges, but less stylistic than most heavy-handed attempts at the steampunk look. Things will gleam and be dull. Leather, brass, polished wood, and magic.

Idea 1

Title: Rainy Days

Executive Summary: As kids, when it rained was when we played inside and made up our own little games. As adults, we can't always get together for play dates or scamper around the house like we used to. So what about making a multiplayer game where we're allowed to create our own games and explore the nooks and crannies of a house much in the same way we did as children? Find wondrous secrets together, create high drama and epic tales with our toys, and slide down the stairs in our footie PJ's? Doing all of this in a multiplayer world where anything can happen, and most likely will.

Questing?

What is it about questing that gets me every time? Whether I'm playing WoW, Fallout 3, or Legend of Zelda the feeling of achievement when completing a quest or task rivals or exceeds that of what I feel when finishing a real-life task. Is this simply to state that my IRL tasks are too simple, or that I'm not trying hard enough? Does it cheapen the in-game accomplishments to compare them to real life?

In WoW, questing is directly linked to the abstract of progression. With the completion of each task, you are pushing your character towards the next level. That sense of accomplishment is fleeting in say, a small quest you may receive from an NPC. But the big-time quests associated with completing some of the later end-game material seems to elicit the same reaction in me at least. As with the smaller quests, it seems to be simply the doing or adventure associated with the quest that is the source of satisfaction.


..more thoughts to come...

The summer is officially under way and I've got lots of ideas floating around in my head, but not a whole lot of time to get them down. I'm going to take a page from Jenova Chen's mind and start keeping a game journal. I'll track what I play, what I think about games and design decisions, and ideas I may have.
Creating original ideas for games is insanely hard. I don't think many people take the time to realize just how difficult the whole process can be, and how discouraging at times. But, enough blah blah. I'm really just talking to myself lol. Time to lay down, write for a bit, read, and then get to sleep.

-B

Three more weeks

So the semester is almost over, and that will give me the time to search for a team to put this all together. First up: programmer.