Game Concept 00
by Mychal McCabe · in Game Design and Creative Issues · 02/08/2002 (2:17 pm) · 4 replies
Our team at badlands games has made some great progress over the last couple of weeks. We'll be busy with Long Shot for the foreseeable future, but I have some other ideas I thought I'd throw open to consideration
Here's one that I've been mulling over for a while now. I'd started working on the idea as a screenplay when I was 16 or so, and I
Title: Point A
Time: 25 years from now.
Teleportation is a common mode of transportation.
There are booths on street corners allowing you beam yourself from Point A to Point B, larger facilities for teleporting large numbers of individuals. The teleportation devices work only on single organisms, not groups, and require a transmitting and receiving unit.
Subdivisions are built with banks of booths where bus stops used to be, gated communities have private booths, and financial districts trade in train stops for teleporter arrays. Adoption is fast and far-reaching; the wealthy have closets for sending and receiving in their homes.
Teleportation is a dicey business, but no more dicey than traveling by a car, or by a plane. There are approximately 3,000 automobile accidents per year in Canada, or approximately 8 per day. This number is likely higher in the United States.
Safety precautions are built into the devices, ensuring that no one can accidentally open the door of a receiving unit from the outside or open the door of a transmitting device once they've hit send.
Teleportation is paid for by your taxes, and access to booths is gained by fingerprint, retina scan, etc. Your tax bracket determines the number of free "hops" you can make in a month.
Early grisly events involving dismembered hands or removed eyeballs held up to the access scanners are harbingers of a new species of crime.
A task force is assembled to respond to cases of teleporter-based crime. They have at their disposal personal-teleporters, fully capable of transmitting themselves on the fly.
In the weeks following initial release of the teleporters the task force responds to multiple incidents of beams becoming "tangled" mid transport and "accidents" falling from the sky, appearing in booths as the next person comes along, and etc.
A division forms within the task force dedicated to cleaning up accidents, which occur as often as a handful of times a night. In addition to dealing with the physical remains of an accident, the group must also contend with bystanders.
Two options here
1. The Postal Route - anyone who sees an accident has to be killed
3. The Men in Black Route - anyone who sees has to look into the red light
Complications
1. Nosy press types who can just feel in their bones that something is wrong
2. Criminal types who are on the look out for accidents they can sell too...
3. Wealthy Eccentric Collectors, possibly politically connected.
Game Play
Playing with a set amount of time, a regulation window of operations, you must address all of the above whenever you are at the scene of an accident.
In addition, you'd have levels of Tactical FPS action - making raids on criminals, even the basement zoos of collectors.
The plot and the settings would have to carry the game play. My favorite potential level for this idea:
two beams cross in the middle of a 747, the accident appears in the middle of a crowded aisle while a movie plays - one of those feel-good romantic-comedies where some guy who can't act has to travel a long distance in order to over come all odds, etc. - you and your team run through the aircraft netting and bagging the 3-legged 4-armed blob of an accident while trying to 'shoot' everyone with the memory wipe gun.
Some great comedy potential here too I think.
mychal mccabe
badlands games
mychal@badlandsgames.com
Here's one that I've been mulling over for a while now. I'd started working on the idea as a screenplay when I was 16 or so, and I
Title: Point A
Time: 25 years from now.
Teleportation is a common mode of transportation.
There are booths on street corners allowing you beam yourself from Point A to Point B, larger facilities for teleporting large numbers of individuals. The teleportation devices work only on single organisms, not groups, and require a transmitting and receiving unit.
Subdivisions are built with banks of booths where bus stops used to be, gated communities have private booths, and financial districts trade in train stops for teleporter arrays. Adoption is fast and far-reaching; the wealthy have closets for sending and receiving in their homes.
Teleportation is a dicey business, but no more dicey than traveling by a car, or by a plane. There are approximately 3,000 automobile accidents per year in Canada, or approximately 8 per day. This number is likely higher in the United States.
Safety precautions are built into the devices, ensuring that no one can accidentally open the door of a receiving unit from the outside or open the door of a transmitting device once they've hit send.
Teleportation is paid for by your taxes, and access to booths is gained by fingerprint, retina scan, etc. Your tax bracket determines the number of free "hops" you can make in a month.
Early grisly events involving dismembered hands or removed eyeballs held up to the access scanners are harbingers of a new species of crime.
