Today, I cast lots and got:

Multiplayer – 3 Players
Wiimote (and any accessory)
Sports – Platformer

The powers that be certainly enjoy giving me sports games with an odd number of players. Ah well, three’s not as bad as seven. There’s a sport that I played a lot in my younger years, and though I’m not tremendously proud of it, got pretty good at it! It’s called “keep away”.

Basically, it’s where two older brothers gang up on an unfortunate younger sibling and taunt them with a toy that he wants to play with. The older ones throw the item in question back and forth, over the younger ones head repeatedly, giving the illusion that the younger one could catch it. It’s a nefarious game, and I was pretty good at the center spot.

Put walls on the sides, and this is an ideal map.

So in our video game version, two people play as the “Jerks”, and one plays as the “Victim” in the middle. It’s a side scrolling platformer similar to Super Smash Brothers. The Jerks throw the ball back and forth between each other, trying to keep it away from the Victim. The Victim uses all means necessary to get the ball from them. Jerks score points by completing successful passes between each other, and the Victim scores points by hanging on to the ball. Similar to Oddball in Halo, the longer the Victim holds the ball, the higher the score is. The Jerks score bonus points for throwing the ball closer to the Victim. The Victim scores higher bonuses for staying closer to the Jerks while he has the ball. In essence, they’re rewarded for taking more risks.

The Victim has weapons, such as bombs, guns, tackling, etc., that can be used to knock the ball out of the Jerks possession. When the Victim has possession of the ball, the Jerks also have similar weapons, but they’re not as powerful since there are two Jerks. Gotta keep balance here.

Controls

The nunchuck controls the direction you run. The A button makes you jump. If you’re in possession of the ball, then B throws the ball, otherwise B fires your weapon. Throwing is done in a series of steps. Think Worms meets Wii Sports Baseball. The person points the Wiimote at the screen to identify a target or trajectory to throw the ball towards. They hold down B and the cursor locks position, then they flick the Wiimote to throw the ball towards the cursor. This way, the ball could be thrown in any direction with any amount of power very quickly.

Same could be done for any of the Victims weapons. If they’re guns, just puching B could fire it toward the cursor. If it’s something like a grenade, then it can be thrown the same way the ball is thrown.

Any improvements?

Ironically, I think nearly every FPS is a platformer. So in that sense, it makes designing one fairly simple. Check out wikipedia’s definition of platformer. The real challenge is making it work within a single touch interface. Today, I don’t have the luxury of stretching the rules a bit like I did with the Beat Boxing concept, so imagining the entire UI on a stylus controlled PDA, or a DS without the other buttons, is what were limited to. The most difficult thing is that for it to be considered a platformer, it needs a jump button, and holes for you to fall in.

The only FPS game done with a screen interface I could think of was Metriod Prime: Hunters. They had the luxury of  more buttons though, and so in our case we’ll need to simplify both the controls and the gameplay. I like how you turn your head & screen by moving the stylus around. That, I remember, feeling pretty intuitive. Basically, you’d tap and hold the stylus down, then the further you moved from the center point of where you put the stylus down, the faster you turn in that direction. Doing a single tap on the screen without holding would fire your weapon. So at this point, it’s pretty intuitive to look around and shoot at stuff.

Where it start to get tricky is walking around and jumping and stuff. You could stick static buttons in corners and such, but for an action game to feel intuitive on a touch screen, I don’t think static buttons work. In fact, I just played Low Grav Racer on the iPad a few days ago, and even the two buttons on the sides of the screen for turning your car didn’t feel good. There’s plenty of decent examples that show why simulated buttons and control sticks don’t work well on a touch interface. There’s just no tactile feedback.

So I just decided it wasn’t worth it! I need to play to the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of what the days constraints are, so I nixed walking and jumping! Why not just cut your legs off entirely? But how does one jump from platform to platform without legs? Well, I started going off on tangents of reducing gravity and making your gun propel you backwards… and as much as that would be cool in its own right (I’ll keep it in mind for a future game), you don’t really jump from platform to platform in zero gravity. I was stumped, until Jon (BeefThief) suggested grappling hooks.

Well I guess it struck me as odd that I didn’t think of that since I like Smashball, where the main mechanic is swinging around Bionic Commando style in an FPS. So, tap once on a surface, and your hook will attach itself to the surface you tapped on. You’ll automatically get some lift and start swinging. Tap again to release and land on a platform. If you tap while falling, you can shoot your hook again and latch on to another surface. The physics would have to be good enough that it felt fun and intuitive to swing over and over, like Spiderman. I think the touch interface could make this work well, since twitch reflexes could let you tap stuff really fast.

