Codexjam 2014 - true game design innovation

Locked-in RPG

A locked-in syndrome rpg, where the protagonist is trapped inside his own mind, and must beat the countdown before his family turns off the plug on his life support, he faces is worse fears, nightmares, fantasies while trying to regain consciousness...

 

Having an actual game design contest could be fun. I mean, it would be pointless and frustrating, cause no one would implement the best entry anyway. But still, so is the rest of the Codex.

Should be turn based.

 

Storm RPG

 

Small game set in a small mountain village with detailed simulation of NPCs and objects. Every NPCs have their schedules and motives, and react to player and other NPCs' action.

You are a new sheriff (or some kind of law enforcer) of the village who came from the outside world. You can do whatever you want to do as a sheriff. The game is very low key at first and there seems to be no troubles in the dull village. But at some point you realize villagers are hiding something...horrifying. You are a superior and have the only gun in the village, but you have only five or so bullets and the gun is old and unstable. Above all, you are alone. If you are unlucky your gun explode and you wil be killed by a villager's sickle.

 

Hitler 2.0
You're the reincarnation of Hitler and have to beat his jew-exterminating highscore

 

Prisoner of Ice 2: Escape from Butcher Bay

Vin Diesel is Ryan Diesel, escaped convict from Guantanamostein bay and now he finds himself in Butcher Bay, where sequels go to be mutilated and then die. He must fight through four hours of linear puzzles and inane dialogue before finally meeting the Obersturmfurry of Butcher bay, Jarl von Frank (also Ryan Diesels' grandfather) who is eager to learn the secrets of the Prisoners of Ice.
Content:
-Five unique weapons including the MP40, Dragon Dildo and Bucket Full of Germs 2000.
-Two voice actors to bring this unique experience to life like never before: A homeless man and a homeless man who claims that he can impersonate Vin Diesel.
-Art by ProsperWorks(tm)
-A shitty statue of Geralt (for some reason) with every purchase.

 

How high concept.

 

Game ideas are completely worthless by themselves no matter how detailed, but whatever might as well post my dumb elevator pitch.

Imagine this: a video game that throws you deep into an imperial space drama with lots of social manipulation, intrigue, ethnic tensions, fading glories and Byzantine diplomatic struggles. It deals with the problems of managing and keeping together an interstellar empire from both a larger and personal perspective. Sort of like a more story based and very different Crusader Kings with a bit of Papers, Please and Divinity: Dragon Commander mixed in and a topping of the economical aspects of imperialism 2. Instead of being about expansion like many strategy games are this is mostly about keeping what you got and trying to avoid internal and external tensions rip the empire, your family and the people apart. Dwindling resources, power hungry nobles and stagnation threaten around every corner not to speak of the assassins and spies that creep around everywhere, are you bad enough dude to keep yourself both alive and in power so that your dumb son can inherit the imperial crown and ruin everything?

 

Here Be Dragons-

PhysX enabled mythological creature dildo creation suite

PS Who do I have to fuck to get my game steam?

 

http://youtu.be/XrQEMBN8DNU?t=3m2s

 

GameJam Tycoon / TumblrCon Simulator 2014

Take on a role of a highly reliable and morally sound person collecting money for a meet-up and/or contest of gaming enthusiasm. Features realistic collision physics, real-time soil erosion, embezzlement, fraud, twitter minigame, cosplay tumblerina cutscenes, fan service and a CYOA coding session.

 

Achievement unlocked: An Extra Hour in the Ballpit

 

>implying any idea is original

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Cock-a-roo, a game about dicks.
You play as a POV fapper that needs to get your shit done, there are several mechanics to get your business done faster, such as good porn, lotion and fantasies.
There are dangers, like getting busted or fapping to gay porn by accident, this will decrease your sanity
When sanity is too low, you commit suicide on cam and the game is over
The mechanics will be very similar to a clicker game, but instead of cookies or whatever its a soft cock

 

So Chatroulette Simulator.

 

Great Waifu and Husbando escape.

