Idea for
September 22, 2010
Summary
The earth faces off against the sky in an RTS style 2-player game.
Mole-people make tunnels through the earth and up to the surface. They find pockets of gas that they release into the atmosphere to pollute the sky above.
The sky competes by using birds that can control the clouds. They try to direct rain clouds near the openings made by the mole-people in the hopes of drowning them.
Another important element is a shared resource: trees. For the mole people these collect rain water and for the birds they absorb co2 gas and disrupt mole tunnels.
Theme(s):
Mole People + Windmills + Attacking With Clouds
includes topics that expand on the theme
We actually had a few other interesting ideas we generated in the brainstorming: a text based chat-game and a game about utopia/distopia.
Genre(s):
game genre with possible significant changes or important points
Strategy for sure and most likely real time. If comparing to a traditional RTS it would have significant differences.
- most likely no resource system
- no tech tree
- creating units may be done automatically
Mechanics/Systems
individual gameplay mechanics and mechanics categorized by system
Mole People:
- Tunneling Underground: mole people would work in tunnel groups. The player has a set number of moles that they can allocate to different areas of their tunnels. More moles will tunnel faster. Also there could be areas underground that are harder to tunnel through than others.
- Placing Trees
- building windmills: windmills can be used to disrupt the wind on the surface, making it harder to control the clouds
- Windmills are powered by mole-people on bicycles and so the player must allocate some moles to do this instead of tunneling.
Sky People:
- Controlling flocks of birds
- moving clouds with birds: birds can be assigned to a cloud and once surrounding it the player can control the cloud as if it was a new unit. Larger clouds require a larger flock to move.
- moving clouds of gas: the sky player must get clouds of gas off the screen or dissipate them with trees to prevent harm to the atmosphere. They can be controlled like other clouds but are typically quite large or numerous.
- merging clouds: clouds can be combined with other clouds to form special ones
- acid rain: a normal cloud mixed with a cloud of gas can cause extra damage to things it rains on
- lightning cloud: not sure how to make one but it does lightning which can damage trees and windmills.
- Placing trees
- controlling the direction of wind: the sky people can choose a direction for the wind to go which can make things easier for them if they do it at the right time. This change doesn't happen instantly however so timing is crucial.
- building windmills: windmills built by the sky people are powered by wind and are used to drill holes into the ground - note that we identified some flaws with this idea.
Story
narrative elements concerning plot, characters, world
The mole-people may have at one point been part of the sky races but then were banished underground. They finally decided to fight back.
Contributors
includes GDC members who contributed to this idea and were present during the discussion
Andrew
Adrian
Justin
Howard
Kyle
Grayson
Nathan
Perry
Shane
Lanz
Additional Comments
After the meeting if you have any additional ideas or comments please keep them in this section
I really like the acid rain and lightning cloud ideas. I have some ideas, but since I wasn't at the meeting, I don't know what extent the following have been discussed:
-tornadoes -> for use by sky people, used to 'clear' the land (eg, destroy all mole people's windmills, but also destroys the sky people's own trees) -> and earthquakes could be the mole people's equivalent -> would require a lot of conditions, though (eg, tornadoes would reqiure a lot of moving of different cloud types)
-take control -> sky people could take over mole people's windmills and use it for their own purposes, while mole people can alter trees (example: maybe by weakening the foundation around a tree so the ground there becomes lower, the tree's height decreases) to alter wind currents/bird flight paths
-weather/seasons -> give advantages/disadvantages to each side
(When I read 'sky people', I think Avatar. Coincidence?)