Challenge 10: The Frankengame

This challenge is inspired by a comment made by a game designer I know.
I forgot where he originally posted the idea, otherwise I'd link to it.

Anyway, your challenge is this:
Design a game out of the left over bits you didn't use in other games you made.

As the submissions here are largely thought experiments and not final games that could actually utilize unused art assets, I will modify what I'm asking for a little bit:

Design a game out of game mechanics you devised, but which were ultimately cut from the final design, in at least 2 different games you've worked on in the past.

(But hey, if you want to actually go out and do a digital game using old unused art assets that's fine too!)

Challenge 9 - First (and only) Strike

I realize this is really, really, REALLY late, but here goes nothing.

This game puts William "BJ" Blazkowitz from Wolfenstein into Duck Hunt. Yes, you heard me. Chain guns in Duck Hunt. Kill ducks to earn points. You can shoot the dog if you want to, but only if you want to piss of Mecha Hitler.

Okay I think that about covers it.

Challenge 9: The Classic Game Character Swap

Note: Decided the office-crab challenge was so fun I had officially made it last week's challenge. Congrats to Dan for actually winning the prize! This challenge has been bumped up to be for this week now. :)

Last challenge went so awesomely, we're going to continue mixing things up.

This next challenge is a bit more... out there:

Rom Check Fail is an interesting little indie game you should go check out right now. Basically, the game mixes together classic video games-- one second you might be the ship from Asteroids, flying around in the Pac-man maze, shooting at Goombas from Super Mario Bros, and suddenly the game flips again and now you're Link, trying to battle the space invaders in the Mushroom kingdom.

The game keeps taking various game characters and their associated mechanics and putting them into different contexts.


So, your challenge this week is to create another similar pairing not already in Rom Check Fail-- in other words put the player character from classic game A into classic game B.

What would Super Mario Bros. be like if the Bionic Commando had to rescue the princess instead, with his lack of jumping ability but his special grappling hook arm? What if the square from Adventure had to defeat the Sinistar? (I'd imagine he'd be pretty screwed, is what... )

Unlike Rom Check Fail which pairs mechanics randomly, you are actively designing a pairing-- challenge yourselves to make a combination that's fun, and maybe even better than the original mechanics.

Challenge 8.5 -- The surprise office-crab challenge! Brian's Turn

I couldn't help but try this one myself...

To recap from Dan:

@deliciousbees of Harmonix posted this challenge recently on Twitter:

"My stress-induced insomnia is your gain. Best game pitch involving Opilio crabs in an office situation gets a RB Country Track Pack code."



Alright! My submission is an RTS called Inter-Cubicle Crab Apocalypse.
Each player playing starts with a human avatar and a cubicle in a cubicle-farm style office space, and a handful of crabs. The player's human avatar is much like the King in Chess-- a player loses when his human self is killed, and although it can be selected and moved like any other unit... it's best to keep him hidden away and walled up behind a line of defenses.

It turns out your defenses mainly consist of an army of Opilio crabs.
Things you can command your crabs do to are attack NPC humans 'creeps' to clear them out of their cubicles so you can claim them (the now empty cubicle) as your own, patrol areas or defend key units (a human avatar, traps, etc.), set up crab nests in empty cubicles to spawn more crabs, etc.

Crabs may also raid cubicles and supply closets for office equipment which can be used to equip crabs with various items like tape, scissors, staplers, etc. Many of these office supplies can be used as weapons --a scissors wielding crab can do more damage than a crab with no weapons-- but many of the items also allow crabs to build certain traps or defenses-- tape-wielding crabs can string reams of tape between cubicles to make a sticky web-like barrier that enemy crabs will get caught in. Scissor-weilding crabs are of course equipped with the tool that can defeat the tape webs, etc.

