Self Study 4 - Game Ideas

Idea 1 - 

A puzzle/platformer game where the player controls a humanoid tethered (or connected, even) to a large sphere or similar object by a rope/chain, which rolls around independently of the player. The player can, however, strike/push/lift the object (into things, to destroy them; down hills, to gain momentum etc). I could see this mechanic being used in a couple of different ways. the brutal difficulty and progress loss of games like Jump King and Getting Over It seem like a good match in concept, however, I think individual levels (as opposed to the large, single-level play areas of the aforementioned games) would be easier to design, and make the game much more easily scalable for the short time frame we will be working in. 

I imagine this game in the third person, with the player being able to move in all directions with WASD or a stick, and also having a punch keyed to a button. The player can push or pull the sphere at a reduced speed to their normal walking speed, or punch the sphere to send it flying and be yanked along with it at a speed much higher than their walking speed. The objective of each level would be a physical location within the level that is made obvious to the player (think flags in Mario, etc), and there would be enemies that harm or stun the player (i like the idea that said enemies cannot be hurt by the player’s punch, but can be destroyed by having the sphere punched into them).

I thought it could be cute to incorporate ancient greek aesthetics and make the protagonist be Sisyphus, with the object being his infamous boulder. I envision the game being shaded so that there are only solid colours, and minimal shadows and highlights, with the terrain and backgrounds being various shades of brown and the protagonist and enemies being solid black with white detailing, to replicate those ancient greek vases. A good example of what I’m going for here graphically can be seen in the game Going Under, which attempts to replicate the flat, minimalist aesthetics seen on corporate training materials and the like in 3D.

Going Under - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1154810/Going_Under/

Idea 2 - 

A game in which two players control separate but connected parts of one entity. This basic concept could be applied to a bunch of genres, but I had specifically in mind that a simple tennis game could be a good application of it. One player would move the legs, and be able to move the protagonist and make them jump. The other player would control the arms, and be able to move the racket to either side and swing. 

This is a fairly simple starting point that we can build more stuff onto if we have the time, and if all goes well it would be cool to add randomly spawning powerups that do funky shit like make the rackets bigger, add more balls, et cetera. I figure that hypothetically the dev team would start off making a four player mode that has two players to a side, and add an AI opponent for just two players to face off against once that’s completed.