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goatandwatch · 6 months

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Hey, its me Again.

I’m back here to deliver another actual post, here not Twitter because here it can be longer.

Thinking more on the GameDev thoughts today, I’ve been thinking of making my dream game for years so most of this stuff has already been planned for a while but I figure I’ll give a brief restatement of the general idea of the game.

The Game Concept & Idea's I've Previously Thought Up:

So I love PokéPark so I want to make a game that's like PokéPark but the protagonist is a cute kind friendly character who communicates with the player, akin to OneShot, you meet the protag and become general friends, but you help out the protagonist so much over the span of the game that by the end the protag character cherishes you so much they’d be willing to take a bullet for you. I dunno maybe like a Yandere trope sorta(??) but that's too far, no "romanticness" to it or not as mentally unstable, just that the sweet adorable angel protag gets so dedicated to you that he’d be willing to do anything for you by the end of the game, mainly just that he’s innocent to the extent that the protagonist and player dynamic go beyond just like best friend as to “I would die for you” from the protags perspective of the player.

Its like PokéPark, so its a 3d segmented open world game that progressively unlocks more areas as you continue through the plot, helping more NPC's and doing good deeds, having fun controlling and cooperating with the protagonist.

I previously thought it’d be cool to add some kinda mouse control in a 3d space, like you can press a button and it’ll remove your control over the protagonist, like he’d go into a sitting animation until you retake control, the camera view wouldn’t change though as you’re still in the third person camera behind him. From there if you’re not controlling him, you can press the button again to retoggle control over him again, or (the reason the feature exists) you can hover your mouse over the screen and click and drag items with special indicators or colors on them.

As an example of this:

If February (yes I’m just calling the protagonist February now after my OC) is under a ledge, but you see a several boxes with a sparkle design on them on-top of the ledge above him, you can position him where you can see the boxes but he’s out of the way, so then you can pause control over February, hover your mouse over the boxes, and move it in four cardinal directions, likely off the ledge, in order to build a staircase for February to walk up after you resume control of him, thus allowing him to get on-top of the ledge. And that's the concept, its a tool used for puzzles, and also possibly to interact with the characters or February. Think like the pointer from Wii games with Super Mario Galaxy for pushing and pulling or shooting Starbits, or the on-screen gyro sensor in captain toad treasure tracker on the switch. I guess a glorified Wii U touch-screen but in-game with a pointer, and if the game gets ported to consoles then a button that does the thing and then your control just gets placed in the center of the screen for you to use the sticks in order to move and press a to interact with the mouse, I hope you get the idea.

That's all past ideas that I’ve already thought up.

But today I thought of maybe 2 more aspects I’d like to throw into this hypothetical PokéPark successor dream game:

First off, I really enjoyed playing through “SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE”, a sequel or DLC to Superhot, it did something really interesting where it kept the level format with different maps every level, but the interesting part is that most if not all levels had no invisible walls. That's the idea here. In PokéPark there are many invisible walls that keep you from falling off the beating path, but the idea is I design a normal playground area/level like in PokéPark, with loading zones so you can go to each area if you interact with the loading zones, but otherwise if you try to run out past the bushes or trees in the distance that you’d think would have invisible walls to keep the player on the path, there are no invisible walls.

The protagonist, February (again it’ll probably not be February but a new protag I’ll design, I’m just using him as a reference) will downright acknowledge either at the beginning of the game or through later text that he and the other NPC’s know that they’re in a game, but try to play it off as if they’re sentient creatures, not that they have predetermined text boxes and stuff, so February knows. Anyway back to the invisible wall idea, there will be a invisible wall on the outskirts of every map but it’ll have no collision, and will purely be a check to show if the player is going outside the map, if the player does, it’ll trigger some flavor text from February, where for the first time you realize you can go out of bounds February will talk a little about something along the lines of “Oh yea. The game developers designed the Park to have boundaries so we couldn’t walk out of bounds, but never actually eventually put thous boundaries in place. So you’re fine to roam outside the level as far as you’d like until you eventually hit the Skybox Floor. I know it might seem odd that there's nothing underneath, but it’s okay when the Park is designed to be a paradise. Also, don’t worry about falling and hitting that Skybox Floor, if you do stray too far it’ll just put you right back up on the ground.”

I figure this first explanation can be more of a “Pause the game and February comes up from the bottom of the screen to give you the dialogue looking directly at you.” thing since its more long-winded, but every subsequent time you pass through the no collision invisible wall check (flavor text check) it’ll be a "Hat in Time"-esque dialogue box that’ll just play as you continue to move, Hat in Time has dialogue boxes that as you continue to platform around display dialogue, with flavor text from February like “Going off the beating path again huh?” and “Nice to always explore outside the intended area, its interesting.” and such, just to recognize that the player is doing so. Though it’ll have a cool-down of every 3 minutes or so, so that going in and out of the check doesn’t just spam the screen.

Other than that, with the idea of no invisible walls, maybe the first area will have invisible walls or something just to give the player the illusion that there usually are invisible walls, but eventually in the next areas they might accidentally walk back into the trees where the visual design is trying to tell them they can’t be, and realize “Oh wow I can actually just run out as far as I’d like.” for the rest of the game. That and I don’t want it to be so they accidentally stumble close to the flavor text check, get the info dump cut-scene about it from February (as explained above), and don’t have the player make the realization that “Oh I just walked outside the boundaries, I can really do that?”, that’d be bad, the point is that they have to consciously be trying to do so. That's the point.

