resource design club 10.01

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

Add a New Comment
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License