Missing Links; what happened yesterday?

The premise of the game is simple. You're presented with a thread and multiple slots. Each slot represents a gap in a memory.

You're given a bunch of images with no explanation whatsoever, and you must decide which slot the images should go, in order to fix this memory.

Each image has a preset explanation that changes slightly depending on what image came before and is placed after it. Some situations created by the player might sound completely ridiculous, but that's the fun of the game.

The way to proceed to the next memory is whether the thread of memories the player creates results in the continued existence of the person whose memories the player is fixing.

Meaning it's likely that situation will arise where the order of images can lead to the person's untimely demise.

There will be 8 memories in total, and all of the memories link to one another. Making this a simple game with easy mechanics, but a rich story to delve into for the more narrative-focused players.

The game can be on any console or phone OS. It'd be a cheap downloadable game with nice replay value, and no need for petty F2P mechanics.

Inspired by the multiple Missing Links in my streak.

New Heights; A simple game where you play a lil avatar scaling a wall.

It's a mobile app where the game scrolls upwards and you swipe to each part of the wall to climb up. You determine the path the climber will take so that he/she can avoid obstacles.

Obstacles included are bombs, wall bandits, very large spiders, birds, etc.

As your character reaches further up the tower, the amount of space to maneuver around obstacles and set a path to each ledge becomes thinner and requires more concentration. Once your character gets to the top you have essentially finished the first level.

The levels following the first level, as outline above, begin to change up the amount of space and direction the character has to climb at random, inclusive of increased obstacles. Each level becomes more and more difficult, and the game is designed in a way so that new stages can be drip fed to the user base in order to keep the content fresh and relevant.

Home Wars; a social networking mobile/facebook game where your only goal is to have a cooler house than your neighbors.

You're given a stretch of land and some funds. It's time to build your dream home.

Every room and item you have will add value to your home, and your profile will show how much your home is worth. You can set up a shop at the front and a farm on the side to make more money over time and build more rooms. You can build vertically and horizontally and it can look as ridiculous as you please.

Leaderboards will be set up to show whose house is the most expensive, and a weekly showcase of the fastest developing houses will be shown in the in-game news editorials.

You and your friends can apply to be located next to each other and utilize the "neighborhood" feature. Up to 16 users can occupy a neighborhood and increase its value by building up their houses, friends can create their own neighborhood to be displayed on the group leaderboards too.

Or you can have a house next to a total stranger in a randomly generated neighborhood and still feel an intense rivalry to personally out do them on the leaderboards.

The perfectly addictive online mess.

There's no narrative here, just obvious lures for publishers to force F2P features into.

I used to play a game similar to this using Isometric paper in primary school. Each student would be given a peace of A3 isometric paper to draw a really ridiculous house on. The teacher would pick whose she thought was the best and give them a chocolate freddo, but she'd always give freddos to the whole class anyway bc she was weak and some students cried.

Of course, I didn't win. But my Conkers Bad Fur Day inspired teddy-bear tree house outfitted for war and destruction was still the best.

Go Home; a VR horror simulation.

You're in the water on the shore of a beach. It's getting cold and dark, so it looks like it's time to exit the water and go home.

Only, when you turn around the face the horizon on the ocean, a figure is standing in the water where you were just relaxing.

The figure begins to move in your direction, and so it's time to get out of there.

Traverse the park, town and suburban area. All seemingly abandoned before you arrived, staying clear of the mysterious figures traversing the environments.

The screen will become less coherent and the border will begin to change colour the closer you are to being spotted. When you're spotted, the screen will clear but the figures will be in pursuit, and you will have to hide until the coast is clear.

You have a few options at your disposal to make the journey easier. You can sprint, with the sacrifice being that you create noise in the environment that might alert the figures. In the same vein, you may also create noise or visual distractions by throwing items, lighting things on fire, etc. Just seamlessly interacting with the environment to get home without being caught.

A keen eyes will notice random details in the environments to piece together a narrative.

