Yes, Games Guy, You Do Need An Idea Man
Ugh. I love the gaming/coding community. But that one article endlessly circulating on Twitter, "No, Idea Guy, I Won't Make Your Game For You", the one with the picture of the dude with the endlessly punchable face, drives me nuts.
On one hand, yes, it's entirely true. A good game coder doesn't really need outside ideas. Any musician, writer, artist, coder worth his or her salt has more designs than they'll ever be able to implement. It's even highly relatable to me personally. People often tell me their half-baked, vague concepts for a novel, all of them terrible. They're not even writers.
Motherfucker, I have a twenty novel queue in my head, on my computer, and on paper. I'll likely never finish them all before I die. Ideas don't stop coming just because you already have a lot of them.
And yet...
There is probably one original game for every thousand clones released. We all know a lot of these are shovelware, using source bought off of eBay. But there are also tons of entry-level game coders learning the ropes by rehashing rehashes of rehashes.
Much like a novel, if you're not adding something new to the mix, I fail to see the point. You don't have to invent a new genre to create something noteworthy, but if you're working on yet another clone, you're wasting your life.
Look at Braid, for example. Even without the amazing storyline and puzzles, it stands out as the most incredibly lush Mario game of all time. Jonathan Blow took a tired genre and reinvented it from the ground up.
Jon Mak has done this a few times, most notably with Everyday Shooter and the somewhat poorly named Sound Shapes. They're both staggeringly inventive, even though they operate within existing frameworks.
Even if you're essentially recreating an existing game to get some dirt under your nails as a game coder, there's absolutely no reason not to innovate along the way. What's the point of learning to code by reinventing the wheel so you can do something innovative later, when you can strive to do that from the beginning?
I do understand the point of view of people who have lots of solid ideas. They're the ones staying up late, working their asses off, often in their spare time, to bring their vision to life. But to suggest that anyone who can half-ass code a game is also a font of solid new game ideas is a dangerous fallacy. All you have to do is peruse any app store's game section to realize that.
What if every one of those clone games was instead an attempt to do something new?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that projecting a justifiably arrogant attitude exuded by top game designer/coders onto the unwashed masses of mediocre coders is a detriment to game design. Some people can write code, but have no idea as to what constitutes a game worthy of writing in the first place.
Yes, some people are merely trying to cash in on a Candy Crush genre wave or whatever. And I sort of respect that. But that only leads to a million samey games, none of which are better than the original version they're copying.
Meh.
Ideas are bigger than code is the bottom line. I feel video games are art, and should be approached as such.
Now, I quit writing games somewhere around the time I started having sex with girls and smoking pot. I instead moved on to making music, and then ultimately writing novels. While I would love to devote the rest of my life to bringing a few of my visions to life, that's clearly not going to happen.
Instead, I used my favorite game concepts as background for a novella I wrote as a tribute to Douglas Adams. If you're a coder working on an unoriginal project, by all means, feel free to pursue one of these, instead.
Dual-joystick action game:
Chapter 4 – Reaper Madness
Prail was playtesting Reaper Madness at the moment. It was inspired in part by Piers Anthony’s On a Pale Horse and Eugene Jarvis’ seminal game Robotron, with a dash of The Sims.
It was a two-joystick affair, isometric three-quarter top down view. You were Death, aka the Grim Reaper, and your job was to harvest souls. The levels were progressive, one through ninety-nine. At its core was the premise that everyone hated The Sims. You would run in wearing a black cowl, swinging a scythe, and dispatch the people occupying each level. However, not everyone was marked for death, and you were penalized for killing the wrong people. Each level contained more people than the last, starting with the training level, a single room containing a single person, all the way through Armageddon, in which you had to kill ‘em all.
You moved the reaper with the left controller, and swung or threw the scythe with the right. Jumping was achieved by pushing down on the left stick, while depressing the right made the weapon fly out in the direction you were facing.
Prail worked diligently at creative level design. For instance, there were driving levels. Death rode a pale horse, naturally, but it could transform into a red Isuzu Amigo jeep as necessary. On a few levels, there was someone ahead of you on the highway destined to crash and die, and you had to catch up with them by the time they did so, lest their souls go uncollected. But for the most part, Death just rode or drove from scenario to scenario. Each level contained more souls than the last, which led to a few design problems. Currently, the Armageddon level was unwinnable, because by using Death’s conventional weapons, the sims multiplied faster than you could kill them.
