Ideas for video games in hopes of spreading creative ideas into the gaming industry.
Non-Euclidean Exploration Game
Games like Portal and Prey have shown that non-euclidean portals are always a good thing to add to an environment. An idea I've had for somewhat longer doesn't involve just portals, but rather an entire world built in more than three dimensions.
The game could start off with the player locked in a house that seems normal for the most part. Interactive physics, a fun little bit of exploration. At some point, the player stumbles across a stairwell, door, or room that violates the laws of physics- the inside being larger than the outside or 'overlapping' with adjacent rooms. Further exploration yields seamless exploration of an incredibly large world contained within a relatively small three-dimensional space.
There could be outdoor sections still 'within' the house- with no way out except back to the indoor sections.
I also think that subtlety will really make the idea pop here. Prey had really in-your-face disgusting environments that made the portal technology seem a little less unsettling in comparison.
In a mundane setting, where the weirdness of the dimensions in play is the only thing the player has to wrap his or her head around, the effect would work a lot better. By subtly applying that violation of our 3-dimensional thinking, and bit by bit having it evolve into a blatant assault on the player's senses, I think the overall effect would be much better expressed.
16 Ratings
Comments ( Add )
Interesting related ideas:
-rotating the doorknob to a room one way gives the normal room, the other way gives a mirror image, perhaps with inverted colors
-somehow twist things like Escher's Relativity painting, walking along the underside of staircases, on walls, etc.
This could work as a myst-type game, with a mystery of somesort to solve, rather than a FPS.
Anybody got plot ideas?
Interesting related ideas:
-rotating the doorknob to a room one way gives the normal room, the other way gives a mirror image, perhaps with inverted colors
-somehow twist things like Escher's Relativity painting, walking along the underside of staircases, on walls, etc.
This could work as a myst-type game, with a mystery of somesort to solve, rather than a FPS.
Anybody got plot ideas?
There is a book that has this sort of idea to it. There's much more to it than this, but basically this guy buys a big house and after a while he notices a doorway he's never seen before that leads to a hall way that connects two rooms that he thought were right next to each other. In the book the guy measures the width of the house from the inside and finds that it is bigger than the houses outside width.
So kind of like how Mario travels between worlds in Mario 64? Make it suprisingly realistic and you might have a start, otherwise it's just another platform game with a common "home-level" between worlds (think Spyros, Crash Bandicoots, Marios and countless other successful 3d platformers).
The book ebrandel is referencing is titles House of Leaves. Very good book.
But... what would be the ultimate goal of the game? Just simple sand-box exploration? If thus so, would you make some sort of generated content so there could be infinte rooms/houses to playthough?
One idea I had, is if you had some sort of story, you could throw in time as a dimensiont hat you move through. Like, you have to move around in time, change something within the house to move ahead in the "present" time. Like you could go back to even before it was built and alter the blueprints or soemthing like that.