You and I love roguelikes. And I don't know about you but I love me some good ol' couch co-op gaming. There's something magical about it.
But basically there's a problem with Co-Op roguelikes. The problem is worse when there are more players. People who have died cannot do anything. The elimination type of gameplay is not a very engaging one. Turn-based would be very tricky to work in as well. So the answer is seemingly an action-based roguelike.
I was thinking that each player controls a "spirit" with core abilities that you can alter by getting different things in the game. And you can possess any bodies in the environment in which case you'd be playing the game. There has to be some sort of gameplay mechanic for the spirit version as well.
I was thinking everyone starts as a spirit, with a bit of mad dash in the beginning to get the best body (slightly competitive), and they play through the game cooperatively, but semi competitively. You win if by the end, you have more points or some kind of game goal.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
Is this something you'd like to work on?
Let me know if you want to brainstorm for something you've been thinking of. I think it's best if we tried at least to spell out as much of the game mechanics as possible and in a way that we can start to piece together the game in code. In numbers.
Hey Sam, serious talk here, I'm not trying to make this blog our circlejerk, but I really think you have a good start of an idea. Like I just read it and I am getting a bunch of ideas for it haha.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I think the spirits idea is great. You could have the players start off with nothing and make them fight for abilities, items and such.
I really think the game can go both ways as in co-op and versus.
For co-op, the players could work together to get as much powerups in the beginning and then place them in a dungeon or something to see how far they can get (fighting monsters, bosses). If a player dies, then they can help the other player as a spirit.
For versus, the players fight for the powerups/items and see how far each person goes before both players dies. When a player does die, s/he can come back as a spirit and try to make the other person die by interacting with the environment/taking control of monsters. I was thinking a split screen option for this game mode.
I also agree that a action-based engine would work best for this game.
Interesting. I was thinking of something like you start out as some sort of energy sphere in a house. You have the ability to possess only small mechanical devices (in the beginning) and manifest them into android like (kinda like morphtronic), then battle each other out to control the electricity (the source of energy that run you). Each device has its own special ability and use in the course of battle. When someone die, the device is broken and cant be used any longer, but the spirit sphere remains intact and you can possess another device to jump right back into the battle as long as you have enough energy from the captured electricity locations.
ReplyDeleteHave you heard of/played the game Tokyo Jungle? It has some rogue-like qualities and it has a co-op mode. It's pretty fun and might be a good play for some ideas. It's on the PSN.
ReplyDeleteMoving onto my idea for this. I saw a shooter/shoot 'em up type game that had a versus mode where everything you kill gets sent to the other players screen (sort of like tetris). This basic concept would work for a versus rogue-like. So if one side was stronger, they could kill stronger monsters, and put pressure on the other side. Gambling to kill stronger monsters increases chances of success, but might get you killed in the process etc.
Tokyo Jungle is an awesome game. The gameplay has enough depth for the type of game it is and slight variances in each playthrough keeps it relatively fresh. The tone of the game is quite comedic as well which adds to the absurdity of the overall game.
ReplyDeleteThat seems like a fun idea. I think there has to be some kind of mechanic to prevent snowballing effect where one side overwhelmingly destroys the other side. I think there was an old japanese tetris-like game where you had various character with 4? different abilities.
Rock of Ages kinda does similar things. It's a mix of super-monkey ball and tower defense.
Funny that you have played my game Carny Death Peddlers, I spend most of my time on a co-operative multiplayer action roguelike called Lanarts.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to contribute to action-based co-op roguelike ... I'd love to dicuss it with you :-)
A run down of the game's progress so far:
http://adam-dev-blog.blogspot.ca/2012/12/my-year-of-game-development.html
ATM there's two very different settings --
1. Lenient respawn -- no penalty for death
2. Hardcore -- ONE person dies, game restarts
Of course some alternate setting will be necessary once the game grows longer.
Cheers.