You must guide your character throught bizzare labyrinths filled by horny and lonely mutated humans and insane illusions. Indeed the illusions at first promise a paradise where everyone is nice, equal and love each other....At laest until you notice unnerving disturping thoughts and messeges between crakcs.

Can you guide your character throught peril without it becoming fantasy waifu/husbando and without badly done sex scene.

 

Mad Professor

This is an RPG heavily inspired by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The game opens with a cinematic/story piece showing the professor finishing working on his elixir which is meant to unlock human potenal. Then he guzzles it down. This elixir of course has the horrible side effect of turning him into a beast. The final shot would be of him tearing off out the laboratory. Then game would open with the professor sprawled out in his house as if he had one hell of a bender.

Gameplay would work slightly similarly to the Japanese VN/RPGs/Sim games where you set a schedule. Except you don't lock yourself into it. Every action you can take would have a time value associated with it, in hours, and you would have X number of hours per day to do things. So you could try to follow your beast tracks and see what you did, 2 hours spent. Maybe repair the garden and fence to clean hide the evidence of what you've done, 6 hours spent. Work in the lab to perfect the elixer, 4 hours spent. Etc, etc, etc. You also have pre-scheduled events like giving a lecture or having lunch with a friend. It's your choice to keep the appointments and keep appearances up or avoid them to do you work™.

Your character begins with the craving for the elixir, and you can't avoid downing another dose on the 2nd night. Through your choices and consequences you can eventually lower your craving and stop yourself, if you want to.

As you go through each day, you will be confronted with semi-random events that will force you to make personality decisions. These decisions and what you decide to spend your time doing will not only affect whether you can control your cravings, but also what happens at night when you turn into the beast. As an example: you get embarrassed by your rival in front of a girl you have the hots for, and that night you attack the dude.

The game would take place over a relatively short time frame, something like 2-3 weeks.

 

Prosper's Odyssey

You are a mentally instable person who seeks to retreive your lost AI. The interesting thing is : you are oblivious to your own dementia and think the hallucinations are just supernatural ocurrences. As the game advances, you slowly realize that you are not Prosper but in fact, the AI itself, wandering a post-apo wasteland. You were progammed to "reset" yourself every 100 years into thinking you are Prosper.

Why ? Because hopw raewur ne.

 

Dinner with Andre - The Video Game

The next level of interactive story telling, this game uses state-of-the-art NLP technology to immerse you in an enlightening dinner experience with your friend Andre.

• no dialog trees, no keywords, just type whatever you want and Andre will provide a felicitous response in lucid English
• revel in Andre's profound insights into the human condition, what it feels like to be buried alive, and why gamer grognards from the 80s and 90s can't realize that gaming is all about living in the cinematic moment
• seduce Andre and experience the miracles of awkward after-dinner hanky panky behind the restaurant dumpster
• 24 different weapons to make Andre your bitch and end this pretentious swirling vortex of intellectual entropy

(Seriously, though, I would kill for an RPG with a decent text parser that does more than Elisa-style pattern matching; it's not like PCFGs are hard to implement. And no, Facade is still too shitty to count.)

 

A game that reverses character progression. Instead of growing more powerful, you age, get mutilated, break limbs, chip your sword, etc.

 

Yeah, that is also something I'd like to see, and the fact that this idea is a rather obvious inversion of the standard tropes shows just how vanilla most RPGs are. Ultima 9, for instance, could have used this. After becoming a god in Pagan, the Avatar returns to Britannia to fight the Guardian. If you go directly to his fortress he's a complete pushover. But with the sun blocked out, the teachings of the codex corrupted and Lord British facing a rebellion after his failure to protect his kingdom, Britannia is still doomed. So instead you have to move slowly, sacrificing some of your power to undo the damage done by the Guardian and then get Lord British to spearhead an offense against that butt-naked red bastard. Your powers aren't enough to fix everything, so you have to be strategic and only help where it's most important, and you still have to make sure that you'll be powerful enough at the end to defeat the Guardian together with Lord British. Cool setup, no Pagan retconning, and you're forced to pick between quests based on strategic and moral considerations.

