Advanced Game Design

Graha, first posts are always awesome!

I'm toying with a few general game design ideas, but without first hand knowledge of how powerful the materials we will be working with this semester, I suppose I'll just have to go with the stars and dream.

My first idea stems from Earthbound gameplay and Diablo 2's style of asthetics (2d overlay with top-down scroller)

These concepts work well together because Earthbound was similar to diablo 2 in its camera views. What I want to take from eathbound are the fundamental characteristics that describe a "feel-good game". Cartoonish characters swing wacky yet slightly plausible weapons around beating snakes, mushrooms, and corrupt police officers to gain EXP and powerful special attacks.

What I take from D2 will be a skill system that allows for more in-depth character development, and "acts" that the player unlocks, each one more difficult than the last. For a 4 month project I would only attempt at developing 1 or 2 acts. Anything else is shooting for the stars.

The storyline is something I'd consider to be the most important part of a game of this type and so I'm not going to bother trying to write it all in this post. I have to select which idea I want before I go ahead and develop it further.

Another option is the ubiquitous 3d world PSO style of game. Again, this is fringing on developmental restrictions when I say this, but negating ability to program, I would have this game function similarly to Might and Magic; Dark Messiah. The main character is given few starting options for skills, but the main choosable classes will be DND primitives, ranging from Rogue, Wizzard, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin, and Cleric. The user will acquire a party of NPC's throughout the game who fill 3 "party spots". These members will be controllable in a similar fasion to the Might and Magic series, where the entire party is represented by pictures, and each players action is controlled time based (each character attacks based on the cooldown of his/her previous action, first attack in combat is determined by the "dexterity" stat, AKA initiative). Combat is thus real-time, and the parties movement is synchronous, FPS style. Ideally, this would be written in the HL2 engine. Of all my ideas, this one is the most developed as far as gameplay and features go.

The storyline of this game would take some working on as well. I would probably chose a more open approach, as taken by Baulders Gate, by Bioware. Once the main character leaves the initial area (most commonly referred to as the noob level), they will be able to navigate in a few different directions, leading to spearate areas of, say, a city.
Getting out of the city requires completion of a few major storyline tasks, such as, say, quelling a rebellion started by the Guild of Shadows.. or something like that. The possibilities here are endless. I just hope Bioware won't sue. Think the first city of Final Fantasy 7. Until you got out, that city was your whole game.

By going this route, I'm able to create a scalable game, which I can take with me and continually develop outside of this class. I'm heavily leaning towards this game concept.

That's all for now. More to come!