Early playtesters found controversy in the killing of women and children, but their complaints fell upon deaf ears. In fact, Prail liked to see them squirm. The current favorite levels were the burning building, and the crashing airplane. Level eighty-eight was a mammoth skyscraper that was on fire ala the old Earth film The Towering Inferno. You raced from bottom to top, harvesting everyone. The combination of smoke, fire, heat and adrenaline was thrilling.
Another earlier level, thirty-three, placed you on an airplane plummeting to Earth while the pilot struggled to regain control. Some players opted to kill the pilot and copilot first, interestingly enough. Either way, Death survived. But players who played the level as Prail intended it were rewarded with a view of Death leaping from the plane with his shimmering black parachute.
She pondered the Armageddon problem and decided that she would probably just use some crude hack. Death could freeze the level for sixty seconds, but that wasn’t much help when you had an entire planet to eradicate. At least game design took her mind off of her work and personal problems for a while.
Retro Reboots:
Prail was aquiver. She’d never had a suitor before, a gentleman caller. She was so nervous at the prospect, she cranked out three quick games to relax. All three were updated classics. It was very rewarding to Prail to write updates to classic games. It was sort of like buying a cheap paint-by-numbers set at the Earth2 Wal-Mart and ending up with a Michelangelo when you were finished. She could turn off her brain and just do, for a change.
Prail found that the simplest way to update a game, eight-bit being her favorite source material, was to take them from two to three dimensions. She had always wondered why no one had made Conway’s Game of Life in 3D, so she started there. Prail wrote it in an hour, in sixteen lines of code, impressing herself. And she was notoriously difficult to please.
She resisted the urge to update the graphics or add sound. It started out as asterisks, and it seemed almost blasphemous to fuxor with that aesthetic, so she left well enough alone.
Next, she wrote Snafu 3D, an update of an old Mattel Intellivision game. In it, multiple flatworms moved around the screen leaving trails and trying to trap one another. If you hit a wall or a trail, game over. It had inspired many clones, including the light cycle sequence in Tron, a favorite on Praxis. Prail liked the simple complexity it possessed.
This project took longer, more than two hours, mainly because the jump to 3D required a lot of intelligent camera work and a new controller configuration. She toyed with the colour scheme a bit, and then reverted back to the original primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green.
Feeling somewhat pleased with herself, Prail took a deep breath and got herself a glass of nectar. Her final update before naptime (Praxalians didn’t attend full sleep cycles, but instead took Edison-like catnaps every few hours) was the Activision 2600 game Barnstorming.
It was nice and relaxing. You flew an ancient biplane over windmills, fences and through barns. As far as Prail could recall, that was it, really. But as an art project, it really gave her a chance to spread her wings. She recreated the original in 2D as best as she could remember and then tucked it away as an Easter egg.
From there it was child’s play to convert it to 3D. But here she really began to shine. Prail increased the framerate, giving everything a dreamlike feel to it. Then she added the option to view the game through various filters: Pointillism, Mondrian, Abstract Impressionist, even Cubist. It was almost pure art.
Feeling pleased, Prail tucked herself in under her desk and closed her eyes for a while.
Driving:
Prail’s stomach was a tornado, her heart a bass drum. The University of Southern California’s marching band played “Tusk” at max volume in her otherwise unoccupied head. Full of nervous energy, she cranked out a quick game.
Driven to Distraction was partly a game, partly a training sim. Prail hoped it might decrease incidents of vehicular homicide on Earth2. It was an automobile driving simulator with a twist. The player drove, but they didn’t control the perspective.
The driver’s gaze constantly wandered. It fiddled with the radio, rummaged through the glovebox. It lit cigarettes and joints. Sometimes it drank alcohol. All the player had to do was drive and not crash. It was extremely challenging. Then Prail added fast food levels where the car coasted into a drive-through, and the player had to drive while eating.
Finally, she added a cell phone. In a secret bit of sneak, Prail coded in messages and pictures from the driver’s girlfriend asking for poems, and the foolhardy player had to compose and type poetry while driving eighty miles an hour. These she siphoned off for her ever-growing collection. It was cool, and that was usually her goal. Having reached it, utterly exhausted, she napped for an entire hour.