 

http://imperiagame.wordpress.com/

 

I've thought this would be really cool with like a Metroid setup, where you have to discard your upgrades one by one for some reason or another. It would be really cool if you could pick which ones to lose, but that would be hard to do in a Metroidvania style game, but would work fine in a traditional RPG.

 

How to Train Your Tranny! The RPG.

You start off as a gender confused person, and slowly gain experince by coming out to friends, family and work / school / Uni mates, going shopping for fabulous outfits, living as your new gender, battling predudice and hatred. There would be branching C&C, example : do you become a street hooker or do you try out for the ladyboy pagents etc, And lots of romance/bromance/trannymance. You level up from original gender to full post-op.


Fun for the whole family!!


The only question is who should make it? Bethderp or Biowhore.

 

Prison Break Simulator (not actual title, just a descriptor)

Remember the Great Escape game from 1986? Where you were a POW and had to come up with an escape plan, scrounge together the tools for the job, learn guard patrols and realize what items to take with you to succeed? That idea, on a larger scale.

In a medieval/dark fantasy setting, there exists the worst prison in the lands: The Pit. A former mine that stretches deep underground, now converted into the hole where the worst criminals and undesirables are thrown into and left to rot. Background, social status, gender, family status, The Pit doesn't care, there's room for everyone. It would have first- or third-person perspective and be an RPG in terms of stats, skills and "choice and consequences", but otherwise play similarly to the Gothic/Risen games, though with a more mature conversation system.

To begin with there would be three "classes", each representing the three major ways to beat the game:

The Brute, a large muscular man with battle scars and a constant scowl, he's in for multiple homicides, is a strong fighter and not afraid to kill. He would be the combat class and excel in that field, being even strong enough to take down a guard in a one-on-one fight. But a brute has to be smart to survive, know to pick his fights and go for quick kills instead of prolonged fights, else the guards will show up in force and toss him into solitary (if he's lucky). He would be minimal on interactions with the other prisoners (except to bash their skulls in) but would have the option of trying to rise up in the ranks of a prison gang instead of escaping, He could then take over a gang, then declare war on the other gangs and eventually, through sheer force, rise to become a kingpin within the prison, living the good life. You see, while escaping the prison is given as the "goal" of the game, the option to rule the prison from within will also be present in all cases.

The Rat, a veritable mouse of a man, thrown in for innumerable counts of theft, burglary and fraud, is the stealth class. His approach could be to either dig an escape tunnel for everyone, or become the Gopher of the prison, the guy everone comes to see for all their needs. Sneaking into restricted areas, nabbing keys and making copies, trading items and such. To become such a vital person within the prison that no one dares touch him.

The Leader, a charismatic good-looking man, locked up for treason and attempting to usurp the king or somesuch. A politician down on his luck, or someone trying to overthrow a tyrannical despot. He's the fast talker, the people person, the guy who greases other people's palms to get what he wants. His approach to escaping is through the other prisoners, making deals, forging alliances, giving orders, letting others do the dirty work and slowly turning the inmates into his own personal army. Whether he uses the army to rule the prison or to break out is up to the player. Hell, he might even manage to win the guards over to his side and they let him walk out through the front door!

Regardless of which "class" is chosen, the prison layout stays the same, but guard patrols and "rooms of interest" are randomized each time.

But here comes the controversial part that will make gaming journalism go apeshit bananas. Once a player has successfully beaten the game with at least two of the above classes, a new "class" is unlocked: The Woman. Anyone ever wonder what kind of game Gothic would be like if the protagonist was a woman? VERY DIFFERENT GAME. And being a woman in a male-centric prison presents a whole new set of challenges... and opportunities. Will you be the bitch that's passed around, or will you use your sexuality to have others do your bidding? In RPG terms, the Woman would be the Jack-of-all-Trades, free to adopt any strategy to achieve her goals, while possessing a unique "tool" that can overcome seemingly impossible odds.

Reading over what I've wrote, this game could also work with strong roguelike elements.