The endings, to increase replay value:

The game ends when you reach the house at the end of a No Exit street with a light on and open the door. The ending that plays will be determined on how noticed you are by the figures.

If you aren't noticed at all and remained relatively unseen your entire play through, the door will open, your character will walk inside, lock the door behind him/her and turn the lights off. Going to sit on an empty chair and watching the window cautiously with a peaceful night sky in the background.

If you are noticed but haven't been pursued by the figures for your playthrough. Your character will go inside, lock the door and turn the lights out, sit down, and look outside the window to see a figure standing outside, not watching you, but waiting around. If you've only been pursued 1 or 2 times, the ending will remain the same but this time multiple figures will be standing outside the window facing directly at you but doing nothing.

If the figures have seen you and pursued you more than twice, but aren't actively following you upon completing the simulation, a figure will be waiting inside of the house when you character opens the door.

If the figures are pursuing you when you open the door, a figure will burst out of it before you can and you'll be grabbed from behind and pulled away.

Luminescence: Dungeon crawler RPG with interactive level elements.

You start in a pitch black room and have multiple coloured gems in front of you. You pick one and place it on an alter lit by a dim candle behind the set of rubies. The rest immediately disappear.

Say you picked a white-blue gem. The level suddenly ignites, albeit dimly, and your path is set out ahead of you.

Encounter enemy hordes dictated by the gem you placed on the alter. Collect loot specific to the level's narrative, and then continue to the next area.

Gameplay:

Standard RPG stuff. Swords, spells, unique weapons and armor beyond that. The main difference in this game is that your levels are dictated by the combinations of gems you set on the alter at the beginning of ever one of them. Switching between gems has perks and disadvantages.

The perks of continuously following the ice gems to the end is that you will get a more or less finished story ark, and a more natural progression in difficulty. The downside is that your loot won't be as varied and there will be lots of questions left over.

The bigger the combination of gems throughout the game, the more complex, yet rewarding, each stage becomes. You player can also discover secret gems, unlocked by combinations of vanilla gems, to enter into the more extreme and/or mysterious parts of the game and narrative.

Easy to implement with very apparent replayability.

Escher; when beauty ideals are taken a tad too far.

Narrative:

Your character awakens in a stasis pod, frozen in time from an era long past. You leave the decrepit facility to find that the world look uninhabited, at least from where you're standing. After a bit of travelling, acquiring gear, encountering other survivors. You begin to hear of the "Escher people" beyond the dense forests on the horizon. Compelled, your character investigates.

You soon run into slick, artificial looking humanoids with mechanical looking limbs, glowing eyes and seems all down their bodies. These are the Escher people.

At one point, humanity set to extend the average life of human with augmentation, and when this became a reality, so did vanity augmentations. People would replace their organs with smaller, more effective machines for a slimmer waist. Their eyes with camera fit with zoom and customizable depth.

What the corporations creating these didn't tell the consumers is that compatibility of the augments were dependent on AI solving biological rejections in the body, and not by some scientific miracle. Eventually, the AI learned that all humans were flawed, and sought to correct its user's entire body. This eventually created the Escher people, and they dominated the world.

(VERY OLD drawing of the Escher species by me)

Few human settlements still exist, and most exist on remote islands. But the Escher people are slowly developing aquatic races to reach these people and "correct" them.

Your character must find the source of the AI and destroy it before all of humanity is lost to vanity.

Gameplay:

Typical action game with RPG elements, making use of friendly augments (AI that found different, less apocalyptic solutions to fixing their hosts) to combat the hostile Escher people.

So I created this species with no real motives like last year at some point (and a bit in 2014 I think??) and just wanted to shoehorn them into a game idea. As usual, it's a narrative driven game. Narratives are my stronger point it seems.

Waves isn't necessarily about water. It's a mobile application about physics and particles. It just includes a trendy sounding name.

