Interaction/emotional strategy game where you live the life of a shutaway person with a broken computer who has forgotten how to connect to others from being alone. You have recently been pushed to apply for a job, and will be working with and around people for the first time in recent memory. You hate attention, and as a result have found that the easiest solution is to do what everyone does and pretend to be fine. The game is played over a span of days which start when you wake up in the morning, and how you prepare for work will influence how relaxed or stressed you are from how piercing your alarm is to how stale the cereal is to whether you accidentally bump into walls or break cups or plates while still sleepy. It starts at a rough value depending on how well you slept - usually terribly at day one - and decreases when faced with negative stimuli like harsh noises or social phobias.
At work, the tasks are usually away from people and are simple tasks such as stacking shelves or wiping tables, but coworkers and customers may come and talk to you from time to time and you will have to navigate dialogue and maintain your body language/composure using comfort objects or escape tactics to keep stress down so they don't guess anything is wrong. The higher your stress the harder this will be, and people wondering is a likely occurrence in the first week or two if things don't improve. Other random events include day to day trials such as laundry days, extra responsibilities, the chance of picking up a stray pet and having to feed it, being mugged after a late shift, and even tripping over the sidewalk and not being able to afford the health insurance until you heal.
With the money you earn, you can afford things like a better mattress, medication for asthma and sleeping, cleaning clothes more often, new music, confectionary treats, and other things for general hygiene and mental health that will reduce the effect stress has and make it easier to fool people into thinking you're okay. If someone suspects something and tries to move closer, though, your stress will ramp up for as long as they're focused on you and the effects of relaxation will have less of an impact the longer it goes on, all the way to zero. If stress hits maximum at any time, you will have a breakdown - if anyone sees you during this you will be found out and referred to a therapist, which will use up any money you would have put towards repairing your computer and result in a failure state.
The aim of the game is to work shift for as long as it takes to afford a repaired or new computer - depending on how many days played, more parts will be needed as your computer breaks down - without being found out in the meantime so that you can fix it in as few days as possible and go back to how you were living before you had to get the job.
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Picture: Dream Life by ImaginarySmile on DeviantArt http://imaginarysmile.deviantart.com/art/Dream-Lif...
A tower defense-like game where you play as a race of animate tongs who live in a kitchen, but it's being invaded by the attacking race of holed ladles and the tongs need to defend it to keep their home. The player has access to their tong defenders at any given time, to drag them to a different position, change direction, and so on. The player also has time at the start to drag furniture and objects around to make it harder for the ladles to reach and attack the tongs, but different objects weigh differently so dragging a chair fifty centimeters would take the same time as making a little barricade out of empty cartons, for example. The player can still do this at any time, but directing the tongs is far more time-efficient so it's not ideal once an attack has started.
The ladles approach from any side of the kitchen that's left open, which is inevitably at least a couple of sides, or one really big gap, or lots of little chokepoints. The ladles have holes in them, and to attack them you deploy boxes of pellets around the kitchen next to tongs. There are different sized pellets, and the ladles have different sized holes in their faces, so smaller pellets have more of a chance of hitting ladles with finer holes and larger pellets are ideal for taking down ladles with big holes that might cause smaller pellets to miss, but smaller pellets are more common. Hitting a ladle with a pellet will knock it back or down depending on the size, and if the pellet is just the right size that it gets stuck in one of the holes they'll be slowed down by each pellet until they fall over.
The pellets are limited, and can be bought with credits given at the start of the game and awarded when a ladle is downed. They can also be empowered with special effects at the cost of credits - pellets that split into smaller pellets, pellets that coalesce into larger pellets midflight, pellets that explode for splash impact, pellets that launch like a mortar and come down delayed, but powerful, and even pellets that temporarily freeze and warp the struck ladle to an alternate dimension for a while.
If the ladles get close to the tongs, they will start whacking them with their ladle heads. Do not let this happen! The tongs are valuable and cannot be replaced. The game ends when either the ladles run out of reinforcements, or the player runs out of tongs.