Crabs may also man certain large 'traps' found around the office-- dispensing coffee from the coffee machine as a sort of boiling-oil to burn crabs traveling below... dispensing water from the water-cooler to create a slippery spill... dispensing cans of soda from the soda machine that roll through the office causing damage as it runs over crabs. (Cans could then also be damaged to turn into a second type of explosive, fizzing, spraying weapon of carnage, and can be moved into strategic positions to use this as a trap-- set up some soda cans as a kind of explosive barrels to be hit with projectiles to explode when enemy crabs are near.)

Groups of crabs can also be used to do more complicated tasks:
-Infesting an empty cubicle with a crab-nest, and maintain the nest (some crabs have to stick around makin' crab babies...)
-Moving office furniture or large appliances (desks, photocopiers) around to use as barriers.
-Disassemble empty cubicles to use their walls as barricades or to expand your main cubicle-fort.
-Moving the large traps around to more strategic locations. (i.e. mount coffee machine traps on your fort so any crabs attempting to enter get scalded, etc.)
-Three crabs can equip a rubber band to form a catapault-- any equipment the loader crab is given is loaded into the rubber band and fired as a long distance projectile.
(Crabs can also be asked to load themselves into the rubber-band catapault as a means of troop transport!)

soda cans fired from the rubber-band-catapault would be like explosive mortar shells, etc.

This game would probably be a beast to balance, but sounds hilarious and could be a hell of a lot of fun.

Hmm... thinking about it, I think there's crabs in WarCraft3-- I could totally make this into an actual playable mod! Would take some heavy scripting work though, but meh.

Challenge 8.5

Before going onto challenge 9, @deliciousbees of Harmonix posted this on Twitter this evening:

My stress-induced insomnia is your gain. Best game pitch involving Opilio crabs in an office situation gets a RB Country Track Pack code.

The idea behind this game is it The Office meets The Deadliest Catch. You play the manager of an Snow Crab Tech Support Center, and it is your job to make sure that the employees at the company do not wander aimlessly into crab traps and to make sure that they are doing the best job they can. The game plays kind of like an isometric fusion of Lemmings, World of Goo, and The Sims.

Each level is a different floor of the Snow Crab Tech Support Center, and the layouts get more complicated as the game goes on. The goal of each level is to get the crabs to their cubicles safely by giving crabs tasks in the office. For example, there are two kinds of security guards: turning and deflective. Turning guards make crabs turn 90 degrees and keep moving. Deflective guards make crabs turn 180 degrees and go back the way they came. Then there are also Trap Destroyers. These crabs go kamikaze on the crab traps so the other crabs can get past them. Finally, when the crabs get to their desks, they can be set to Work, Eat, or Sleep, each of which adds to one game-metric and subtracts from two. Work increases your money, while decreases your Comfort and Alertness. Eat increases your comfort, while slowing down your money intake and decreasing your Alertness. Sleep increases your Alertness while slowing down your money intake and and Comfort.

Each level has different goals to be completed on different playthroughs, ala Mario 64/Sunshine/Galaxy. For example, a level's goals may be "Make $15,000" or "Maintain 100% Comfort for 3 Minutes" or "Avoid All Fishermen," which would be traps and hooks that are thrown down to the game-space during the level which the player must avoid. The player receives a different colored Crab Medal for the number of completed goals: Bronze Crab for 1, Silver Crab for 2, and Golden Crab for 3.

Between levels, players spend their earned money on hiring employee types between levels. Unlike Lemmings which have a set number of umbrellas, bombers, miners etc. per level, here it is up to the player to determine what they need and which playstyle fits them best. General workers do not need to be purchased, but Security, Bombers, and any other special job types do. These basically equate to your inventory.

The main multiplayer mode I can think of would involve one player dropping traps, nets, fishing lines, and all sorts of other crab-catching paraphenalia on another player who is trying to avoid them and get the crabs out of the maze. Whichever player has the most crabs at the end wins.

So while players are mainly concerned with completing the level's objectives, they must also watch out for traps sent by the enemy AI/other players. If the overall alertness of the crabs is low, they react slower to your clicks to make them move. If they are hungry, they move slower. If they are hungry and tired, they're just overall sluggish. But keep them happy, healthy crabs and they're lightning fast.

