Colorscape

This game was meant to make an MMO out of the game development process. As all structures in a virtual world are flat, being hollow external foils without mass, building a game world necessarily requires only surfaces, wrapped around empty space to give the impression of something internally constituted. Therefore, the two fundamental components of a game world are: surface and color.

The world I have envisioned is an endless expanse of colored, square tiles, with simpler colors being more common and more nuanced hues rarer. Players have the ability to collect these tiles, using them to construct whatever they can imagine, or trading them with other players who are so inclined. Advanced editing and production software would be integrated into the game world, bringing the creation process into the gameplay experience.

This last part is where my will was originally broken, as I am wholly incapable of such feats of programming. Unfortunately, the last five years have brought me no closer, and I am afraid this idea will die with me.

Charge Angels: Dark Tide

This idea stems from a long fascination with turn-based combat. Modern games are a poor approximation of realistic action, and it seems to me that slowing the experience down is currently the only logical way to capture the complexity of a physical encounter. I envision this game being played on a grid of some size, with a wide variety of possible options, all depleting a limited energy supply which recovers between actions, and can be stored in surplus across turns to be released to greater effect. This energy investment is called “charging,” which gives the game its name.

The player serves as the “Creator,” a deity of the Abrahamic tradition, who must design and deploy angels to fight for them against a malevolent force, tentatively called the Wrot. This evil spreads virally and turns ordinary inhabitants of this fictitious world into monsters. To cure the corrupted citizens, angels move throughout the earthly plane, gradually growing closer to the source of darkness and facing more challenging enemies. Their final confrontation is with the leader of the Wrot, a beautiful fallen angel who, denied the power of creation, must ensnare followers with guile and charm. Fairly generic fare, but somewhat compelling.

Silo

This may be the least unique of my game ideas, as the premise is well-worn. The player, stuck inside a silo during a nuclear attack, emerges to find an empty expanse, and must rebuild. Unfortunately, the game lacks further plot, and was mostly a vehicle to explore complexity. In my head, there were hunting and gathering mini-games, detailed building mechanics and realistic social interactions. At one point, I even imagined it as a simulation.

The endgame was to create a successful community, materially and logistically. Players would build shelters, produce food, arrange a limited government and otherwise maintain an increasingly complex system. There was even a romantic element, where players could marry and reproduce with some of the characters they met, having offspring that roughly resembled them.

Like most of my ideas, a simple starting concept became unwieldy, and my ambition was eventually defeated. However, the familiar plot device remains attractive, and could serve as the basis of something simpler, perhaps filling a survival or agricultural niche, if one exists. Either way, the idea has some merit, if it can be concentrated.

Selection

Derived from my enthusiasm for the Pokemon breeding system, this game is a dog breeding simulator. The player starts with ancestral stock, as in wolves, and selectively breeds the animals to form new varieties. With any process as intricate as heredity, there would obviously need to be some simplifying, but I aspire to create realistic variety in all visible systems, from skeletal and muscular features to skin, fur and color. There would be mutations and recombination, with a broadly accurate mixing of characters, though perhaps more blending than is desirable.

There would ideally be an online component, where players can share their creations and buy or trade for animals they want to incorporate into their gene pool. Shows and competitions could be organized, judged by any number of interested users. Overall, I think a global community could be formed, sustaining both formal and informal economies around the hobby.

The breeding system would need to be believable, and account for emergent variation. At some point, there would likely need to be limits to what phenotypes are possible, just as physics limits the actual process. Even with relatively few variables though, near limitless combinations could be selected for. It may not approximate the real system, but could be closer than anyone has come yet.

Gem Dragons

Here lies my obligatory monster-collecting game. Frustrated by the deficient underlying logic of similar games, I wanted a world with more consistency and was eventually willing to sacrifice realism to obtain it. Conceding that there is no ethical foundation for a collecting and battling game, I opted for an artificial world with no such considerations. In this game, players search for magical gems. Able to capture the spirit of a dragon, the sole inhabitants of this plane alongside humans, the gems are scattered and their collection amounts to the plot of the game. Eventually amassing a small team of animals, the player traverses the world fighting other “tamers,” and reaches a final challenge of some undetermined evil.

Theoretically there would be hundreds of species of the animal, with no real unifying traits. They would come in different sizes, shapes, colors and patterns, with horns, claws, wings and other traits reminiscent of their common conception. Ideally, they would be breedable, and hybrids of different species possible through some type of fusion. Similar to the dedicated breeding game, I want variation within species and for that variety to be heritable, with players able to build unique lineages, given a reasonable outlay of time and effort.