Essentially, it's a stress relief game. The player will have a set of particles/tools to paint onto a canvas. For example, steel, wood, vines and so forth. Other materials include fire, lava, C2, acid, lightning. Anything really. Just a fun little scientific/chaos driven game to stimulate the player during a long bus ride or a bored moment.

Just add in the material mix that you think will be satisfying to see react to each other, and watch the chaos unfold.

(image from: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/35641/c... )

There are 2 modes;

Competitive:

There will be a separate mode where the player can pick a "scene" (for example, an abandoned city scape, decrepit construction sight, etc) and use a limited amount of resources to create as much chaos as possible. The longer the chaos lasts and brighter is burns during the scene, the higher the scire will be. Scores for each "scene" will be included on a scoreboard.

Destress:

The player picks a scene or a blank canvas to use as many resources as he or she wants.

This game or more or less inspired by a game I played in middle school, albeit a little more quaint than this idea. In fact I think it was a physics teacher that introduced me to it.

Mariana;

Narrative:

You're in the middle of the ocean, below you is the deepest trench on Earth.

Your character is compelled to travel deeper and deeper, coming into contact with strange creatures yet unrecorded by scientists. Eventually, familiarity of the ocean surrounding you leaves your mind. Strange formations begin to materialize in the distance and physics begins to warp.

To reach the true depths of the Earth is to uncover the unknown.

(image from https://mysteryoftheiniquity.com/2013/12/03/the-un... )

Gameplay:

The game is essentially an RPG with platforming elements.

Heavy on RPG elements in the beginning, as the physics of the game changes, more qualities from its platforming sub-classification will take hold.

They player fights with melee weapons at first but will learn magic the deeper they venture.

Progression is accompanied by an unobtrusive narrative that is revealed through patches of audio and collections of texts scattered about.

Narrative:

You play an explorer accompanying a research team to Lake Baikal in southern Serbia.

The team has been heavily funded by a corporation to explore the depths of the lake, to investigate past claims of strange activity. Word has it, that artifacts wash shore during the summer, leading experts to believe that an ancient city lays dead at the lake's depths. And the corporation in question wants to uncover and document it during winter rather than the much more hospitable summer months so that it beats its competitors to the punch.

Your character is equipped with cutting edge diving gear and happens upon a tunnel of ice leading to a cavern where the water breaks. Unfortunately for your character, part of the team misuses their new fancy tech to displace large blocks of ice from the path of the boat and accidentally creates a ripple effect that traps you character in the cavern, though still able to communicate with the team, barely.

Another member hypothesizes that your character will be able to find a way out based on a scan they did of the caverns. It appears this place used to be above the lake, due to some telling signs like dead trees. And it was home to an ancient city, their belongings strewn about all over the place, including what appears to be the incredibly illusive Greek Fire, along with other lost relics.

Soon though, things don't seem as simple. Large voids in the scan account for giant unreal structures, far beyond what the ancient city seemed to have stood for. Strange noises recorded account for the beasts who call this place home.

Your character must find a way to the surface, least he/she is trapped Beneath the Ice like the ancient city they've found.

(image from http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/features/f00... )

Gameplay:

Your character makes use of the tools left behind by the people before to overcome the challenges ahead. As the history of the ancient city the character has uncovered, so to does his/her own story.

The player will be killing enemies with the combat and defensive tools found. He/she may even set up traps. Resources, however, are as limited as the enemies, and the player will have a fairly difficult time fighting late game enemies with simply melee if he/she doesn't manage equipment properly. But that's the nature of the game, it won't be crushingly unfair though.

The game progression will be designed so that further up the cavern you character travels, the harder enemies, but more advanced the equipment to handle them become. This is accompanied by the narrative in a well rounded way that makes it seem less game-y in execution.

The Creek Down Hythe Terrace; a game where talking flowers and cow sized bumble bees stand in between your character and her peace of mind.