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Image: http://indoornice.com/images/img-10/kitchen-design-with-island-layout-best-design-ideas-3.jpg
A team-based, most likely top-down sportlike game where the objective is something sportsy like kicking a ball through one side of the field or putting it through a hoop to score more sports points than the other team's sports, but half of each team is AI-controlled and nobody has any names, making it difficult to identify who's a player and who's a bot. What everyone does have is the ability to possess another character aside from themselves and control both at the same time via separate ends of the keyboard, which would be done to intercept positions, coordinate between two characters more effectively, imbalance the team numbers in your favour, and so on. Teams would be small - 4 to 8 or 6 to 10 - and controls would be simple to accomodate this, but the twist is that if you attempt to possess a human player, the two of you swap places and teams, meaning you might now be on the losing team - so losing team players are more likely to be possession-happy than the winning ones, at least until they swap roles. If someone possesses a bot you've already possessed, the control goes to them and your possession is locked out for a short time, making identifying player mannerisms and correctly guessing their controlled bot to be rewarding.The first person to get the most sports points in whatever sport the map is imitating wins, similar to real life sports, but with the souls of the damned wailing around the field and into players.
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Image: http://sport.maths.org/content/charting-more-succe...
A semi-turnbased RPG in the vein of some of Final Fantasy's more recent ATB systems such as in XIII. The player is a customised character, but within the idea of a solitary, very resourceful warrior who tries to overcome impossible odds by using everything down to the tiniest resource to win.The setting is some sort of wasteland, most like Shadow of the Colossus's deserted plains after a series of natural and unnatural disasters shattered the earth and splintered the terrain into pieces. Twisted creatures from these fallouts roam the land, and with survivors few and far between, the warrior has taken it upon themself to be the single hand to make the area safe again.
Similar to Colossus, the main focus is boss battles, but there are still smaller enemies to supplement as it's not primarily about battling bosses but rather collecting and converting resources in preparation for those battles, then the boss battles, where the player can use everything they've prepared to attempt to succeed against far more powerful opponents.
As an example, the player has defeated the previous boss, and sees that the next fragment of earth is charred and the sky is dark. They decide the next zone is fire-based, look through the books they've collected along the way - books of alchemy, first aid, leatherworking, and so on - and see the alchemy book has a recipe for a potion of resist fire, and the leatherworking book has an antifire cape recipe in it. They backtrack to the last wasteland merchant to buy some empty phials and some thread, then hunt down imps for their leather and ashes, as well as some fireslimes for their fiery ooze. They combine the ooze with the ashes and water to make a potion of resist fire, and use the potion in combination with some imp leather and the thread to make an antifire cape, then make some more resist fire potions. They combine linen cloth with ground-up blasting powder from mining and use more thread for a wick to make some stun grenades, as they've been doing so far, then set off after selling their boots and buying some better ones from the merchant with the rest of their gold.
Defeating the boss of an area will clear it of many of the monsters and the rest will be easily avoidable when passing through, making it much safer, but the monsters are still good for experience and ingredients until you defeat the boss.
The twist to the game, and the reason for its name, is that remnants of the deceased linger where they died, as restless as the destroyed earth they walk on. They continually re-enact the scenes leading up to their deaths, like a spectral projection from the past into the present. These are sometimes contextual clues to warn the player when they get near hazardous terrain, to fill in the story or atmosphere such as seeing a group falling after a natural bridge collapsed when the player comes up to its remains, and so on. But the most important reason for their being there is during the boss battles. The remnants will phase in and out of the player's fight as though battling alongside the player, but without being aware of the player's presence - they're fighting the boss in the past, and as they die to it you can see where they went wrong and learn from their mistakes during your own battle. The fire boss might curl up, ready to counterattack the player with a massive attack if they swing at it, but if the player waits just a second they can see someone in the past trying exactly that and being incinerated, so the player might instead choose to throw their stun grenade to draw it out, then attack, and so on.
The game is mainly a spectacle strategy, and the reward for playing is the scenery and vistas, as well as seeing all the different bosses and figuring out how to defeat each one, and finding as many uses as possible for everything around the player. It would be a game for people who enjoy min/maxing, roaming vast landscapes, analysing everything and theorising about what might be possible, and thinking outside the box when it comes to fighting powerful bosses.
