Morlock Tales
Players guide a small group of characters through a map that is constantly collapsing. At it's core, the game is still a basic strategy game, with the player setting goals and orders for the characters he controls. Players can create bases, and the characters he controls need a constant supply of food or other resources, thus must hunt other creatures for food and craft new weapons, etc. The game differs from other strategy games in that there is no guarantee that their bases will survive for long.
A slow moving threat (be it a zombie army, lava, whatever) is moving across the map, forcing the player to keep the characters they control moving. But just moving across the map forever is not an option since some of the tasks (cooking, crafting, something like that) need the characters to stop moving. The player must hop from outpost to outpost, keeping one step ahead of the encroaching force.
Corporate Physics
This game represents the way corporations work through a highly abstract physical metaphor.
- Administration provides a large number of tabs onto which other components can be attached.
- Production creates widgets.
- R&D increases the cost at which widgets can be sold to consumers.
- Warehouses allow widgets to be stored.
- Sales acts as a vacuum cleaner, which sucks up consumers can pops them out the other side with less money and in possession of a widget.
- Marketing acts as a magnet, drawing consumers towards itself. The marketing component can be placed to draw consumers towards the sales component.
- Legal acts as a cannon that can be used to attack other corporations, knocking them out of position.
Consumers are represented as little dots, which respond to forces exerted by the corporations. A consumer slowly grows in money, which makes the effects of corporations’ marketing and sales beams stronger, but being sucked up by a corporation’s sales component reduces their money.
Players must balance the need for growth with the dangers of growing too fast and not being able to support their employees. Growth is encouraged by pressure from competing corporations… if rival corporations outpace the player, the player will be crushed by rival corporations legal attacks.
Of course, this is all pie-in-sky kinda stuff. I don’t think I can really make the kinda AI that this would require, and without the AI it all falls down.
Imperialist Caretaker
This game attempts to simulate a simplified overview the issues faced by the imperialist caretakers of a conquered country. The main issue faced is the maximization of profit gained from the inhabitants of the country while avoiding revolution. This involves a careful balancing of education levels, quality of living, taxation and your military presence.
Basically, it's Sim City with higher stakes. In Sim City if you fail to balance your city correctly, the citizens will just leave. In this game, the citizens will riot and destroy your factories or fight a gorilla war against your soldiers.
The game will be quite simple though, with only a few types of buildings: factories, schools, houses, and military bases/barracks/checkpoints, etc. This will keep the scope containable, and the system through which the citizens are controlled quite transparent and able to be manipulated by the player.
Mechanised
Players use a toolset of parts to design battle machines. Design of the machines is entirely in the player's hands... there are no set slots where parts must go. Instead, players can place parts anywhere on a blueprint-style view. For rockets or guns or wheels to function though they must be connected to a power source, of which the player has a limited supply. Each power source is tied to a different trigger button on the keyboard or on the screen. When the player holds down a trigger button, the battle machine components that have been connected to that power source will be activated.
In this example when the player holds the 1 trigger, the two rocket engines will fire, shooting the machine towards the enemy and battering them with the shields the player has placed on the front of their machine.I'm unsure if gravity is a good or bad idea for this game. If it was ignored, players could have much more freedom in their designs, and in the way their machines work. However, the inclusion of gravity reduces the play field to essentially one dimension of movement, two if the player invests specifically in vertical thrusters... which makes the AI design a simpler task, and also focuses more importance in the machine design, rather than the player's piloting skill.
Music Fight
Music Fight is a strategy/rhythm game in which the game levels are defined by the music that is playing. Players must lead their soldiers across the horisontal landscape of the level which is created by analysis of the game's music. Enemies must be defeated, and difficult points in the landscape must be traversed.
The player's soldiers have different abilities, which are colour coded depending on the abilities type (melee attacks are red, ranged attacks are yellow, defenses are blue, etc). While the song is playing, the game detects points where instruments or pitches are particularly loud, and triggers 'beat blocks' of colours depending on the instrument which triggered them. The beat blocks slide across the game screen, and when they are over a soldier that has an ability of the corresponding colour, the ability is enabled. To actually use the ability the player must click the beat block.
Other than triggering an ability to use, the player has no control over the soldiers. When they are told to attack, the soldiers will find an appropriate enemy to attack without the player having to give speficic orders. This is made easier by the essentially one-dimensional play field. Having a traditional 2D playing field like in most strategy games would make the very control scheme too constrained for the required complexity of input.
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