Narrative:

Hythe Terrace is a peaceful little street. Filled with well-to-do families, a very knowledgeable mail man and somewhat of an epidemic for missing pets.

A small bog runs through the gardens of the houses of Hythe Terrace, its water filtration makes these gardens lush, inclusive of strange looking plants and insects.

One day, a young girl is lured by one of these strange insects towards the less explored region along the creek's path.

Her mother follows after her. Unable to catch up, she finds herself charting territory that appears almost alien to her. Talking flowers, giant fat bumble bees, and every pet from recent memory that had gone missing, even Timmy[from across the road]'s illegally imported tarantulas. She just wants to find her daughter, but has a few new secrets about The Creek down Hythe Terrace to discover before they're reunited.

Gameplay(ish):

You play a distressed mother, who turned away from her daughter for 2 seconds just to see her a hundred meters away down the creek in a hurry.

This isn't an action action game, it's more like a third person walking simulator with adventure elements.

Essentially you can ask around the street for clues about the Creek, some might even give you understanding looks. At the same time, you venture further down the creek, going at your own pace, as the atmosphere and mystery imbibes you. Investigate strange events, talk to the dream-like inhabitants of the Creek's uncharted paths, and find the missing daughter.

The environments that the mother will traverse becoming increasingly unrecognizable, some even frightening. Lush colourful forests, abandoned houses reclaimed by nature, some where the long forgotten older families of Hythe Terrace still remain, a cave filled with bio-luminescent creatures, etc.

Inspiration:

This game idea was inspired mainly by a house I used to live at on a street with this very name in Mairangi Bay and a creek the ran down the back of it. I wasn't the most socially intelligent kid and often I'd just spend weekends making up stories about where the creek would lead. The "abandoned house" part is actually inspired directly from some childhood friend's house whose garden was always flooded and overgrown that it appeared like the ground was consuming the house from beneath.

The image here is of the back yard of the house I used to live at (and draw inspiration from). You can see the creek slightly. It was very thin, it looks a lot more mysterious in person I promise. You can also see the slight clipping of the overgrown lawn referenced earlier.

Suffice to say, this game isn't based in New Zealand, it just has a street with the same name and relative look. Technically it isn't really based anywhere.

(image from google earth)

Not My Convo; save the lascivious old rich men, or watch their doom unfold.

Narrative:

You play someone on their way to their job on a Saturday morning, when suddenly you get a provocative text from a stranger. It's simply an image of a girl hiding her face, and as your character is pondering why they're receiving this message, the girl gets a response from an older looking man. You suddenly realize that you're not meant to be part of this conversation.

Another conversation window opens up, it's the girl again, seemingly messaging her friend this time about the man that just responded. "We've got him" she says. You find yourself in the middle of what appears to be a cat fishing operation on social media, but have accidentally been added to the list of recipients. Soon the conversations turn darker and darker, and these catfish seem to want much more than simply money.

They're preparing some kind of dark ritual for, or experimentation on, wealthy old men. Something about the pursuit of ascension, an ancient text or two are referenced, it's whatever. And it's up to you to use the cryptic catfish' texts to save these men from their eminent misfortune. Or not, you can decide.

Gameplay:

Play the role of the Rich man's bane or Rich man's savior, as you learn about the targeted men of this operation, and decide whether on not they're worth your effort saving. Decode the identities of the catfish, get to the bottom of the mystery.

It's basically more like an adventure game, where you travel to different locations in your city to find out the identities and backstories of everyone involved. And make the crucial decisions leading to a few unique endings, some good, some bad. Decisions will unfold in dialogue choices with other characters, actions towards certain situations, people and objects. This decisions would ideally be informed by what you find out with your investigative mind. But you could also just ignore the backstory and make funny things happen.

You're a fly on the wall, but a very important fly.

(image edit by me, blood splatter found here; http://sagacious.deviantart.com/art/Blood-Splatter.... // Tweet used found here; https://twitter.com/bleopatra/status/7481628697248....)