Challenge 8 - Second Assault

Zombie Karaoke Uncensored

For 1-2 Players

Platforms: XBox 360, Wii, Ps2, PS3

In Zombie Karaoke Uncensored, players design their zombie slaying/American Idol-esque badass and take to the stage to clear the audience of the zombie horde - that is, to say, everybody - by belting their hearts out and blasting their shotguns.

The game comes packed with a microphone and microphone stand, as the use of a controller is also necessary. While singing, the game plays similarly to Rock Band or Karaoke Revolution. The words scroll across the screen from right to left, as well as a line representing the pitch, and an arrow showing how your singing matches up to the song. There is also a thin vertical line near the left side of the screen which indicates where to sing a certain word or syllable.

As you sing, you gain damage multipliers for your attacks. Normally, you have a 1x multiplier, which means regular zombies need 4 hits to kill. That can be brought up to a 4x multiplier, which means regular zombies can be killed in 1 shot. The longer you sing consistantly, the fuller your Will-To-Live meter goes. If you get it full, your current multiplier is immediately multiplied by 4, so you can have up to a 16x multiplier, which causes major damage and, depending on your character, earns you different abilities. For example, a character can get Napalm Bullets which eat through zombies in a line, or Nitrogen Bullets which slow zombies down, faster fire and reload, etc. Players select their perk when they make their character, and unlock more perks as the game goes on.

Attacks are performed in two ways. One is while you are singing, which is done in a quick-time event fashion. A directional arrow and a trigger icon appears in an icon under a word, and if you hit that button combination when the word is sung, your character shoots a zombie with power equal to your current multiplier. On the Wii, the triggers display B or Z instead. The movement part is done by aiming the Wii remote in the indicated direction. The player does not have to aim the direction at the same time as they shoot. They can aim beforehand. If they do shoot before the word hits, though, their gun jams.

During instrumental sections of a song, the camera shifts to a behind-the-shoulder view, and the player must drag the cursor over approaching zombies, which the player's avatar then shoots on-beat, ala REZ. Depending on the player's weapon, they may be able to shoot many zombies or only a few per beat during this part. For example, automatics can hit many zombies at once, while the shotgun can only hit about one per beat. The more zombies shot during this part, the higher the player's multiplier goes, and kills can be racked up fairly quickly regardless of weapon.

There are also several boss battles which eliminate the fighting system in exchange for a regular scoring system. The player must reach a certain score in order to beat the boss. The boss is a smarter zombie that has retained the ability to sing. The winner kills the other.

The game has several modes of play. The mode described above is the basic Single and Multiplayer (called Face-Off). There is also Singing Shooter mode, where your character's shots are dependent solely on your singing capability. The better you sing, the more they shoot. Multipliers are added up the same way.

"Infected" Mode is an unlockable easter egg where you play as zombies. The fighting mechanics are eliminated for regular scoring, but the words in the songs are replaced with various moans and groans, and any word that rhymes with the word "brains" is replaced with such.

Single-player and Face-Off multiplayer is where everything is unlocked. You can unlock everything from outfits to dress up your character, to weapons which do more damage from the start or can hit multiple enemies, such as the Shotgun which does 3 damage instead of 1, and the Rocket Launcher which causes splash damage to other surrounding zombies.

As the game progresses, new kinds of zombies start appearing. The zombies at the start of the game are just the regular stumblers, but soon running zombies start appearing, as well as exploding zombies, zombies with guns, healer zombies that if left alive continuously heal any zombies you shoot, and necromancer zombies which can raise zombie attack dogs.

