Game Design Megathread

[Blue Screen]

also i have most or all of the dialogue and story in my head but i don't know if i wanna post that here because it'll be reaaaaaaaaaaally big
oh and most of the weapons/vehicles/items/blahblahblah all that fun stuff because everyone wants to blow stuff up right???

[Ad Bot]

[Bushido]

i sort of like the idea that something called 'savior of the world' or 'bane of the world' is of comparable power to just dropping like a dozen swords on a guy

[Strovbe]

If you're going to ask for help;

a) Post amazing concept art and screenshots.
b) Explain specifically what you want to achieve, including extremely specific gameplay mechanics and level counts.
c) Describe what kind of roles you'd like filled, and how many.
d) List your experience.
e) Be open to critique.


I would love to work on another game project, but I'm currently swamped because of loving character design. Ask me in two months and I'll probably say "Let's loving do this."

All these things are something I'd like to discuss with someone who would be interested in doing this privately. I've got plenty of ideas and concept art, but I really would prefer to discuss it over messaging rather than on a thread.

But I will say the story is about a young girl who is slowly developing schizophrenia and psychosis. She watches her imaginary friends become her worst enemies, and the illness itself is personified as a demon that gets closer and closer to catching her and more influental on her imaginary friends the older she gets.

[Bushido]

one of the ideas i have lying around that i straight up do not know how to address is the idea of a horror game that takes place in an infinite mirror world

like what happens is that the protagonist enters (a haunted castle?) or something with a wall that is just a giant forgetin mirror with a reflection of herself that is sapient and friendly and able to move on her own, and entering the mirror allows her into the First Mirror World where everything is literally just the normal world but as reflected in a mirror and inside this world live the reflections of the castle's residents and it's sort of implied that the protagonist's reflection is something horrific (the reflection will replace her in the real world, the reflection will kill her and take her place, the reflection exists because she'll die in the castle and exist only as a reflection in the mirror...) but that's a total red herring

because in the mirror world there's another mirror room, on the opposite side of the castle, that doesn't reflect the original castle because there's no light inside the locked room that the mirror exists in, and walking into that mirror leads to a warped version of the mirror world where everything begins to take on a psychological horror bend and things stop reflecting the world as it exists and it begins to reflect what could be and the people from the first mirror appear not necessarily as their genuinely nonthreatening selves but tinged to suit the protagonist's image and fears of them (the king is corrupt and will send his army to kill her, the queen's dogs will turn on her with the slightest provocation, her reflection actually wants to kill her and take her place... ) and because the depiction of the second mirror world is spotty and incomplete the mirror room she entered in the first place doesn't lead back to the first mirror world and the protagonist has to travel deeper and deeper into the echo chamber to find a way back out

the game's finale would ultimately revolve around the protagonist somehow beginning the slow ascent back to the first mirror world and her reaction to it's (genuinely friendly) inhabitants after seeing what horrible stuff she 'saw' ('imagined', but in a way that her imagination became reality) them doing, which for most of the endings probably involves her destroying the mirror room that lead her to the FMW in the first place or otherwise abandoning the mirror world out of fear

[The Resonte!]

it sounds like one of those rpg games that destroyerofblocks plays

but hopefully good

[Bushido]

the problem is i couldnt possibly actually write that sort of thing because almost inevitably i would have the fmw reflection of protag start richarding around and start talking about how she knows that the protagonist thinks that she wants to kill her but doesnt, and she doesn't have to worry about that because shes pretty sure its not that kind of video game

[Hansome duded]

One quick idea I had for a game was that it would be a fighting/rhythm game hybrid, where as computer AI controls your fighter. The better you do in the song, the more the AI begins to improve while it fights for you. Up against an opponent that is either another computer or second player that needs to do the same in order to win.

[Bushido]

[Squidbee]

Question
How long did it take you to completely develop Star Signal 144?

[Glass Joe]

do you really need to constantly format all your posts like that

[Bushido]

you know the game's not done, right

[Foxscotch]

do you really need to constantly format all your posts like that

Answer
yes

[Glass Joe]

well in other news, I had this idea in my head of a trick system similar to sonic rush's, where you perform moves in midair to gain points/boost

if you don't know, in sonic rush, you can mash buttons in the air after hitting a spring to rack up a point counter, that earns you x amount of points/boost once you hit the ground

in this system of mine, you can mash buttons like in rush to earn a steady amount of pointage, but you can get more by tapping in a specified rhythm (which can vary depending on the character, like 1-1-1-1 or 1-2-1-2, etc.) you can propel yourself either straight up or straight horizontal every "measure" to maintain airtime and/or avoid enemies, and you can perform a finishing trick after performing at least one measure of tricks. the finishing move puts you in a prone state for one beat, and touching the ground/getting hit while in that state makes you lose 25% of the points you were going to gain from the trick, but once the prone state ends you gain 150% more points than you normally would once you reach the ground

this idea seems pretty good on paper so far but I'm not quite sure what style of platformer I can really fit that system into, so any ideas would be pretty ok

[Khorde]

how do you make the sprites in game maker not look so fuzzy when you run your game?

[Bushido]

turn off interpolation of colors between pixels, scale up uniformly, increase the viewport's port size to increase the scale of the window