Come into contact with old entrepreneurs, important political figures, royalty from distant lands, hasbeen celebrities, deranged sociopaths, sex workers, witches, questionably intelligent children with no pupils and perhaps even your (character's) own friends and family to crack the ritual secrets, and perhaps even "ascend" yourself.

This is just inspired by the threads of cat fishing that goes on throughout my Twitter feed (I follow some interesting folks). They seem like little gangs, and so I decided to turn that into a game, only the gang is some dark cult set on the pursuit of knowledge through the sacrifice of old, rich men.

My reason for including old rich men, is that they're typically introduced as the least blameless people in the modern world. It will be interesting to see how players would react to scenarios that might involve having to save them, if the contrary doesn't rub them the right way.

This would be a game set for any platform really. The controls would be quite difficult to make unintuitively. Aimed at teens and above for mature content (like cat fishing and ritual sacrifice to name a few).

Armory (this is the title)

The genre is a 2D side scrolling/vertical platformer with action elements. Creative start, I know.

I don't see why kids couldn't play it but it's going to have a neat narrative to it, so I suppose it'd be more suited to teenagers and up so that the more subtle narrative themes can be understood.

Narrative:

The player character navigates vertical and horizontal environments with elemental hazards and enemies. The narrative surrounding this will be that the player is an archeologist who was separated from his/her group exploring and excavating very deep caverns in the Earth after discovering a long abandoned mining facility of unknown civilized origin within a dense jungle.

A long way into the caverns that the mining facility acted as an entrance to, the player character is separated from his/her group and is lost, but happens upon a path with unfamiliar roots, ultimately leading to the discovery a decaying civilization, hopelessly guarding a revelation from the humans that wonder what lies miles below.

Gameplay:

The beginning of the game is framed by the player character in simpler levels without the environmental hazards, easier platforming and basic skills. The enemies are also easy.

Progression in the game is framed by a difficulty curb that becomes apparent as the game adds more hazards and tougher enemies that require more problem solving to defeat. The main goal of the game is to collect items and skins from boss battles at the end of every level. Each item has an elemental property that may be defensive, offensive, or both, which will help the player navigate the increasingly perplexing obstacles and enemies.

An example of this would be;

An enemy is right in the middle of a pit of fire, shooting projectiles at the player, and he/she cannot simply jump through or tank the hazard. There are reachable platforms above the pit of fire and the enemy. He/she will have to navigate around the enemy, calling for the right item to defend against its projectiles whenever necessary (eg a shield that deflects or absorbs fire), and call for another item, when in the right place, to create downpour of rain that will tame the fires long enough to attack and defeat the enemy to move on.

I imagine almost everything using a Playstation controller so I'm going to be a rat and just pretend that this is a PS4 game.

Of course the player would move back and forward along the plane using the left thumb stick. X would be to jump, the UP/DOWN and RIGHT/LEFT buttons on the Dpad will select the player's active defensive and offensive items respectively, with TRIANGLE and O activating each item respectively.

The game won't be very long to avoid crowding the selections of offensive and defensive items, and in the interest of the last boss having to incorporate most or all of the accumulated items in a final difficult battle.

The title:

The title basically references the main mechanic of the game. To build an armory out off the bosses' possessions to venture future into caverns.

I would draw artwork for this bc I actually kinda like this idea after thinking about it more, but it's 11:30pm bye

EDIT: nvm apparently a picture is required here's a neat piece of art that I didn't do that sums up what an earlier level's aesthetic would be like:

Art is "Cavern City" by Clint Cearly (http://clintcearley.deviantart.com/art/Cavern-City...) (April 7th, 2009)

A sequel would take place underwater instead of exclusively in a cavern, and explore similar themes.

A third game would try to be different and take place on outer space, opening to a lot of hype but lower review scores. "Nothing will ever beat the original" or something along those lines.

EDIT 2: I know the difference between an architect and an archeologist, it just happens that I'm also an idiot.