And now for the hopeful tracklist, in no particular order:

• Jonathan Coulton - Re: Your Brains
• B52's - Love Shack
• The Darkness - I Believe In a Thing Called Love
• The Cranberries - Zombie
• Rob Zombie - Living Dead Girl
• Michael Jackson - Thriller
• BJ Thomas - Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head
• Bobby Picket - Monster Mash
• Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear the Reaper
• Tom Petty - Zombie Zoo
• REM - It's The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
• Journey - Don't Stop Believin'
• Morris Day and the Time - Jungle Love
• Spinal Tap - Stonehenge
• Tokyo Police Club - Graves
• The Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive
• Our Lady Peace - Superman's Dead
• The Presidents of the United States - Lump
• GWAR - Sexecutioner
• Verix - Drop the Dodongo

Feel free to comment with suggestions for more songs.

Zombie Karaoke Uncensored, coming soon to an uninfected console near you.

Challenge 8: Brian's Turn

Just for fun, I'll tackle the remaining three the other guys didn't take!

Romantic Sudoku Onslaught:

Okay, what I picture for this is a DS game where the gameplay is a series of sudoku puzzles (big surprise) but all strung together with a narrative told in comic-like panel-based cutscenes. The story is about a young man trying to woo a sudoku-loving gal. The sudoku puzzles and how/why you interact with them would progress and change based on the situation in the story. Early puzzles would just be done straight as the man tries to impress her with his sudoku skills. Then he'd try doing sudoku with the girl, and it could be a race to see who can complete their puzzle first-- the player or the AI controlled girl. Then, finding her still unimpressed, the man decides to quest to the secret Temple of Sudoku in an Indiana Jones kind of parody. Can he solve the sudoku puzzles of the temple to unlock the secret rooms and avoid the deathtraps so he can return and win the girl over with the gift of the rarest of artifacts: the Holy Sudoku Tablet of Ra?

Heavy Office Competition:

I have two ideas for this one...

1.) There was an episode of the Office where they did office Olympics-- a bunch of simple sport-like games that can be played around the office, like tossing crumpled paper into a wastebin. Basically, that's what I'm envisioning for this game, only in video-game form. It'd be a multi-player party game for the Wii, consisting of a collection of mini-games all based around wacky new games that could actually be played in an office, with office supplies. Cubicle nerf-wars, wastebin basketball, three-legged-wastebin-on-your-foot races, some sort of game where you compete to make the best photocopies of yourself on the photocopier, etc.

2.) This title totally fits a game idea I've had in my head for a long time and never actually got around to making... a miniatures wargame played on one's cubicle desk, with office supplies as the pieces.

The rules are to be inspired by those of Fuzzy Heroes where the stats of a unit are based on the physical properties of the item used-- size, color, etc.
The bigger it is, the slower it moves but the more hit points it has, the slashing damage caused by a pair of scissors is a function of the measurements of it's blade, etc. Paper is easily afflicted by slashing, cutting or impaling damage (from a scissor, staple-remover or pencil/pen/paperclip) but is resistant to blunt-force damage and has the ability to transform (via folding) into different shapes like paper airplanes or origami critters to give it new movement modes and attacks.

Movement (and measuring) done with a tape-measure... might need other, non-office-supply like equipment like dice for conflict resolution.

European Rainbow in the Desert:

The player plays as a Leprechaun (Irish of course-- just to get the 'European' criteria in there...) who's trying to find his pot of gold. As we all know-- leprechaun gold is at the end of a rainbow. So he flies across his Irish rainbow and finds the other end is deep within an inhospitable foreign desert filled with savage hungry beasts. His pot of gold is too big and heavy to fly back up the rainbow with, so he'll have to lug the gold all the way back to Ireland, using the rainbow as his guide, with nothing but his pot-o-gold and his leprechaun trickery for aid as he makes his way past the hungry creatures of the desert. (The game ends when you get to the ocean-- where the leprechaun catches a ride back to Ireland from a friendly whale or ship captain or something.)

The game would be a 2D side-scroller puzzle-platformer as you try to figure out how to get from point A to point B in a level with your big'ol pot o' gold. Could use it to activate pressure-plate sort of switches, or dropped onto enemies to defeat them, etc.