Licensed Games YOU’D Like to Work On
Matt posted in Licensed Games I'd Want to Work On on January 7th, 2007
I’m working on my next post about licensed games I’d like to work on (this time, it’s a movie and book, so I’m not cheating by choosing a game), but it’s turning out to be pretty long, so it may be a bit before it’s done. but I thought it’d be good to create a thread for others to post the licensed games that they would like to work on. I’m sure someone has an even better idea for a movie, TV show, book, play, story, poem, opera, etc that would benefit greatly from interactivity. Any thoughts?
January 7th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” always struck me as it could be an interactive poem. It’s one of the most immersive poems I read when I was in high school because it uses a literary techniques that puts the reader right there. And it also works as a scary ghost story. Lots of elements to start from.
January 7th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
“Star Fox”. I’ve loved rail shooters all my life be they on-ground or in-air. Games like Star Fox, Ikaruga, and Red Alarm (a little known yet mega-awesome Virtual Boy game that just happens to be one of my all-time favorites) just naturally appeal to me and I dream about working on one. Star Fox, being one of my childhood favorites, is definitely a franchise i’d love to work on.
January 9th, 2007 at 6:57 am
If I could get my hands on a Mega Man licence, I would want to work on Mega Man Legends 3. I really liked the “Rouge” like format (ascii dungeon game) and would really have benifited from generated worlds. The RPG aspects of the first one were nice, there was a big town to explore that could be blown up durring battles, and stayed destroyed the rest of the game unless you gave the city funds. The weapon system was a little silly in the first two games, you found things like bowling balls in trash cans to make stuff, and usually only one weapon was worth upgrading. I would want to make the weapon system more invovled, and even make it sort of like the origial mega man series were you would get like a fire weapon part from a fire themed bad guy that allowed you to make fire weapons. I would also make it so you could carry more than one weapon at a time, so the player could use some strat combos. Also I would want dungeons that you didn’t nessisarily have to do in a specific order. I wouldn’t try and make it like the original with Dr. Wiley though, I kinda like the new story the Legend series uses.
All in all, It was a good start to a game, but needed some serious work before it would be a game I would want to play over and over again.
Also I would want to make a Mega Man deathmatch type game that uses all of the characters from the first 9 games, I even started an engine to do this with NES graphics. The design was going to be a dr. wiley base vs a dr. light base that you could use upgrade trees to build different robots (electricity robots could be built after upgrading electricity research), then there would be different ways to mess up each other’s base, either by cutting power (use cutman to cut wires!) or a direct attack on the main doors.
January 12th, 2007 at 2:57 am
That’s awesome that someone thought of a poem to adapt. I put that in as a “wish” hoping that someone could think of one, and it was the very first post.
I love Red Alarm. Unfortunately, Virtual Boy gives me terrible eye aches, so I cannot enjoy it. I would say though that the “Star Fox” license doesn’t give you much to work with. The characters aren’t all that well developed and the worlds seem relatively generic. All you get is a fanbase, which isn’t necessarily a good thing, but you lose the opportunity to develop your own IP, which if you get the chance, is one of the best things you can do as a game developer.
Does anyone know what the hell happened with MegaMan?!?! It seems like Capcom took a giant crap on the franchise… That was one of the top NES series, and now it’s like a joke.
January 23rd, 2007 at 7:43 pm
I have worked on a Call of Cuthulu idea for awhile, to bring back the original atmosphere of the Alone in the Dark original. I really like the detective role, I would want to work on a system that generates “cases” for you to work on.
I was thinking of an X-Com style game, where you manage an paranormal detective agency, hiring doctors, forensic experts, swat team members, psychics and schollers. You would start out with a city map, which would sort of be like the geoscape in X-Com.
Then you would get calls, and when you go to the site of a call, it would turn into an alone in the dark game, or 1st person, which ever works out better. Maybe a Dead Rising feel, where you have guns, weapons and can take pictures or dust for prints or whatever. Once you were satisifed with evidence gathering, you could return to head quarters and do some more managing.
For an example: You might get a call from a neibor conserned about screams and howls next door, and you drive to location, question the resedents and proceed next door to see whats going on. Once inside, you may meet up with a dog that attacks you, and you have to kill/restrain it. Then you would find a body, with scratch marks. Then depending on forensic skill, you would be able to confim the dog did it or didn’t. Say in this case a demon of some sort killed him, and it turned out the dog was just riled up from the attack. Then you might realize that you didn’t send a potent enough team to deal with the situation, and the rest of the case is simply escaping the house alive, or holding out till backup gets there.
In this respect, some cases would be red herrings (say the dog really did just get rabies and attack the owner) others would be from demonic influences, others would be relating to the cult that was tring to resurrect Cuthulu. The whole object of the game would be to stop a cult from acomplishing that goal. There would be amature cults that don’t know what they are doing as well (not as big of threat)
The most difficult part of this design would be coming up with good “case” generation. Making cases relate to one another, or having it be unique enough to keep the player guessing. (not oh, i’ve done this one before, solved before even got there)
As the cult gets closer to the goal, and demonic influences cause more people to simply go crasy and kill family members. Maybe even generate some connection to each crazy person to the cult of intrest, maybe even a small assosiation with cult member would drive someone crazy.
The start of the game, some percent of the population would be crazy, but as the game progressed, it would rise. More normal people would be influenced by the cult, not nessisarly joining, just tip them over the edge.
I might write up some docs for this design, but this gives a good idea.