Classy Games Project Ideas

Post your ideas for the community project here

My idea is a mix between games such as Spore, No Mans Sky, Star Citizen and many more. It's less of a game and more of an exploration simulator. Basically you're in a space ship or something and you have the ability to explore the Universe. There will be lots and lots of star systems which will have planets in which the player can explore. I have a few ideas for different goals of the game but i haven't fleshed it out. Basically think of the player having a HUGE UNIVERSAL Pokédex. As I said, its less of a game and more of a simulation.

Everything will be random. Random planets (terrain, colour, chemical composition, weather, textures), animals, plants and so on. Think of this idea to be the same as No Mans Sky. Right now you don't do things on the planet. Just explore it in the sky. This could be another future goal.

Basically think of this like No Mans Sky but  A LOT less gameplay (I know NMS already has very little haha). But the goal is to discover stuff in your Pokédex.

This idea includes every field in game development. Here are just some examples.

Programmers: Generation, Terrain Sculpting, LOTS OF PLANET/SUN PHYSICS and more
Artist: Models of life, Plants, Planet Textures, Asteroids, Stars
Audio: Animals, Space sounds, Engines etc
Designers: Planet compositions, Statistics/Information on everything in the game.

That's just some ideas i can think of.

The entire idea behind this project is to allow a lot of people to get involved and so a small part to contribute. For example.

• A programmer could make the planets movement, object impacts, PHYSICS.
  
• An artist could make an animal, plant, space objects and anything really
  
• An audio guy could make some audio for animal noises, space ambience, explosions
  
• A designer would think of cool and wacky planet idea as well as ideas for everything really
  

Obviously some commitment would be needed but tasks will be small. We all have our own lives to live so this project would probably go on for a while.

The project would probably be used in Unity with C#. If there is enough Unreal/ C++ guys they could do their own but use the same assets.

So yea. If this is something you're interested in please post in this thread with what you can do and maybe an idea you have. Remember, think small.

[Programmers]
Me (Limited availability/University)
Rocketman Dan 
Mario
Matteo (Limited availability)

[Artists]

[Audio]
Riccardo (Limited availability)
VRMLN


[Designers]
Abhay Shukla
Sitruc

[Other]
Dylan

If you would like to take part please add your availability to the this link - https://doodle.com/poll/uzgu64sbn7stmsyv

hi Jamie concept looks nice to me .As you describe there would be less game play so ,  are you including game element - resource management system like no man sky ? If so need to make more engaging because no man sky was boring as hell .

Concept is good in terms of making a portfolio for technical related aspects - so I'd like to propose a few points for the Designers;

Depending on what the type of game-play will be involving - there can be a number of ways this can be tackled; 

If we go for the Avatar collecting resources and building - there can be a lot done with differentiating various planets with unique-looking resources. This would add to the exploration factor of the game, however there would need to be more towards that point - you don't want to simply encourage a player to explore just for one aspect of the game, since you would leave out a large number of people who aren't interested in that part of the game.

If we go for primarily story-based - then again, narrative considerations will be pretty big. Not to mention the need to design better characters that the player will be able to meet, better locations [Which will add to the amount of work the PCG will need to do] and a plan on how to create the narrative aspect in a PCG world, without making it lose it's beauty. 

An idea could be an RPG-style game [Think Oblivion, or Skyrim] however with the ability to visit new planets, and sci-fi or sci-fi fantasy styled. The planets could house various areas the player can explore - and something akin to what is done in Starbound could be done, where the player ship can be used as the player's housing.

These are just a few ideas, I personally think the RPG-style game could be pretty exciting to work on and design for. It also might make it easier to come up with systems to fit in the narrative - rather than going for a story-based game completely.

Yes Dylan, I agree. We have to take in mind all the player types there are out there: Achievers, Explorers, Killers and Socializers. No Man's Sky focused way too much on Explorers, so the game was boring for most of the players. I like Jamie's idea, but we have to take this into consideration, so the game can actually have a point and be interesting.

I think that Star Citizen did this perfectly, it has awesome combat, it's amazing at exploring since you can actually control your ship and land wherever you want, as for socializing, all the players are gonna be out there on the same universe, exploring the planets and fighting together or against each other.