Also this should be obvious by this point, but if I’m going to allow them to go out of bounds then (nearly) every surface should have collision. So:

The far off grass behind the trees in the forest.

Likely the low poly or flat trees off in the distance.

Any hills or landscape in general in the background that the player can see on the main path from a distance, it has to be walk-able.

The player will be able to run onto or into them like they’re floors or walls, not fall through the ground, like no-clipping out of a valve game past the chain fence in TF2 on 2Fort, where the ground has collision despite it's out of bounds. Or! you can go to the PokéPark VRChat maps I found previously and go see if there isn’t invisible walls on that, if I recall correctly. That should be a good demonstration.

So, that's one, the invisible walls thing stated above.

Other than that I thought playing on the idea of the game developers and out of bounds stuff knowing the game is self-aware that its a game, my second thought today was: “What if I put a character in the game who was a real person in the real world but loved the game so much they uploaded their consciousness to it, and its not just like a random person or a fan but a developer of the game that was so passionate and caring that they willingly uploaded themselves into the game before release”. So every NPC in the game is a fictional character who pretend they have sentience and enjoy living inside the game, but one NPC is an actual developer, in his model and text name and all, he uploaded himself into the game. This developer NPC I figure could be just a self-insert for myself or something if I wanted to do that, or I could make it an actual character in the game’s lore, regardless they’d have to show up in the list of names in the credits of the game at the end of the game.

Anyway, this developer NPC would maybe first be found directly on the main linear story path where he interacts with the protagonist, and all the other NPC’s and protagonist include him in the dialogue as well. I could do a route where they don’t acknowledge him as he’s not directly written into the code, but the idea is is that the NPC’s in the game are sentient and have feelings as well, like February, the protagonist. After you first interact with this developer NPC (who I’ll just refer to as myself from now on), he’ll show up exclusively on out of bounds areas of the map.

He’s the only NPC to actually walk out of bounds, and that gives more incentive to explore out of bounds to find secrets or just to see the level slowly fade in less detail as you get further out.

But also, there’ll be a check for how many times each you load into an area, so if you load into the area for the first time, first time ever seeing that area, it’ll track that, as that number goes up to 5 or 10, you’ll see changes that specifically myself as the developer NPC will make, as because he’s uploaded his consciousness into the game, he also likes to tinker around and maybe build himself a little hut out of bounds, as that counter I previously mentioned goes up, you’ll see him slowly build stuff each time the level is reloaded. He’ll take apart pieces of the environment, like twigs or plank board’s lying around and use them to build a little shelter, and it’ll look out of place since it’s out of bounds, the ground it sits on will be a low quality texture meanwhile the individual pieces that make up the shelter will have higher quality textures because hypothetically the storytelling is that he took a tarp or board from the main area and carried it out of bounds to build his little shelter, and that's often where you’ll find him out of bounds, making cool stuff for you and himself to enjoy.

He’ll also offer more in-depth game-play tips besides the tutorial stuff you’ll be taught on the linear path, this is where if, for example, I were to implement a racing mini-game, there’s be a controls screen that’d tell you how to drive forward in the race, but my developer character would give you the tip that you can hold a button to activate a boost, and that button prompt doesn’t show up on the controls in the tutorial for the minigame, you only find it out by reading the text of this NPC, or experimenting and finding it out for yourself. Its like if the combo’s in fighting games at the arcade were exclusive moves people had to figure out themselves and pass by word of mouth, instead of those combo’s being listed out on a menu if you paused the game.

The developer NPC would tell you these as flavor text, tips about the game that you’d only know either from learning it from him, or by experimenting and getting lucky. Almost like the developers left in some cheaty button combinations or whatever to give them a way to easily destroy the competition in harder mini-games later in the game for example, Dev routes in a Mario Maker Level or something. It’d be fun for him to tell the player tips like that, stuff only the developer would know.

To wrap up this long post and end my thoughts.

The previous stuff I said regarding the developer I don’t think I emphasized the best, but hopefully you get the picture.

I like the idea of the player being able to just naturally walk out of the intended design path of the level, going past walls to the out of bounds areas, and then also finding the developer NPC back there just hanging around enjoying his time spent in the paradise he helped create, giving some exclusive tips to you if you talk to him.

That sums it up really with those new thoughts that inspired me to write this all down, so hopefully I might be able to develop a game like this someday, but that's a lot of work and free-time I don’t have.

I don’t want people reading this and stealing and using my idea, I hope that doesn’t happen, but I figured these were fun concepts regardless that if I don’t ever get to develop the game I want that at least I got those ideas out there for people to enjoy some way or another. I hope this hasn’t been completely rambling and you can imagine and visualize my vision in your head and think “wow that does sound interesting and fun to interact with!”

If you managed to read this all, I guess even if you skimmed it, then I genuinely thank you a lot, I know it probably could’ve been shortened, but oh well.

Have a great day regardless, I thank you a lot for reading.

And to the person who just scrolled from the top immediately to the bottom without reading, darn it, come on guy, give a chance to hear me out...

#actual post #text #post #gamedev #thoughts #february #feb

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