You've Been Put In Charge of Development

Congratulations, you, a competent videogame designer, have been offered creative control of a franchise of your choice.

Yes indeed, A Game Developer Is You!

Now, there are some strings attached. You've have to make a game that is part of an established franchise, but they want you to change it up somehow. No remakes (without *major* changes) and no saying you want a sequel exactly like the first game, but more so.

For example: —You could not make a sequel to Baldur's Gate with the Infinity Engine —You can make a remake of Baldur's Gate if you redid the game engine, changed the ruleset, altered or streamlined or expanded the main story and NP Cs.

I put forth two ideas: the first is Live-A-Live 2.

Like the first game, LAL 2 would be split between multiple unrelated storylines that come together in the end. The stories would be connected by the instigator of the crises, who would be a sort of memetic monster, hiding within the collective subconscious, who spreads and feeds upon fear, ignorance and hatred of progress, goodness and the foreign. The storylines this time around would be: —mafia/gangster story set in Chicago or New York during the 20s/30s about a young family head who decides to turn his gang straight—or at least respectable. —A Native American dream quest, involving a young shaman's quest to find himself and return to his tribe as an adult by bringing back something of value. —A Wuxia story, with martial artists fighting to establish their schools and principles across the land. —An Hindu/Buddhist fable about a war between the Devas and the Asura. —A renaissance adventure, with a Leonardo da Vinci figure tries to spread his inventions, while (literally) fighting suspicion and hostility from the establishment. —Don Quixote-esque story where the main character is aware that fantasy elements are real and always present, but is ignored or thought crazy when he tries to act on his knowledge. The ending to this storyline is dependent on how strongly you stick to your belief in what you see with your eyes. —An group of astronauts trying to stop a disaster on an international space station, divided by mutual suspicion and distrust.

The ending fight is less ridiculous than the one from the first game (FIGHT ITEM DEFEND ARMAGEDDON) but is based on how true you were to the theme of each chapter. Getting more of the chapters "right" opens up more of the final boss fight itself, meaning that you can only win if everyone found their correct paths.

The other idea I had is Persona 5.

First and foremost, ditch the S Link system. I hate it. They just are not in-depth enough to put the characters on a level where I'd care about them. I also dislike how the party members are so vastly inferior to the main character; as this carries unfortunate implications for the narrative itself. Also, this lets us ditch the We Cannot Continue Without You aspect of most of the SMT games.

Next, there are only four party characters, including the protagonist. No more, no less. Each of the main characters have four Persona, representing the basic aspects of their personality. Each Persona is unique in its Arcana too, so no two characters overlap. By cutting down on the main cast, we can increase the depth to which they are developed, and by giving them all multiple Personae, we can more accurately describe their personality as per Jung's theories by the attribution of multiple Major Arcana to a character.

The main antagonist is a Persona user called The Masked Man. You and your friends stumble upon him while exploring a cave that your group claimed as a hideout as children. He says that he has been waiting for you to come, immobilizes everyone, then strikes you down one by one, each time saying some incredible secret about your companions that they deny. When it's your turn, you recognize the Man as the fifth member of your group, who has just died, an accusation that makes him laugh. He takes off his mask, revealing your friend's face, then takes off your friend's face, explaining that it's just another mask he wears. He replaces the face, calmly informs you that he plans to claim four more, and is suddenly attacked by your friend's Personae. He beats them back, but you manage to awaken your own and together you defeat the Man. He escapes, your friend's spirit is put to rest, and the four of you meet Igor who has decided that the back of your cave is the new Velvet Room.

The rest of the game is about tracking down the Masked Man, who is trying to assemble a full set of "masks" corresponding to the Major Arcana excluding Fool and World (his natural Arcana being the former). His end goal is the creation of a World card through the fusion of the other 20, which he plans to use to reap ALL of humanity, so as to become God.