If the game we're gonna work on is going to be based off of No Man's Sky we need to pull something amazing from under our sleeves to make it work. We also need to know the languages each person works in so we can split the tasks reasonably, so it falls into each person's area. 

Personally, I think the biggest challenge is going to be getting the 3D assets, they take quite a while to be made, and we don't have all those artist available.

If we do decide to add multiplayer - that will add an entirely new layer of complexity - of course, we dot that idea down as a 'Long Term plan' that we can prepare for as we work; so it's good that you mentioned it now so we could decide on that early on, it will make designing a lot easier if we're on the same page in terms of player numbers. 

3D assets will be a challenge - although if we go for a simplistic style - or we make do with a lot of placeholders, it shouldn't stagnate the work too much. Textures would definitely be harder to placeholder I feel like - unless we stick with solid colours until we get the base down, and recruit a few more artists to join in the project.

@Dylan: Yes, the term socializers refers mostly to online games. But the amount of players that spend time and money on a game for a chat buddy is pretty low, I don't think it's a huge priority. 

@Matita: That's actually a pretty good idea. We could even add some Foxhole to the mix.

I’d be interested in helping out my skills lay with the design aspects.

I like Matteo’s idea, I think we should aim for a more unique game than No Mans Sky and his idea should make it an easy project for a team like us to pull off with a high enough quality.

I second Matteo's RTS idea - coming from someone who loves strategy games, and RTS games especially, it could be an interesting thing to go for; especially since the genre hasn't seen too much in the way of games in recent years minus Starcraft II. Although tying it with the random-planet generation will be an interesting idea. 

We could go for something along the lines of what was done with AI War - generate a galaxy, and make the war span the galaxy, with each planet providing resources for the war-effort. This would mean that the planets won't be so detailed as to have animals, terrain, etc... and the game would be played on a space-scale rather than map-scale or planet-scale.

I knew it would be of interest for you, Dylan

The first thought I had while thinking about this idea was something similar to Star Wars: Rebellion, but honestly I don't remember all the gameplay since I played it a long time ago.

Of course I don't think we should copy that game, but it could be good to get some inspiration

Foxhole is an open world game with an endless online multiplayer war going on between a bunch of factions, that you join when starting the game. I really like that idea, what if we made something like that, with an endless war going on between players, and instead of just exploring for no reason, the player explores with the purpose of colonizing and area, or taking a location to advance on the planet that is under the control of another faction. 

I like the idea of an RTS, and it could work along with mine, so instead of a trooper or a soldier you would be a captain or general, but I think that the player being the foot soldier, or driver, or ship pilot adds a lot more to the game, it makes the players feel more important, and like everything you do has an impact in the current battle, instead of a the whole war itself.

Here's an odd idea - let's say we go for an RTS where you build structures and units [we can talk about specifics after] 

Galaxy is procedurally generated, together with resources available on each planet [Some resources might not even appear at all in some games].

Afterwards, the Faction Roster is generated - the player has access to units based on what resources are available in the galaxy [Some units might not even appear at all in some games]. This can be done with pre-made units, or we create modules that create the units [E.g. Mini-gun Turret, on Small Unit chasis, creates 'Unit X', see Earth 2160 for an example of this] although I would suggest we stick to pre-made and designed units and just have ones to account for the various combinations of resources. Think how magic deals with it's colors, and how some cards use multiple colors - meaning you need to create a deck accounting for that if you want to use multiple colored cards; except in our case, the game does that for you. 

To allow for some consistency and add to the element of planning - players can choose a 'Faction' which grants them certain traits for bonuses, as well as that unit's roster. Each faction will have it's own play-style, and as such units will match said play-style. Other bonuses can be for certain parameters of structures and units like movement speed, gathering rate etc... If we add research to the game, there can be bonuses to research speed as well for instance.

Design wise - this would be an interesting, if sizable, challenge, balancing and ensuring that there are units for each resource combination that are interesting. 

Art wise - if artists can figure out ways to create module-based units and structures, we can likely create a vaster arrange of different unit models, with a lower amount of artists [since we do seem to have a lack of artists available] 

Programming wise - this would again be an interesting challenge for the generation - depending on if we go for a galaxy-wide view, or a planet-wide view, or a map-wide view - there are opportunities to add to the procedural generation, not to mention generating the unit rosters. 

