/gameideas/reborn.txt

[Mechanical Ape]

A first-person action game where there are no movement controls at all; you just have a hookshot and have to get around that way.

Pickle Rick Simulator

[Jill]

A first-person action game where there are no movement controls at all; you just have a hookshot and have to get around that way.

Risk of Rain 2 almost has this


the recent DLC added an item that doubles your health but halves your movement speed, and at 2+ stacks your WASD movement becomes impractically slow. Loader's playstyle involves mostly getting around with a grappling hook and rocket punch anyway, which makes stacking the item uniquely advantageous to her. (she also gets a temporary barrier when punching enemies relative to her max HP, which affords her a lot of extra tankiness)

one quirk of this though is that slower movement speed means less traction when landing from a grapple or punch, which means your horizontal momentum makes you slide across the terrain more, which makes it trickier to not overshoot your mobility skills

[Mechanical Ape]

Base builder game where you are a witch managing your deep forest cottage. Grow herbs in your garden, research spells, befriend the woodland animals (and use them as spies). Gradually make the whole wood your home, using your power to both protect and be rejuvenated by it.

Deal with visitors to your wood as you please; help the lost children get home, or lead them to your cottage and eat them. You can be a good witch or a bad witch or anything in between; the game does not judge, a witch’s morals are her own. But the local villagers may have an opinion (not always accurate).

[Pocket]

A game where you have no weapons but your enemies are trigger-happy and very much not immune to friendly fire, so your goal is to bait them into killing each other. My initial thought was for it to be a first-person shooter with a vaguely DOOM-inspired feel, but it could work as third person or top-down 2D. In the latter case, it could even be a sort of bullet-hell where you die in one hit, although bullet-hell is a niche enough genre already that it might not feel like a unique enough spin.

Been thinking about this some more, and I realize that if I didn't mind being super-derivative, the premise kind of writes itself. You've been given a gun and sent to deal with a demon infestation after some idiots opened a portal to Hell, except this isn't actually the DOOM universe so conventional weapons are literally useless against demons. What the gun can do is draw aggro, giving you a way to bait distant enemies into chasing and attacking you even if you've already baited them into infighting.

The one thing I'm still unclear on is how to deal with the inevitable last enemy. Maybe every level has at least one environmental hazard that every enemy can be baited into, a la Attack of the PETSCII Robots, or maybe there's a demon that summons an infinite supply of minions and is conveniently invulnerable to everything but them...

[Jill]

The one thing I'm still unclear on is how to deal with the inevitable last enemy. Maybe every level has at least one environmental hazard that every enemy can be baited into, a la Attack of the PETSCII Robots, or maybe there's a demon that summons an infinite supply of minions and is conveniently invulnerable to everything but them...

i don't see a problem as long as you ditch the underlying assumption that the player should be able to clear a stage down to the last enemy

...but assuming you want them to be able to do so for any reason, I would probably go with some sort of parry/reflect mechanic that is not easy to use but lets you send enemy attacks back at them. or maybe the player could have access to some kind of effigy or voodoo doll that was reverse-engineered from demonic rituals. any time one of these decoys receives damage, the attacker takes that damage as well

[Pocket]

i don't see a problem as long as you ditch the underlying assumption that the player should be able to clear a stage down to the last enemy

I've been thinking about this, and it's less that the player needs to clear the stage and more that any enemies that aren't dealt with are just going to keep pursuing the player until they are. In classic shooters, "not clearing the stage" means bypassing parts of the level and leaving any enemies in it un-aggro'd, which is perfectly valid and happens all the time, especially if they're behind hidden wall panels. But being unable to deal with the last enemy even in a given room means having to let it chase you into the next one... which I just realized is going to turn every level into a nonstop mad dash to the exit without the downtime between encounters you'd normally expect. That's not the kind of pacing I had in mind when I first thought of this.

And speaking of pacing, having to end every level by rushing for the exit with an enemy still on your tail feels weird to me. It worked for the Left 4 Dead games, but those all had a theme of "there are literally millions more of these zombies out there than you'll ever encounter; this is just about survival, with killing them being a means to that end". If survival was all that mattered here, just sprinting past them rather than wasting time baiting them into killing each other would not only be just as valid of a playstyle, it would probably make more sense from the character's perspective. Ideally the player's motivation and the character's motivation should be the same.