Along the way, you and your friends develop the different aspects of your own personalities, based on how you treat one another and those around you. Acting aggressively helps develop your physical Personae, while thoughtfulness and foresight boost the potential of healing and status effecting Personae.

So. Thoughts on my ideas, and what games would you make if you were put in charge?

Sonic The Hedgehog. A much darker title than the rest of the series titled: "Sonic: War Dawn." It would establish a series timeline, and concern things like Sinbad, Gawain, Tikal, Knouge (Rouge defrosts even further), the Sol Dimension (is destroyed), and Fantastic Racism. I would have a lot of Ship Teases. The main baddie: SHADOW. Driven mad by the fact his friends are rarley playable or even seen nowadays, he goes back to the dark side.

I am completely, utterly, and thoroughly done with Sola Sonica and 2D

If somebody were to make the epically retarded decision of hiring me as a design lead, it wouldn't be pretty. I'd manage to ruin the company and piss off everybody in less than three weeks.

My Blog | My Steam profile

Food Fight. I loved that game back in the day.

Remake Pokemon with a new combat system, now each move has a cooldown and there is no longer any defined turns. Also a number of enviroment-based puzzles as part of the plot.

It's clearly a case of backroom political albumizing.

I'm pretty sure that given my non-existent programming and drawing skills, that any project that I got assigned to would wind up being given to someone else.

That said... Any of the following would make my life as a gamer:

• Paper Pokemon.
• MOTHER (insert installment here): The EB64-style RPG
• Jet Set Radio (insert term here)
• Ni No Kuni: "Playable in a language that I can understand" Edition

edited 4th Apr '11 9:52:04 PM by TheGinkei

And "Reality" is unveiled. What did it want...? What did it see...? What did it hear...? What did it think...? What did it do...?

Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.

I'd make Star Control 3, err, 4, and put less emphasis on tooling around gathering resources and more on story. Instead of landing on four-meter-long planets just to collect round thingies of mineral and gas, you would instead land on procedurally generated landscapes with user creatable, fully scriptable adventures that take place on each planet. The focus would be on Star Trek-style exploration, at least initially.

So basically I'd keep doing what I'm doing already, except possibly with slightly nicer graphics and less focus on capitalist ventures.

edited 4th Apr '11 10:47:38 PM by Schilcote

For the game ideas I have... I guess the one with the summon-eating would work okay as part of Final Fantasy, and the battle system was always inspired by ATB

Go mad with power and alienate the entire fanbase.

So, I whore myself out to Electronic Arts, right? And then I suddenly learn that their corporate assassins have assassinated Faran Brygo in a desperate bid to retake the Wasteland IP rights. And I get to direct the sequel!

So, first things first, it's a direct sequel, not a Gaiden Game like Mean Time was planned to be. Umpteen years have passed since Finster's plan of robotic domination failed, and the Desert Rangers have become a major power in the Nevada wasteland. Your decisions from the first game will carry over to shape the shape of political chaos that the Las Vegas area now is — did you help Fat Freddy or Faran Brygo? did you ever make contact with the Railroad people? did you eradicate Highpool? did you reactivate the Sleeper Base and the cloning tech within? etc. — and new troubles will creep onto the wasteland! Aliens from Mars invade from the fake plot in the Paragraphs to wreak vengeance for the atrocities the Rangers that DID actually go there with Finster's clone committed! Krazy Klowns from the Island of Florida (totally legit, EA still owns the rights to Fo D!) move westwards in a Genghis Khan manner, subjugating (and/or eating) anyone they come across! A Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of the Brotherhood of Steel seeks to expand eastwards from California! And in the middle of all of this, you are now a lowly resident of a small village of mutants, picked by your chief to find someone who would shelter your kin from the coming war! (also totally legit, since since Origin went the way of the Dodo, EA also kept the rights to Bad Blood). Do you pick the mundane but marginally human-looking diplomat? The hideous yet nigh-indestructible brute? The somewhat human, but still mutating half-breed? Or build your own victim of I Love Nuclear Power that will evolve new powers as he or she or it levels up?

