Sci-Fi Apocalypse
by Oscar Hayward · in Game Design and Creative Issues · 07/03/2005 (8:20 am) · 21 replies
Hi.
My mates and I have had a rather good idea if you ask me. Although this is like the seventh idea we've had (the others were scrapped).
Okay, briefly, its Earth sometime in the far future and we've expanded beyond our solar system etc. Meanwhile this alien race is longing for oxygen. They need it because they use it for fuel and they have exhausted all of their own sources. So they see Earth and they also see that it is one of the most richest sources of pure oxygen for a few parsects. And so they gather up their invasion fleet and thye move in.
The player is a soldier which is in training at the beginning, then the story unfolds as what seems to be missiles pass them overhead. What they really are is pods from the invasion fleet which act in a kamikaze way. The alien is inside the pod and when it crashes into the earth, it loosens it all up so that nthe alien can immediately seek for oxygen. (We will probably think up a better reason some time soon!)
We haven't really developed the story much from there. Basically the aliens start mining the Earth for oxygen. They mine the rocks to extract the oxygen from them and they suck in the atmosphere and squeeze out the oxygen from there too.
The story develops with missions ranging from stealth: boarding one of the mining ships and infiltrating it; to full throttle shootouts.
You might be asking, Who wins? Well the humans do obviously. But to break away from the usual, 'And so they lived happily ever after' end line, the Earth will be severely damaged with massive craters and huge volcanos caused by the alien's huge mining efforts.
Alternatively, we might make the enitre story longer to make a sequence of titles, sort of like Star Wars.
I've already started making a few models. Here are some of them:
That's the pod the aliens land in.
That's a destroyer class alien ship.
We'll think of a proper name for the aliens later on, once we've totally decided to go with this idea.
Please comment on what you think of this idea, and if you have any suggestions, please post them as well. Thanks!
My mates and I have had a rather good idea if you ask me. Although this is like the seventh idea we've had (the others were scrapped).
Okay, briefly, its Earth sometime in the far future and we've expanded beyond our solar system etc. Meanwhile this alien race is longing for oxygen. They need it because they use it for fuel and they have exhausted all of their own sources. So they see Earth and they also see that it is one of the most richest sources of pure oxygen for a few parsects. And so they gather up their invasion fleet and thye move in.
The player is a soldier which is in training at the beginning, then the story unfolds as what seems to be missiles pass them overhead. What they really are is pods from the invasion fleet which act in a kamikaze way. The alien is inside the pod and when it crashes into the earth, it loosens it all up so that nthe alien can immediately seek for oxygen. (We will probably think up a better reason some time soon!)
We haven't really developed the story much from there. Basically the aliens start mining the Earth for oxygen. They mine the rocks to extract the oxygen from them and they suck in the atmosphere and squeeze out the oxygen from there too.
The story develops with missions ranging from stealth: boarding one of the mining ships and infiltrating it; to full throttle shootouts.
You might be asking, Who wins? Well the humans do obviously. But to break away from the usual, 'And so they lived happily ever after' end line, the Earth will be severely damaged with massive craters and huge volcanos caused by the alien's huge mining efforts.
Alternatively, we might make the enitre story longer to make a sequence of titles, sort of like Star Wars.
I've already started making a few models. Here are some of them:
That's the pod the aliens land in.That's a destroyer class alien ship.We'll think of a proper name for the aliens later on, once we've totally decided to go with this idea.
Please comment on what you think of this idea, and if you have any suggestions, please post them as well. Thanks!
Oscar Hayward
This next one is an 'iffy' one. What if we sort of combined RTS and FPS? Before you go into a battle or op of some kind, you get to choose the time/date, you get to see all the intel info and you get to choose what units you would like to take with you. So if you run a kidnapping op in the middle of the day on the day when the security of the target is at its highest, then your chances of succeeding are rather diminished. Then the intercom thing comes into action because you get to order around your battalian or whatever you want to call it. I think that this idea would drift the game apart from all the ruin-of-the-mill sci-fi games. I find that just shooting anything that moves with no strategy and a loose storyline is no more fun than scrubbing every inch of the US with a toothbrush. (That was rhetorical by the way).
I also thought that we could copy another idea from Swat and a few other games. The idea of giving awards to the player if they excel in a certain area. This will lead on to another idea so just read on... So say if you got an award for getting 20+ headshots or completing an op without any fatalities on both sides. The reason I thought of this, not only for the players self-satisfaction, is that we could have some sort of respect system in the works. So the more respect you have among your subordinates, the more likely they'll do what you say without any remarks or disobediences. While if they don't respect you, they'll either not listen and screw the thing up or in the extreme cases will do absolutely nothing and plot against you. I also though there should be five seperate areas for respect: subordiantes, blood-thirsty superiors, peaceful superiors, the public and the aliens. Each will be affected by different events. So if you got 20+ head shots then you will get more respect from your subordinates and blood-thirsty superiors while you will lose respect from the public, peaceful superiors and the aliens will not be affected. A tad bit complicated I realise.
Another idea, seeing as we're on the road to making this different from the stereotype sci-fi game, then I though of instead of having 'health packs', which you probably wouldn't find floating around in random places, you should have to go to a designated area which will have medics or whatever. But then I thought that eliminated health packs would be stupid so I decided to rename them to First Aid Kits (FAK's - I like that abbr.!) and instead of them being in random places, you actually have a few in your backpack or belt and there will be a few in logical locations such as the enemy's sick bay.
And I also reckon that we should copy GTA:SA's idea of target accuracy = weapon skill. The more kills you do with the weapon, the more skilled you are with it. There will be varying degrees of zoom levels on the aiming of course.
Wow that took a while... Tell me if I'm on the right track to stop me from doing more crappy stuff that isn't what we're looking for! Thanks for the advice!