The hook could also be used as a weapon, knocking people around, dragging them off ledges, etc.

So there you have it! Thanks Jon! What kind of game would you like to play with this mechanic? A deathmatch shooter? A puzzler?

Multiplayer – 8+ players
Single touch controller
Health – Music

I guess I should just get over the fact that most of these are not going to be easy… hence the challenge. In the controllers list, I listed single touch to differentiate between multi-touch and single-touch screens. In this case, I stretched it to mean that the game was operated by only pushing one button at a time.

After scribbling a few worthless ideas, I was kinda stumped, so I put the book down and wrote up the previous three days games on the blog so that I’d be all caught up. It wasn’t until I was sitting in the car later in the day, waiting, that I finally figured out what I was going to do.

It seemed that music and health could only mean one thing… DDR. And you can’t play that on a single touch interface! So I mulled around ideas of how you could modify DDR to be single touch. Then something clicked.

I call it Beat Boxing… which I thought was a pretty clever name as you’ll soon see. Looking at it now, it’s like DDR meets Taebo. Basically, it’s a rhythm game like DDR or guitar hero, but the buttons are padded buttons attached to a metal frame. You punch and kick the corresponding colored pads to the music. Since we don’t punch and kick at the same time, or even punch with both fists at the same time while kickboxing, this fulfilled the single touch requirement.

Teh mockup of LEET!

The next issue was making it 8+ multiplayer. I think the most obvious is to make it tournament friendly, or to do a last man standing type event. For example, have tons of people in a gym or something, all on their own machine playing the same song. Then the song gets progressively more difficult like Tetris, and the last person to not have lost due to scoring badly wins.

Another option would be to have a battle mode where you send attacking waves of intensity to other players by playing well. An example of this can be seen in Tetris DS.

Can you think of ways to improve this idea?

Lastly, my wife suggested a more cooperative approach where you were playing back to back and you needed to use each other to cooperatively switch machines at a specific time and similar stuff like that. It would make it more choreographed looking and achieve a coolness factor that way. It’s a lot kore complicated, but if pulled off well could be awesome.

Single player
Wii Controller
Health – Strategy

I laughed at the chance of getting Wii controllers and health together. Convenient. Working the strategy element into the health genre was really the only difficult thing. Health games are synonymous with casual, while strategy is synonymous with hardcore. And odd mix if nothing else.

So here’s what I came up with:

I started with the only health game I’ve ever played… Wii Fit. I actually enjoyed Wii Fit, and the only reason I don’t still play it every day is because I no longer have access to a Wii. For someone that’s self motivated to exercise, It works great, but to get a hardcore gamer to exercise, that’s another challenge altogether. What’s the point? What’s the incentive? Where’s the dangling carrot that a gamer could relate to?

Which brings us to the strategy side. In this case, I defaulted to final fantasy tactics… the mother of strategy games. Well… once again, it all about the game that I had played before. I could have chosen Fire Emblem, but I liked FF:T better.

So the mesh of the two became Wii Fit Tactics to me. The concept is actually very simple. Add as much motion to the strategy game as possible. In the strategy game, you would have stats, such as speed, focus, power, etc. So why not have the players use Wii Fit as the way to level up their character? You would load up Wii Fit, and do an aerobic run for an hour, and that would give you Speed stats to level up your character within Wii Fit Tactics. You could do balance games to level up Focus. Pushups to level up Arm Strength. Etc, etc.

Then, when you’ve exercised enough, you swap back over to WF:T and access your leveling menu. You have new points to be used to buy new skills. If you ran for five hours total, you can now use those points to upgrade several characters Speed stats which would allow them to move more spaces at one time during a turn. Or, they could use their pushups to increase sword swings per turn. Or, a magician could use Focus stats to do more powerful spells. The premise is to set up some simple to understand stats that correlate directly to types of exercises in Wii Fit. You could even reward the players more for having a steady exercise schedule instead of power grinding sporadically once a week or so.

Every other strategy game rewards you for winning fights though. So, items, new spells, combos, characters, etc are all achieved in WF:T. So you unlock the ability to use new items and stuff in Wii Fit, but unlock the item itself within Wii Fit Tactics. To top it all off, and magic spells, sword swing combos, and things like that are all activated using motion controls. For example, you unlock four sword swings in Wii Fit, then come over to WF:T, and buy a time combo. To activate it, you would come up next to an enemy, and attack him with four slashes forming the shape of an hourglass. The damage takes affect, and time slows down.