Audio wise - there will be a fair amount of different units which I feel could use their own touches in terms of dialogue to make them distinctive. Not to mention the other needs towards making sure ambient isn't neglected especially if we got for a heavily uniquely generated planet.

This, needless to say, takes a lot of procedural content generation - but it does give the game a unique aspect to it. It's a challenge to balance - that's for sure; but it can be quite interesting regardless I think, even if not perfectly balanced.

Let's go for something smaller like an RPG where you play as the villain and you summon "minions" to stop the protagonist from reaching you, but as they defeat your minions, they level up and get stronger so you must find what enemies they are weak to and exploit their weakness before they become too powerful. 

I think currently our biggest problem is that we don't have any artist in the team.
AFAIK we have audio guys, design guys, code guys but no artist.

We also have to decide if we want, as a first project, to have a very little scope, just to warm up and start to work as a team, or if we want to work on a prototype that could become an actual game at a certain point in the future.

If we opt for the little scope maybe we should lower the bar more than a bit, I think that all the ideas we had are too much.
Nothing stops us, though, to leave the ideas in the backlog and take them later for a next project.

So far we have used the top-down approach (having a general idea and then go deeper to add details, maybe to better understand how big the scope we want it to be we could use the bottom-up approach (start from the mechanics and then glue them together to have a game)

Let's analyze what we got right now, in order of appearance, and what we need at a very minimum to make it enjoyable or at list showable to someone that's not part of the team.
Every bold term is an entity that has to be (one or more of) coded, designed, modeled, animated, sound-designed (I don't know which verb to use )
All of the analysis are done by assuming the game is only single player, no multiplayer or network stuff is considered.

Exploration

- a galaxy generator (a galaxy is formed by star systems)
- a star system generator (a star system is formed by at least a star and some planets, planets can have moons but this is optional)
- a planet generator (every planet has a base color, a size, a distance from the star, a mass and can have mountains, deserts, trees, flowers and plants, bushes, seas, rivers)
- a weather system that activates when approaching the planet (rainy, foggy, sunny, sand-stormy, day and night)
- animals (we could decide to make them modular, so we can have more combinations with less pieces, like legs, neck, tail, but we also need a animal builder that needs to glue all the pieces)
- a LOD system like a quad-tree, since we are in a galactical scale and we absolutely must save polygons to render (I think this is the hardest part)
- a pokédex system, similar to an inventory, but we have to figure out how to insert entities (animals, flowers, plants, etc.) in the poxédex: you have to "take a picture" or you just pass by?
- physics system we could simplify it a lot and just have a certain gravity applied to the player only when approaching a planet, otherwise no gravity is applied (note: spherical gravity is a bit harder than the standard force applied in a fixed direction)
- ship controller to move the player, assuming the only gameplay is inside the ship, and not walking on the planet

Real Time Strategy

- a galaxy generator ( a galaxy is formed by star systems)
- a star system generator (a star system is formed by at least a star and some planets)
- a planet generator (a planet has a base color, a size, a distance from the star and resources)
- a resource system (resources that are consumed maybe in different ways, like the standard "build a facility" or maybe with the time/size of your army if we want to put water as a resource, or traveling if we want to put energy/fuel as a resource)
- at least three type of units: building creator, light army, heavy army
- at least three type of buildings: resource storage, light army factory, heavy army factory
- a map navigation system: it should be easy to navigate among all the planets you control or you risk to get lost in the galaxy/universe. can you see all the galaxy at once? Is every star system a screen per se or is the transition between solar systems smooth?
- a unit selection system
- a planet details screen where you can see the details of a planet and can decide, for example, to build a facility
- lot of icons
- a beautiful and intuitive HUD
- one or more AI (I think this is the most difficult one)
(all of this assuming that all the races/enemies/factions you can encounter are the same as you)

Optional:
- the module system proposed by @Dylan
- a story for the campaign

Role Playing Game

I'm working on it, come later when I'll have edited the post with the informations

Conclusions

Still WIP, but here are a draft of what I will say when the post will be finished:
All of the ideas we had are too big scopes, maybe we should should aim to some more casual game, like an endless runner or similar.

