Creating the Concept

So, onto stuff that people have a hope of actually caring about!

In a probably fruitless effort to keep this project grounded in subjects OTHER than computing, I decided from the start that this game is likely to be designed with interesting physics in mind. With that noted, I decided that a fun game to draw inspiration from might well be something like Gravitee Wars, a game incorporating multiple-body physics and gravity-affected projectiles to create an odd blend of puzzle and turn based strategy.

Looking at the maths behind it, it quickly became apparent that having a single, central planet as a basis for a shooter of some kind would be an interesting concept both to design for and, hopefully, to play. So I decided to work from that as a concept. For the next step, determining the variety of shooter was next on the list. For me, this was a no-brainer; multiplayer class based shooter. My reasoning for multiplayer is twofold- One, without other players, some description of AI would be required, and I know from experience that game AIs are very VERY difficult to implement (That said, it would be nice to have an AI at some point, for 'vs bots' play.), and two, being multiplayer means that you could play with friends, which I've seen in the past as a major draw to games with anything approaching strategic elements. An added bonus is that when you have a multiplayer-focal shooter, you don't really need to have a compelling storyline, as whatever story is there is likely to just be an excuse for "run around shooting things". As for class basis, this was a conscious decision between 3 options. These options lie on the sliding scale of player freedom like so:


<CLOSED-----THE SLIDING SCALE OF PLAYER FREEDOM------FREE>
A                           B                            C

Option A is a closed shooter. Think Quake, here- all of the players are exactly the same, differentiated only by what powerups and weapons they find lying around. On the plus side, they have balance- all combat will be won on skill and luck, not just tactical rock-paper-scissors. Unfortunately, it suffers from that too- things can end up horrifically unbalanced if one player on one of the teams is significantly better than anyone else, and the gameplay can get very repetitive.

Option B is a class based shooter. Think Team Fortress, now. The players get to choose from a selection of characters, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. The benefits here are that there is generally a 'counter' to any given strategy or character, meaning you can't always employ the same tactics and be guaranteed to win. Equally, the balance can be fine-tuned by the developers, without forcing all of the characters into the same mold. On the other hand, it can suffer from breaking strategies being employed by players, or from one character being too powerful by comparison to the others.

Option C is a freeform shooter. Think Counterstrike. The players create their characters of themselves from a blank template, equipping themselves with gear with thought, prior to the match starting, rather than being equipped by the developers or by grabbing their equipment mid-match. This allows the players to have total freedom over their characters, and thus over what strategies they can employ, and so on. Unfortunately, it leads to similar issues to option B- if one weapon or strategy is noticably more effective than the others, all other options will fall into disuse. If you don't believe me, go say 'AWP' or 'AWSM' to any veteran Counterstrike player and check whether their eye twitches.

Given these choices, I decided that Option B was probably the best, partially because it gives the developers (ie us) the most control over what's going on, and partially because it gives us a chance to put some character into the characters. With Option A, every player is identical- any characterization would be applied to every character, and would kind of lose its meaning. As for Option C, it's harder to characterize anyone for the opposite reason- everybody is different, and there's no way of predicting HOW they'll be different, so you either need to apply separate personalities to every possible combination of equipment, making it no different from a particularly elaborate version of option B, or leave the characters bland and faceless- something I want to avoid. As a disclaimer to everything I said here, I do not want to insinuate that options A or C are bad, they're just not directions that would be good for this particular project.

With the genre mostly decided, it was time to find a unique selling point. I won't go into detail as to how this idea came along, because I'm not entirely sure how my train of thought works myself, but it should suffice to say that I ended up thinking "What would it be like if rugby was played on a planetoid?". From here, I was able to come up with what should be a fairly obvious USP and some core gameplay. Essentially, there is a ball of some kind, and two teams of players are trying to transfer the ball from somewhere on the planetoid to somewhere else. The obvious conclusion here is to use opposite poles of the planet as goals, making the main play area the space between them.

From here, it just needed some fleshing out. I took a hint from Monday Night Combat and decided that this game is the spectator sport of the dystopian future- two teams of genetically modified combatants, battling it out, ostensibly to score a goal and win the game. The rules are simple. Grab the ball, and make it to the opposite side of the planet alive. The execution, less simple. Each player is armed to the teeth with unique weaponry and unique training, and they won't let you score without a fight.

Sound good?

I sure hope so.

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