Game Ideas

Picking up the Common Themes

After my brainstorming sessions I decided to look at what were some of the common elements between each of the games. What aspects were similar in the way that they played or the gaming experience. These 'game styles' are presented below.

Types of Games to create from a Mash-Up

I feel that there are two keys here. One is the number of players - single or multiple - and how they interact with each other - cooperative or versus. The other important thing to consider is the impact that the Makey Makey interface could have on the game and how much of the enjoyment will be derived from just the controls themselves. 

Putting it all Together

Once I had taken these themes into consideration I just started mashing together aspects of each game that had come out of my initial brainstorms. There was no real order for what I mashed up with what, only things that sounded interesting. Like a Cute Hippo, cover shooter (Duh).

Element Mash Up

While some of the mash ups helped to generate some interesting game concepts, others were rather generic and did not lend themselves to a non standard interface. For example mashing up a buzzer and a joystick only got me thinking about skill tester machines but without any real context (I guess it could be a fun interface for the right idea). Similarly putting the navy themes of battleships with the never ending hordes of enemies from space invaders seemed re-inventing the wheel with ideas about cannons and pirates (essentially re-skinning space invaders).

Promising Ideas

Thinking about the motor skills required by Operation and the combo system of Street Fighter actually got me thinking about combination locks. Which seem like an excellent way to implement a Makey Makey interface but also create some simple but challenging game play. Users would play as a safe cracker opening vaults by turning the combination lock left and right through a sequence of check points. Audio would be used to provide feedback to the user when they had found a correct number so that they knew to change directions.

Mashing up the grid system from Battleships and the blocks from Tetris seemed like an easy fit, but I struggled to come up with a game concept. Although the idea that a grid system could be used as an interface was a positive to come out of the experiment. Some of my initial ideas are presented in the image below.

Initial game concepts

My thought was that by using a grid system as a movement system but without removing the pins (white and red markers) the users would be able to keep track of their previous movements. Which could work wonders in a maze style game. Overall this seems like a flexible interface type which could be used with a number of game aspects from other games.

Finally back to our Hippo Cover shooter. While the idea sounds fun I am still struggling to think of a way to make the game fun with a non-traditional control scheme. Potentially using some sort of slide rail system which user would use to move the hippo in and out of cover. Using an actually hungry hungry hungry hippo would then allow the button which opens the mouth to be used to shoot. Or perhaps to eat? and the cover used to avoid eating a bomb or something similar with the hippos mouth constantly being open.

Hopefully polish these ideas later this week so that I can get started on a script sooner rather than later.