Real-Time Strategy:
Prail was working on another epic game, ‘Barbarians’. It was based on the pre-gunpowder days on ancient Earth. She’d noticed the varied fighting styles of the different barbarian tribes from distant locations, and thought it would be fun to pit them against each other.
So far, she’d implemented Huns, Mongols, Vikings, and Vandals, and wanted to include Visigoths next. Her favorites were the Mongols and the Vikings. The Mongols were expert horsemen, small in stature. They could ride side-saddle and fire arrows with amazing accuracy. So well, she had to introduce heavy winds to handicap them.
There were two moves she was particularly enamored of. One strategy was to ride in single-file, an army of a thousand strong. When they reached their opponents, they would fan out and form an oncoming wall of death. The other involved splitting into three brigades. The decoy group would attack head on, while the other two would circle their prey from the left and right and attack from the rear. It was a devastating move. On the steppes, their home turf, they were unbeatable. Take them out of their element, however, and the tables turned.
In Viking villages, they met their demise.
The Vikings favored hand weapons such as swords, battleaxes and war hammers, although they were no slouches with arrows, either. Flaming arrows.
They also employed berserkers. Berserkers were great hulking brutes who lived only to fight and kill. They were so fierce they were kept subdued by their own kind until they were needed. Once unleashed on the battlefield, they would fly into a blood rage, snapping necks and severing spines left and right until they were killed or collapsed from exhaustion. They would even kill other Vikings.
Their secret weapon was mushrooms. The Vikings would feed amanita muscaria to their reindeer, and then collect the reindeer urine, which was filtered of toxins. Then drink it. It apparently kept them awake for days. Prail thought it was hilarious that the origins of Santa Claus and flying reindeer stemmed from use of a red and white psychedelic.
She was thinking about the Goths when a sensor sounded, indicating the approach of President Gorlax.
“Whoop, whoop,” it said.
Prail saved her work, and got nervous and dressed. Praxalians never wore clothes around each other, but gave in to the custom in order to appease other races.
MMORPGs:
Chapter 13 – Death Race 2000
Prail was debugging another of her games. While strip-mining the culture of Earth in an effort to understand why it fell, she’d uncovered a David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone vehicle, Death Race 2000. Sort of like Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races, it involved eight teams of drivers in a coast-to-coast race. Unlike Wacky Races, you scored extra points by killing people.
Prail elected to rip it off wholesale. She’d scanned in the vehicles from framegrabs and knocked them up into 3D models. She cheated a bit by only modeling the top halves of the humanoids, but had painted herself into a corner there, and was forced to backtrack. Prail hadn’t planned on giving the players the options to exit their cars, but after the level editor was completed, she thought better of it.
It was almost pure suicide, exiting your vehicle in a game in which the object was to run people over, but she’d been monitoring the motivations of her alpha-testers, and had discovered a few quirks. Some of the end-users were thinking about strategies that involved exiting their vehicles, and were frustrated that they could not, so of course that became high on the feature list. Frustrated gamers quit playing, and games only existed when they were being played, for the most part.
Prail wanted her games to be the best ever.
The other interesting quandary was that much like being the car in Monopoly, everyone wanted to be either Frankenstein or Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. She would allow only one instance of each per game. Without that limitation, she invariably ended up with four or five of one and three or four of the other.
Unacceptable, in her eyes.
She tinkered and tweaked on the other characters and cars in an effort to make them more enticing, but was limited by the parameters of the movie, to a large degree. The best she could come up with was cool choices of music on the in-game radios, and the ability to get naked and have sex while driving. Even then, she had to extend those options to the lead characters as well.
She settled it to her satisfaction by handicapping the lead characters. She simply made them the targets of the other six teams, and weighted additional problems against them: flat tires, engine trouble. Which brought her all the way back around to the necessity of fully articulated humanoids, which was a lot of work. Luckily, Prail loved to work, and she could reuse the humanoid system in future games.
Thinking about one problem led her to a breakthrough in another game. She’d figured out how to structure the writer sim. Instead of relying on A.I. or the end user’s input, she would draw upon Earth’s pool of literature, and simply keep the knowledge of their success from the player, forcing them to work hard for their art. The stories would write themselves. The player would merely make time to write and edit, and the more time and effort they devoted to their craft, the quicker they would achieve their goals.
