Your Game

We as commited (note: people that know their games) gamers are the harshest critics. We bitch on about any aspect that we think sucks. Although it's been years since we played a game that we felt deserved five starts, we know what makes a good game. We know the generic conventions of most gaming genres.

Some gamers who make complaints about games usually come up with another way of approaching the game.

What if they were put in charge?
...That was a rhetorical question.

What would you do if you were a game designer? What would your game be about? What kinds of gameplay mechanics would the game have? What specific console would you develop for and why? Or would you go multiplatform?

What would the main focus/essense of the game be? What audience is intended? Why would you think it will be successful?

Hopefully, with this thread, an overall idea of what gamers want from their games can be identified. And hopefully some random guy working for a publisher will pick this thread up. Or maybe not (seeing as what happened to Sonic and all).

Anyway, discuss.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

My game would be inspired by the likes of Ico, Zelda and Myst. My setting would be in a jungle or forest, where the main character wakes up and starts off with nothing, remembers nothing and can only walk and jump. The place is set on Earth, although supernatural elements would appear in the game.

The genre would be adventure with a context sensitive button to explore, observe, open doors and etc. As you progress, skills would be added to your repitoire but instead of being mapped out like Zelda they would be commands found in fighting games just as Street Fighter (Down, down-right, right + punch for fireball etc... only this game won't have fireballs). The rest of the controller apart from the context sensitive button will act as part the character's list of moves.

The character's moves would be somewhat primitive, given that he is just an ordinary boy without any training in martial arts or whatsoever. This also applies to the weapons available, which would be the interactive environment (sticks from trees, rocks as projectiles etc.). Although, as he progresses through the game, he will gain more skills to be able to explore more places, which will be as vast as Zelda TP's field, yet somehow important in the overall structure of the world.

It won't be realistic to the point where every 20 minutes or so you have to feed the character. It'll just be that if you need health or stamina, you kill an animal or get a drink of water.

The aim of the game is to find out what exactly is going on, find clues about your apparent past and find a way to reach contact with another human. The type of ending you get, though, would be entirely up to what you do during the game. For example, if you walk through the jungle wrecklessly and still manage to survive you'll have a different ending to that of when you stay in the jungle and try to gather enough resources to create a fire signal. The longest way to reach an ending would, if I could make this game, be around 40 hours. The shortest way, around 10.

Some endings would involve being found by a search party, actually finding a way out, going the other way (away from the previous ending mentioned) and making it through a desert, and actually finding out the real reason the character ends up there (conspiracies, groups conducting experiments etc.).

You would also need to know your enemies. You can kill the ones you can defeat and use them as food. On the other hand, if you run into "unnatural" enemies (somewhat similar to the mysterious monster on the TV show, Lost) as well as ghosts etc., you run. Well, that until you find the right way or method to defeat them.

Basically, if you want to take the easy way out and ignore clues that lead to the ultimate ending, you'll get little of what the game offers. Put in a lot to find out what really happened with the character, and you'll be rewarded with a rich an deep storyline.

As my intention would be to create an experience, this game would only be for one player. Because of wanting this game to be an experience, the music would be orchestrated and the graphics would be dreamy-like, like in Ico.

The character wouldn't really speak... maybe a few lines now and then talking to himself but that's about it. As for mini-games, I wouldn't like to create mini-games for it as it would detract from "experiencing" the game. Maybe a fishing mini-game. Maybe.

Although it'll fit any console I would rather it be on the Revolution, or any other unorthodoxed console available in the future. Sure, to be able to program all these ideas into a game would require a powerful console, but the interface of the Revolution would involve the player more, which would fulfill what I intended to create in this game.

Long read. Sorry guys.

There's nowhere I can't reach.