So, this is a remake of Bad Blood, sequel to Wasteland AND Fountain Of Dreams, interquel to a Jimmy Hart Version of Fallout and Fallout Tactics, and a bid for power in the otherwise stagnant non-fantasy Karma Meter-driven RPG niche! Or, to cut it shorter, my Author Appeal =)

edited 5th Apr '11 12:04:58 AM by Noelemahc

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

Pokemon action RPG. Four-move limit may be incidentally enforced by sheer virtue of how many buttons you have*

, but you'd be able to store as many as you have access to, hotkey them out of combat, and a Kingdom Hearts style action menu would let you whip out any of the others if you have enough time. Moves would run on a shared recharging PP pool rather than individual meters.

Deep character-driven plot with story-defined team instead of collect-a-thon. Would probably be darker just because by focusing in a few places you have a bit more time to be pulling at loose strings and seeing consequences of things, but the focus would be on telling a nuanced story properly instead of OMG EDGY, and retaining humor and weirdness would be critical.

Also a room made of Wobbuffets.

edited 5th Apr '11 12:22:49 AM by Pykrete

Hmm . . . a fourth Penumbra could be interesting. Philip's story is pretty much over, but we never got to find out what happened after he sent out his message. I'm visualizing some sort of government squad coming in to handle things, and most of them getting killed almost immediately, leaving one new protagonist to finish the job. Of course, it wouldn't be appropriate to turn what was basically an adventure series into a Fear clone, so our hero is also separated from his gun, forced to rely on his combat knife and his wits. I'd bring back the stealth elements from the first two games, but as a trained soldier rather than a panicky physics professor, the new protagonist would be capable of looking at monsters without panicking, and would have a Back Stab ability. Of course, monsters are still as tough as ever if you can't get the drop on them, and as before there'd be an emphasis on avoidance. (And of course, the heart of the game would be puzzle-solving, as it was in the previous entries.)

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Bionic Commando 2009, but with a slightly different premise and possibly without plotholes so huge you could drive a truck through.

Gameplay changes:

• first, more open levels. Spencer's Super Drowning Skills should be enough of a limit, illogically placed invisible killy radiation walls have to go in most of the places.
• Also, get rid of the Adrenaline system - make the spinning strike a normal attack and vehicle One-Hit Kill a QTE (grapple it, don't get shaken off, open the cockpit, throw driver out).
• Rework the unlockable abilities system to get rid of Sequence Breaking.
• Make comm tower hacking a minigame instead of plug & play.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Remake Sonic 2006 in a way that truns it from... what it originally was into something of Unleashed Daytime / Colors-level of awesomeness.

Or I'd remake Heroes and/or Shadow into something closer to Colors.

Well, let's pretend I am do not have zero amount of experience in the field. Hell, let's just pretend I am a pretty kickass developer. Here goes...

Gotcha Force 2. However, there are going to be a lot of changes and my ass may very well get toasted by the They Changed It, Now It Sucks! crowd. Here's some basic ideas...