A task force is assembled to respond to cases of teleporter-based crime. They have at their disposal personal-teleporters, fully capable of transmitting themselves on the fly.
In the weeks following initial release of the teleporters the task force responds to multiple incidents of beams becoming "tangled" mid transport and "accidents" falling from the sky, appearing in booths as the next person comes along, and etc.
A division forms within the task force dedicated to cleaning up accidents, which occur as often as a handful of times a night. In addition to dealing with the physical remains of an accident, the group must also contend with bystanders.
Two options here
1. The Postal Route - anyone who sees an accident has to be killed
3. The Men in Black Route - anyone who sees has to look into the red light
Complications
1. Nosy press types who can just feel in their bones that something is wrong
2. Criminal types who are on the look out for accidents they can sell too...
3. Wealthy Eccentric Collectors, possibly politically connected.
Game Play
Playing with a set amount of time, a regulation window of operations, you must address all of the above whenever you are at the scene of an accident.
In addition, you'd have levels of Tactical FPS action - making raids on criminals, even the basement zoos of collectors.
The plot and the settings would have to carry the game play. My favorite potential level for this idea:
two beams cross in the middle of a 747, the accident appears in the middle of a crowded aisle while a movie plays - one of those feel-good romantic-comedies where some guy who can't act has to travel a long distance in order to over come all odds, etc. - you and your team run through the aircraft netting and bagging the 3-legged 4-armed blob of an accident while trying to 'shoot' everyone with the memory wipe gun.
Some great comedy potential here too I think.
mychal mccabe
badlands games
mychal@badlandsgames.com
About the author
#2
- potentially hostile insto-mutated humans
- gun packing criminal types who want to capture said
- nosy reporters looking to get the fun on camera
- hiding and cowering civilians who need to be memory wiped
- an array of weapons including vaccum-cleaner type accident schlurpers
- the odd "beaming and entering" response call
given that all you generally need for a AAA Title is cool graphics, CTF, vehicles if you really wanna go whole hog, and support for many players I thought this'd be more than enough for someone to work with. ;]
02/10/2002 (11:03 am)
More in the mix than: - potentially hostile insto-mutated humans
- gun packing criminal types who want to capture said
- nosy reporters looking to get the fun on camera
- hiding and cowering civilians who need to be memory wiped
- an array of weapons including vaccum-cleaner type accident schlurpers
- the odd "beaming and entering" response call
given that all you generally need for a AAA Title is cool graphics, CTF, vehicles if you really wanna go whole hog, and support for many players I thought this'd be more than enough for someone to work with. ;]
#3
I think this would be a great game to have a very interactive world. You could take the cameras from the reporters, take out the tape and smash it. You could roll a garbage can into a group of mutated hostiles as opposed to just shooting them. You could block off areas with vehicles...
Then again, I'm a sucker for interactive worlds...GO GTA!
:)
-Evan
02/10/2002 (11:35 am)
Ah, that clears it up a bit. :)I think this would be a great game to have a very interactive world. You could take the cameras from the reporters, take out the tape and smash it. You could roll a garbage can into a group of mutated hostiles as opposed to just shooting them. You could block off areas with vehicles...
Then again, I'm a sucker for interactive worlds...GO GTA!
:)
-Evan
#4
I think it was the book with the Shrike in it (Hyperion?) that had some sort of hyper space, with things living in it (The computers from memory, I haven't read the book in quite a while now). This only applies if the beams are actually travelling through some other "dimension" and not just normal space...
02/11/2002 (4:00 am)
Someone gains the ability to intercept/redirect the beams?I think it was the book with the Shrike in it (Hyperion?) that had some sort of hyper space, with things living in it (The computers from memory, I haven't read the book in quite a while now). This only applies if the beams are actually travelling through some other "dimension" and not just normal space...
Evan Hamilton
One possibility is to add some sort of terrorists (which of course will now seem cliched after 9/11, but oh well) who are trying to use the Teleporters to wreak havoc. Maybe they're causing some of these accidents to make the government look bad, and maybe they're trying to modify the teleporters to allow them to get into government buildings and the like.
Most forms of transportation can be abused (stealing cars, flying jumbo jets into buildings), and I don't think the teleporters would be any different...you could add something along those lines.
In any case, neat idea!
-Evan