May 23, 2010

Generating ideas

So I got a fairly fun assignment from the game design course I'm taking for once. I should come up with 50 ideas using my own idea generation technique.

I used a sort of "notes in the basket" approach where you placed some notes with words in a basket and randomly drew two and then you should come up with something with the two words. But I'm too lazy to write a lot of notes and it's pretty damn hard to come up with a lot of good words too, so I tried to automate the process.

I searched for some random words and found this site: http://www.wordswarm.net/ and I pulled out a few pages and got a few thousand words. Then I made a very simple tool which randomly combines two lines from a file and creates a sentence, much like the you would with the notes but this is just so much faster. Granted I had a lot of shitty words and I got a lot of garbage lines but I could go through so many lines it was a very simple task to get these 50 one-lined game ideas.

These are not fully fledged game ideas, but merely seeds from which you could grow a game.

• Pensionere wheelchair race
• Fish and surf on the fish
• Deep sun exploration
• VimCity - A simcity but with ascii chars which will teach you vim
• Crazy units RTS
• RTS with important landscapes - Destructable, things moving, rising water, paths in snow etc
• House destruction - explosions!
• Hospital creation with strange diseases you need to cure
• Create Nautilus - an underwater city creator
• Prison diner maid - give lunch to hungry prisoners
• Prison break - with stealth, create stuff with different things
• Bread seller - bread maker tycoon?
• Night debt collection hero
• Imprison Berth the jewel thief - police hunting a thief in the night/museum
• Feed azimutal, the mythic beast in the sky
• The 59th beetle-killer squads patriotic killings
• Trauma center boom
• Make mt. 63 a tourist franchise
• Chop the mighty "King's wood" from the legendary forest of death
• Untagling Sarsenet - the predecessor to skynet
• The great pie theft
• Sawyer the egoist ant
• Herbsman Abdal, the lone man growing herbs in the desert
• Carving the first images - like caveman style
• Bart the Darting hero
• Brady the Big Eater glutton - Rush into restaurants and eat everything, then split
• The struggle against Montezuma II, A mayan RTS war game
• Industrializing Cakedoom
• Mini racers the beginning: Autobahn
• Saunter on thin ice - wannabe ice princess
• Clark the Corrupt and Ruler of the Rhen - screw your inhabitants and take all the money
• A wooden submarine - the first submarine, the turtle
• Aristocrat apartment building
• Managing the missionaries hygiene
• The world's best Toasts
• The raspberry in Cosmos
• The viking slap-up
• Digging after tea
• Colorizing the world with a trumpet
• Round Rod explores Square City
• Ordering the Oranges
• Smuggling over the boarder
• Life at the Toxic Waste Dump
• Creating a Ghost Town - with real ghosts who want to live their life
• Riding a Lawnmower and killing Gremlings
• Digging gold on Mars
• The life of a Bacteria, birth, mutation and world conquering
• Put the surfing Duck
• Butler who's carrying silver

May 18, 2010

Competition Feedback

The voting is over and I got a few ratings I want to comment on. You can view all ratings and comments here.

They're all from 1 to 5.

Innovation: 3.75
This is by far the most positive of the bunch and the one button timing combination worked great!

Fun: 3.29
Again a good grade and I thought the game was fun although it became really frustrating.

Theme: 3.17
The islands wasn't very prominent in the game and the game could've been about anything really, but again I'm more than happy with the grade.

Graphics: 2.54
Very simple and with some more effort it would've been better. But I'm happy, programmer graphics ftw!

Audio: 2.14
I only had two click sounds but still got fairly high. Many decided not to vote on it and I wouldn't either. They were just last minutes add-ons but good to see someone liked it.

Humor: 2.54
I didn't focus on this at all but got some decent grades from it anyway. Not sure if my graphics are that ugly.

Overall: 3.13
The most prestigious grade and it's okay. I'm absolutely happy with it, especially since my desperate hope was to get something playable out of this.

Community: 1.64
The community rating is for posts and stuff over at the Ludum Dare homepage. Sadly I didn't spend time there, almost at all, so I can't really say anything about this.

Overall I'm really happy with everything and I'm really happy with my relatively good grades.

I will do my very best to make my next game even better, but atm I can't seem to decide which idea I want to work with (I have like 4-5 serious ideas I'd want to explore).