• Remove auto-targeter or just make it optional. This way it can appeal to the more talented TPS crowd while still maintaining its current following.
• Change the experience system. In fact, let's just go out and make it so that you can divide up the amount of experience amongst your team however you want. Don't want to spend that extra amount of time doing so? No problem. You can choose to auto-allocate it evenly amongst your team.
• A more in-depth story.
  • I figure it would be best to have it occur maybe a few decades after the events of the first game. The new protagonists could be descendants of the original group or just a new group of kids. If the latter, definitely have them meet the original protagonists.
  • A new attack on Earth has begun, started by a new mysterious group of Gotcha Borgs from an alternate dimension! Led by G Black and his personal masked Commander, Vain, as well as veritible army of young Commanders, this new invasion quickly begins to rattle the planet as it utilizes an almost Blitzkrieg level of power and speed. However, just when it seems all hope is lost, the new protagonists begin to push through!
  • Vain is, in fact, the alternate reality counter-part of the first games protagonist, Kou, and the other Commanders are the alternate forms of the allies from the previous game. However, they appear much like in the previous game as they still are children because of some time-travelling clause in dimension hopping. The final showdown will be one of the same scale as the previous game, but with the opponents fighting you in the same style as your allies fought with you in the final mission of the first game.
• Change how Hyper Mode works somewhat. Preferably give character borgs their own "super moves" over the short-period of increased speed and infinite bullets. Perhaps a suped-up version of their strongest attack/combo?
• Online trading and battling. This is a must, as it would allow the tight community to stay strong even if they were few and far in between. Which it is right now.
• Online tiers and tournaments. It would make the game so much easier if someone took the time to balance out the borgs so that we don't have every team made out of Neo G Reds/G Blacks/Galactic Emperors/G Reds/Sirius(es)...
• Rare coloured borgs. A bit of a change in how you would collect them as it is next to impossible to get a multi-part rare coloured borg. Fighting a rare coloured borg means the auto-obtaining of them or their part if they are multi-part. If you fight the same rare coloured borg at a later time, you obtain a different fragment than the one you already own.
• Rare coloured borgs part II. The addition of a new rare "coloured" borg: Blank. Obtaining one of these allows you to put your own custom paint job on it using either templates, a free-draw, or a combination of the two.
• New borgs. Duh. Mind you, I would have to really sit down to come up with new borgs as the current spread has an incredible amount of variety and such.
• New game modes. I'd love the idea of being able to design certain scenarios like the Event Matches in Super Smash Bros. Perhaps throw in a large scale mode and more than one difficulty and the ability for more than two to a team. Enlarge Challenge Mode to four users and make it harder and/or force the use of Random teams.

I think I got just about all of it. Keep the So Bad, It's Good voice acting style and the adorable graphics.

"Evii is right though" -Saturn "I didn't know you were a bitch Evii." -Lior Val

Super Mario RTS: Revenge of the Koopalings

You know that time when the Koopalings were seemingly forgotten in favor of Bowser Jr.? This game would pretty much be about that general time period. The single player would focus on an Enemy Civil War, though it would still have little more than an excuse plot.

There'd be three teams:

• Mushroom Kingdom - The good guy team, which would be used to do the tutorial missions as you help fight back the latest attempt by Bowser to kidnap Princess Peach. They would be, appropriately, The Mario team.
• The Koopalings - Upset about how Bowser Jr.'s come in and basically stolen the spotlight from them, their army would consist of the lesser minions among Bowsers army, such as the various Goomba varieties and other mooks that don't feel like they get the respect they deserve. They'd have troops that were weaker in general, but easier, cheaper, and quicker to produce. Their stand out feature would be the player being able to somewhat customize their army based on your intended game strategy by selecting a particular Koopaling or two and getting a boost to your army based on who you picked.
• Bowser Jr's Forces - This would be lead by Bowser Jr. and have units made up of the more prominent and higher ranking members of Bowsers forces, such as the Koopas. They'd be the heavier hitting army.

The focus of the game would be designed to get troops out faster - micro over macro. Economy would be simplified by using only one or two resources, the first one obviously being coin blocks and the other possibly being some kind of power-up resource. In either case, the resources wouldn't require any kind of special structure or unit, you'd just have to find them and send your workers out to 'bonk' them then have them return home to make use of it.

There'd be minimal emphasis on houses or other population control, too. At most, it would be only limited by the total number of buildings you have, with every building increasing the number of troops you could have, though each by a different amount. Thus, you could focus more on getting troops to send out and try to squish the enemy and less on building up your base or collecting resources.

The final big point would be the hero units, which would be unique characters (such as Mario or Peach or Magikoopa or Bowser) that could each only be recruited once and if defeated, they'd be out of the game for good.