What do you think? How would you change it?

The requirements were:

Multiplayer – 7 players
Keyboard only
Sports – FPS

I was a little bit miffed about the odd number of players, and only having the keyboard as a controller. Sports FPS I can deal with. Metal Drift and Smashball are enough for me to see that the genre is proven.

Well I decided that you could split the teams into two teams of three, and the extra player could be doing something that affects the other players from an unbiased position. For example, a sport is being played in a stadium while an unbiased party of one shoots them.

That’s about as far as I got. I scribbled some controls for the team players to lock on to other sports players via hotkey, but it just didn’t seem to clunky.

Later, when I asked my brother what he would do with the same constraints, he came up the same team configuration with an unbiased single player affecting them. It only took him about thirty seconds to come up with that on his own, when in comparison, it took me several minutes.

He expanded it until he settled on this:

Each team has two players that must get a ball from one goal to the other. Similar to soccer. A third person on each team is not physically present, but instead resides in the glorious counterstrike spectator mode. This player switches back and forth between the screens of the two team mates and switches their weapons. The two team players (runners) control like a traditional fps, but they can’t swap their weapons. So it takes their third team player (swapper) to coordinate who has what so that they’re most effective against the other team.

For example, you can’t carry the ball and shoot at the same time, in fact, you can’t even carry the ball unless you are using the carrier weapon. Also, you can’t scale walls unless you have the grappling hook. The strategy would get intense.

The remaining unbiased player (forger) gets a nice birds eye view of the whole map. His job is to make it as difficult as possible for the game to function smoothly for the two competing teams. He adjusts the map terrain, sends fire spouting out of walls, and other such nefarious deeds.

The control scheme on the keyboard would make a game like this tedious, so it would have to be very streamlined. Obviously, if this game were to actually be made, it wouldn’t use just a keyboard. But keeping with the spirit of the exercise, we decided recreating the gamepad controls on the keyboard could work. Left hand would be forward back and strafe, while he right hand would control turning and looking up and down. Personally I don’t like it.

How would you do the control scheme?

Multiplayer – Five
Keyboard & Mouse
RPG – Music

I guess I knew it was going to be random… what with using a simulated dice roll program to select the numbers for me and all, but it still caught me off guard. Five players being the default and optimal number of players? Keyboard and Mouse I could work with. But RPG and Music together? Hrm…

When it comes to RPG’s, I seem to default to my favorite. Final Fantasy 7, which is something I don’t apologize for. So that’s where I started. I also have a fascination for music related games such as Audiosurf, Beat Hazard, etc. They have quite a bit of replay value that other games don’t seem to have. Dynamic music also makes me giddy, and when someone does it right, I’ll buy the game just for the dynamic music.

As I mulled different games or sources of using music to fight, I thought of Guitar Hero and Scott Pilgrim. I just watched Scott Pilgrim in theaters, and loved the scene where they’re playing head to head against the Japanese dudes. Suddenly, a music related RPG didn’t sound too impossible.

So here’s what I came up with.

Five players (controlled similar to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles) choose a band instrument. Conveniently, I could only think of five major instruments. Guitar, Bass, Drums, Keyboard, and Vocals.

You  go head to head with another band, played by the computer, and your goal is to play better than them and knock them off stage with your awesomeness. Different abilities work better against other abilities in a balance similar to Pokémon or magic the gathering. The basic elememnts are the same as any RPG, but your attacks and how they’re deployed is unique.

The two types of abilities each player can use are Band Modifiers and Solo Modifiers.

Band Modifiers affect the entire song you’re playing. These are drastic changes that everyone else adjusts to accommodate for. Things like the tempo, volume, changing the key you’re playing in, mood of the song, or even what genre you’re playing.

Solo Modifiers are a little more specific. Stuff like your harmonies, if you’re going to break out in a solo (i.e. limit breaks), backing someone up (adding to their abilities or protecting them with a shield), or distortion.

Some basic stats I came up with were:

• Precision – How many notes you miss while playing more complex stuff. Fewer notes missed equals more power.
• Stamina – How long you can play before precision dramatically drops.
• Speed – The Beats Per Minute.
• Complexity – The type of music you can play. For example, the difference between flight of the bumblebee and twinkle twinkle little star.

So, if you imagine starting the game with a low complexity stat, you’d need to go against noob bands until you got better and better. Harmonies could create shields for the bands, volume increases the power, and things like that. It’d be cool I think.