2D Fluid Physics Gameplay

Another interesting use of physics by Strange Loop Games.

Shadow Gameplay

Found this while browsing around the other day.

Trying out Unity3D

Marker World

SDGI 8: Magic Systems Revisited

Image is from the game Final Fantasy - Crystal Chronicles

Copied from ign.com

I've always been interested in magic systems. We all know the quote by Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic" - and I'm sure that magic wouldn't be the least magical if it existed - but that's beside the point. What I'm interested in is the implementation details and the design of magic systems in games as well as movies and litterature.

I just found a new post over at Gamedev which covers a magic system one of the newer members is developing. So if you're interested in magic systems then check it out!

SDGI 5: The voices made me do it!

I've been thinking about the usage of voice and voice distortion in computer games for a long time. Having in-game voice support (team speak etc.) is a great way to enable fast communication between players but it breaks some of the illusion of you being your avatar. A mighty dwarven fighter with a squeaky voice is always a turnoff (not that I get turned on by dwarves any way ;) - so why not use voice distortion technology? I know that there are a lot of technical difficulties to consider when designing such a system but I believe that it's viable.

quote: Gamasutra - Features "Internet Game Design" [08.01.97]
"I ought to address the technical viability of speech data over the modem phone lines. With proper compression, speech data is definitely viable at modem bandwidths. You can design with the expectation that each channel of streamed audio will require roughly 300 bytes per second. We'll address the bandwidth allocation issue in more depth in the next article, but I just want to assure you that speech, if properly compressed and scheduled alongside game data, is viable. Here's one other tidbit of information: compression of speech today typically uses about 15% to 25% of a Pentium 100 CPU, and decompression uses 10% to 15%"

Adding voice distortion will probably add a lot of overhead and it would probably bring older systems to their knees. Next gen consoles and newer PCs should handle it well. All the first generation of Xbox 360 titles are single threaded according to The Inquirer, and I don't expect that all of the cores on the PS3 are used by the first generation of games either. On the PC side of things, the quad cores are coming - so I expect more processing power available there as well. I bet you even could offload much of the number crunching to the GPU.

SDGI 4: Magic systems

Image taken from Shadowrun for the 360

I've written about this earlier (in this post) but I'll mention it again since it fits the SDGI idea well. If you check out this post you'll find a lot of different ideas concerning how to make a magic system fun/different!

SDGI 3: Geriatron

Why does a character always have to be young and energetic? I hereby propose the game Geriatron. You're playing a senior hacker in a futuristic cyberpunk rpg setting. You start the game just as your character gets his death sentence by the doctor - so the main task in the game is to get hold of all manners of biological and cybernetic enhancements to cheat death just a little longer.

Since you're playing a senior citizen, the character system should be different than in normal rpgs. You'll for instance have the stat "Memory" which will be of great importance if you want to do more than just wander around aimlessly (or perhaps even forget skills you've learned). Agility/dexterity will also be essencial - you've got a time limit so increasing your movement speed is a must.

SDGI 2: Ninja Zombies

Need I say more? It's been said before, but I'll stress it - ninja zombies are cool! If you've ever seen a game with a ninja zombie, then please let me know!

By the way - Resident Evil 4: Japanese Trailer.

SDGI 1: XP sharing

How many times have I not played an RPG and just needed a couple of more points to level up. XP sharing to the rescue! I think it would be really cool to be able to treat XP as any other resource in a game - this mechanic should of course be balanced and made into something more action filled than just being able to donate a couple of points to another player. Perhaps it's vital for team tactics to boost one of the characters to a super high level to handle an enemy, or perhaps you actually have to use XP as a resource to buy stuff - so when you're buying new equipment you'll have to make sure it doesn't make you less power overall.

Edit:
Perhaps you even could steal experience from enemies. You get a certain amount of XP from killing a certain enemy, but by stealing XP from it you can both make it weaker and gain more XP at the same time.

Semi-Daily Game Idea (SDGI)

I've just decided to start a section in this blog called SDGI where I write one game (related) idea (almost) every day. The purpose of this section will be to force me to think creatively about games every day - sort of like an exercise in creativity - and to write it down. I've got so many game related notes all over the place but I can't seem to find them when I need them ;). The ideas don't need to be good, unique or have any positive qualities at all - consider them to be the result of an ongoing brainstorming. They're not copyrighted, they're not my intellectual property (god I hate that word) in any way and I'm sure that ALL of the ideas are already thought of by someone somewhere in the world before me. And of course; feel free to use or abuse any of the ideas presented here as long as you don't claim them as your own later on and try to sue someone!

Magic systems that are fun

After playing a lot of different RPGs I’m starting to get tired of all the boring magic systems. It seems that most magic users are only considered multi purpose assault rifles with different buttons for different effects – now where’s the creativity and magic in that?

In games like Diablo and Neverwinter Nights you get armour and weapons with different random effects which make content creation easier and it also makes it more fun to play since you don’t end up getting the same items over and over again. But this is not the case when using magic. I’m currently on the second chapter of Neverwinter Nights and I’m getting bored of the magic – so I started to wonder how much more work it would be to just add a bit more fun into the magic system? You could add a couple of variables that the magic user can change during battle to adjust strength, mana drain and effects. Another simple way to do it would be to create random spells just like any other random item or you could go hog wild and create an immersive magic system that makes it all seem a bit more like magic.

Read my post concerning this here.