This led her to conceive of a way to infinitely expand her planned Heavy Metal game. It was based on the animated Earth film, which allowed for sword and sorcery as well as advanced technology. It would be a fine game on its own, but Prail wanted more.
She decided to write wrappers for other MMORPGs, allowing players to visit other games. Once you tired of the Heavy Metal universe, you could visit, say, the Star Trek one, the World of Warcraft one, and so on, using the same character and interface.
Prail then decided to take a catnap. MotherBrain had arranged for her to escort President Gorlax on a tour of the Praxis facilities. She smiled and dreamed of dandelions.
Simulation:
Chapter 9 – Construction Master
Prail pulled up her editor, finally free to write games full-time. She was feeling generous and calm, so she began tinkering with Construction Master. It was, Prail thought, the ultimate guy game. You started off tasked with building a treehouse, using components gathered during subquests. The points early on were cool points, based on style and fun alone. Your avatar started out as a youth and aged as you progressed.
From there you built birdhouses, lemonade stands, doghouses and the like, earning money and skills along the way. When you were old and able enough, you entered the construction trade proper as an apprentice. The projects grew into massive hydroelectric dams, power plants and skyscrapers. No matter which discipline you chose, mason, plumber, sheetrocker, electrical, etcetera, you were expected to work your way up to project manager or superintendant. The beauty of it was the scalable complexity.
You could get lost in the endless details. Prail knew men liked to tinker, measure and count. Construction Master offered ample opportunity for that, with the advantage of being achievement based. She considered adding pissing contests and dick measuring, and decided against it. Beyond the craftsman aspect, you needed planning, budgeting and people-handling skills, if you wanted to make it to the top. You could fight and argue to your heart’s content, if that was your thing. She was especially proud of the bathroom subgame Johnnie on the Spot, which let you do custom graffiti in private outhouses.
She was secretly collecting the best drawings and bits of doggerel from the beta testers. To her amazement and amusement, the end users formed factions, alliances and political views, using the outhouses as message boards and forums for debate. It was a bit like Praxis’ MentalNet, the invisible network all Praxalians were tied into, but more crude, akin to the BBS and Internet systems of Earth2. That’s where she learned to let A.I. work for her.
What she considered her crowning achievement in that game was the fact that the in-game prices were tied to real-world prices on Earth2, giving it an unlimited lifespan and relevance. Prail loved the idea of a hands-off project that continued to evolve on its own.
Children/Action:
Prail was working on Big Top, a fun little action game for kids. It was a circus management sim, of a sort. You controlled the ringmaster of a three-ring circus. The show went on all around you, with continually changing acts in each of the three rings, as well as clowns and vendors who operated on the perimeters.
It was very entertaining just to watch. She put a lot of effort into the details, with plenty of acts and variations. All the player had to do was pass near the acts and keep them all going. The ringmaster avatar was surrounded by a green ring, his sphere of influence. As the levels progressed, the ring grew smaller, and the acts became more involved. It was rather like spinning plates on poles. Eventually, it became too much to manage.
Then the fun really began. Lions ran wild. Trapeze artists fell. Clown cars crashed and caught fire. In the worst case scenario, the tent itself erupted into flames. And it was deliberately unwinnable. Her favorite character was a demented clown with a sock puppet on his hand.
She made a mental note using a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Post-It to add a circus level to Reaper Madness, and wondered how President Gorlax’s illness was doing.
I do have one last game design I've been pondering for a while, but I feel that one deserves some concept art, and an article of its own. If you ever do decide to pursue one of these designs, drop me a note, I'd gladly involve myself. The excerpts are from 'Perfect Me', an homage to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, albeit with a darker, more American edge. If you'd like to read it, or the sequel 'Cure for Sanity', they are available on Amazon, and will soon be released by the Wetworks imprint of J. Ellington Ashton Press.
https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Me-Perfection-Labs-Book-ebook/dp/B006FXE1OC
Of course, if you don't want to spend a whopping $.99 for the ebook, you can always get a free Kindle review copy here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5IGQRmdxOyuS2R5dXNJbkJ5Zk0?ddrp=1
Thanks for reading this. All four of you. I'd love your comments, feedback, and perhaps to even hear of your own personal game designs below.