GC

Where Do Game Ideas Come From

Following the success of Where Do Ideas Come From, I bring the idea process for EPIC Sardines our Design for Entertainment Systems Module group EPIC Entertainment. The Mission create a game or gaming device or entertainment system or all three.

There was an early idea in the pot already conceived by me and Airs but we had already ruled that out for being too hard to build. Airs had come up with another, which was basically murder mystery for the iPhone using location based clues. This was ok, but it lacked gameplay mechanic and the crucial hook. That drive that keeps making you play more and more. Plus I had another idea, which I thought was better. And commence ye-old vintage Gav vs Airs battle.

My idea was to change the way we purchase and play games using the internet as the glue to stick platform together. Basically imagine WOW (Word of Warcraft) on a Mac, iPhone, Xbox, PS3 and any other platform you can think of. Not a new idea I mean PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) comes out on most platforms with varying degrees of graphics and intelligence depending on platform constraints, which would be the same for our game. The core of my idea was to store user saved data online and allow players to play from the same point in a role playing game on any platform. Currently if I have Half-Life on PC and have almost completed the game I couldn’t pick up my PS2 and continue from the same spot, with our system you could. To make it even better we would supply the game to you on any platform for free over the internet, gamers would just pay a subscription to access their user data and the game could only be played via the data on our servers. The concept would be commercially viable now and could potentially turn the way we pay for games and use an array of gaming devices on its head.

There where only two problems when running it past Dan, firstly we had 12 weeks to create this framework and a killer game to run on it, there isn’t enough time if you take into account our other modules on the go. Secondly we had to create a killer game and that is difficult enough without creating an entire new framework also. Thus we presented Air’s idea to Dan and the issue with this was as we suspected, it had no hook nor gripping gameplay mechanic. Back to the drawing board.

Dan did actually say one thing when pulling apart both ideas.

“If you had said Sardines merged with another game”

Well we thought, none of this ‘if’ let’s do it. Let’s merge sardines with something. Well we had already gone down the road of location based gaming for the iPhone, so there was only one thing that could spawn from this really. Sardines over a large area using the iPhone as a finding aide by displaying the user a compass which pointed them in the right direction, kind of and a hot/cold meter. What we were also able to do is use a server to mediate the game meaning people can join or leave a game whilst the game is in motion, giving the possibility of an endless game. The hook, the gameplay mechanic, the innovation, it’s all there really, thus we’ve already scoped the game screens and are beginning programing very soon.