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Image: http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/keepwalking/frozen-desert
A survival, psychology/strategy game in a similar vein to goodbye where you play as an ethereal Spirit of Worldly Passage and starting the game puts you in the shoes of a random stranger. But this time you're not fading away, you're dying. You have one day left to live, and on starting the game you're given some information about the person you're inhabiting: their skills - the things they're best at; their fears - what could hold them back from doing certain things; their allergies, diseases, or conditions; and a list of the things they want to do before they die, which they have entrusted to you along with their body. This can range from something as simple as trying on a new coat from the tailor, or as extravagant as going hang gliding for the first time in their life, and it may overlap with the other categories - someone may want to have a strawberry milkshake but they're lactose intolerant, so you will need to find a way around that.
The goal of the game is to fulfill as many dying wishes as you can before their time is up. As a Spirit of Worldly Passage, it is also your job to guide the departed to the afterlife, and a restless soul drains multitudes more of your energy than a soul at peace to guide, meaning you will not be able to help as many people if you don't complete enough of their lists. With every wish you fulfill, your spirit grows a tiny bit stronger, meaning your third playthrough will be longer and more complex than your first - like leveling up, but without levels, just invisible experience. Once your energy is up, you return to the Place Beyond the World to be replaced by another Spirit, leaving you with the options to stop or start again.
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A real-time strategy game set in a medieval fantasy era, around the time of great warlords such as Alexander or Genghis, where you play as a Witch-doctor with a number of mystic skills, including reanimating the ashes of the dead. Your home is a small nation trapped between two much greater powers who are currently at war, and your nation's failure to choose a political side has left it very vulnerable. Now, with one nation making a move through yours to their enemy, your infrastructure is collapsing under the invasion's weight.
Your only advantage is the chokepoint location of your nation; situated between two valleys, there are only two or three major fronts you can be attacked from, with a scattering of smaller points of entry to watch out for. Your nation still lacks mighty heroes, however, and this is where you come in. The fall of your nation would mean your death, as Witch-doctory is considered heretical in the invading nation and you would be executed for your crimes.
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Through your farseer mysticism, you are able to see major battles and leaders as glows on your world map, allowing you to track the campaign's movements and see which important heroes are where at any given time. This will be the means you can use to position yourself - your resurrecting powers are the key to your nation's survival, but you need to travel to the places it is needed so you can be of use. This is instant for the player, but takes time in the game, and before you leave your map will be shown the state of the campaign at the time you will arrive, so you can decide if it's worth trying to come to the defense of one front over another.
You have to position carefully, though. You need to first get into position, then contact the local defense via your mysticism so they can bring their fallen champions back to you. But if you choose your place badly, enemy movements might stumble upon you and execute you, or steal information of your allies.
Once in position, there are a number of things you can do: gather ingredients for your other actions, although you start with a limited supply; set up traps, wards, and decoys to allow your safe escape should you be discovered by the enemy's patrols or mystics; contact the local defense and having them bring their fallen leaders to you so you can reanimate them, bolstering this front's defense; or use mysticism to enchant or bolster the soldiers, cause bad weather to impair the enemy's movements, or curse their troops with ailments such as ravenous hunger or sleeplessness. Be as much of a minx to the enemy lines as possible, but pay attention to the map so you know where to move to next, before your nation is overrun from a different angle. Above all, do not let yourself get captured!
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Image: Voodoo Whisperer: Curse of a Legend (Gogii Games, 2014) http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/walkthrough/voodoo-whisperer-curse-of-a-legend-walkthrough/
A point-and-click adventure/strategy game where you play as a necromancer in a gothic hamlet. Your objective is to overrun the town with an undead invasion, but you are only a novice necromancer and your first raised dead are too weak to pose a threat. You must first root yourself among the town and its people before weakening it from the inside while you build your skills, using actions shown in the sample flowchart.
The constabulary stand ever vigilant against undead attacks, and the more the townsfolk suspect strange happenings, the more restless they will become. You must bide your time and do everything you can to remain undetected while you practice your dark art - but your necromancy requires a supply of fresh corpses from their graveyard, or even from among the living should no suitable vessels be available.
Ply your craft, avoid suspicion or throw the watchful townspeople off your trail, and do everything you can to bring your plan to fruition before some do-gooder stops you. Soon, this town will be yours...
Background: fullyramblomatic.com - The Trials of Odysseus Kent by Benjamin "Yahtzee" Croshaw