An era ago I had an idea about a puzzle game in the space where you gather resources in a part of the solar system and you have to send those resources to your home planet by using the gravity of the planets/asteroids/whatever in between.
Divided in levels you start with an amount of resources in your station, you have a target, you waste a small amount of resources to see how the gravity influences your launch, then flush all the resources as soon as you find the optimal path.
If more than a certain threshold of resources comes to the planet then you pass the level.

I have a very very very rough proof of concept made in Javascript years ago, you can try it here.
The random generation is very crappy, currently it's not sure that you can beat a level.

Maybe this is a feasible scope...

I suggest a Lego like shooter, easy and quick AF to model and get all the art done, and as a shooter quite straight forward. I think it's a good start. I mean, maybe it's not the most beautiful idea we can think of, but it's not like we're doing anything.

Have you guys ever heard of OGAT? It's like R6S only it's top down, there's no hostage and it's a 1000 times more boring. We could always do something like that.

I agree with @CrazyRaccoon with the lego idea. We can just make a small FPS to start off - it has elements everyone can pitch into; designers included. That's where my vote stands;

Simplistic - Low-Poly FPS

Exactly, @Dylan . I once modeled a sniper rifle, and programmed an FPS in Unity, on my own. It took me a couple of weeks, I only didn't finish it cuz I got lazy, but I'm sure that all of us, if we work together, we'll have a whole game in a month.

I think we should stick with the original idea, of a space game. It’s not too difficult and it has room for expansion. If we start with an expansion/exploration game first starting off in our solar system, say planet earth is dying and for the survival of the human race we need to expand and create a self sustainable colony by sending the supplies from earth so it would be like a base building game. Certain events or even actions the player takes on earth could hasten or slow the planets Death.

Create the game and it’s mechanics ready to expand. We could add Martians who aren’t too happy with the humans. 

An FPS game is too simple an idea and doesn’t give much room for expansition other than adding more levels more enemies or more guns.

I think the first order of getting to work will be to just vote on an idea; the meeting on the 26th will likely be primarily that, along with discussing what roles each individual will have, how tasks will be split, and so on. Needless to say - if one has more points to list and ideas to put out, definitely do so - we'll vote based on what has been listed on 

well I suppose since I've had this idea for a while I'll list it down.

Japanese themed total war game (definately not shogan total war)
to start off this can just be skirmish battles a campaign map can later be added. the campaign map would be turn based and the battles could follow that or be real time though I feel turn based would better fit the mechanics.

the battles would be much smaller scale than total war having unit sizes of 5 and allowing the player to combine them to create larger units.
Ashigaru, the basic foot soldiers
Yari - spear infantry, defense against charges and effective against cavalry
Katana - sword infantry best used in melee
bow - effective at range
shield - very good defensive unit with poor attack vulnerable to being outflanked
cavalry - fast shock cavalry good at charging enemy units.

what makes the game more interesting would be the combinations of adding a unit of 5 spears to a unit of 5 shield. the shields would for a defensible wall while the spears strike at an enemy unable to even make it past the spears, whereas 5 katanas and 5 spears makes a good counter charge unit the spears would stop an enemy charge and the katanas would charge forth and counter the enemy.

we could start off with only 3 units, the yari, katana and bows balance them allow them to combine then add more such as cavalry as they'd be a good counter for the archers then shields.

as for the campaign we could add a tutorial story mode then add a larger world for the player to lead their own campaigns of conquest. a plan for the future wold be customizable cities as they grow the player could develop the defenses in their own way and seiges would be more realistic than total war happening in stages so the attacker would need to build a blockade outside the city otherwise the enemy could just sally out this would cost man power which would be a resource used for building siege towers. also siege towers were initially used as a vantage point for the attackers to get the enemy off the wall so they could then send in their infantry so immediately going for the wall would have many of your soldiers dead and you'd e encouraged to take it slowly.

obviously this is a lot to do but they would be my future plans for the game if it was to be developed. which is the important thing the game has skirmishes that should be easy enough to complete but it also has a lot of room to expand should we get that far.

These are some notes @Dylan and I discussed about in the meeting.
They are very raw and in no particular order.

• real time strategy, gameplay will be on a plane (2D), graphics can be 3D or 2D (not decided yet)
  
• you start with a planet, with just the base structure and a ship
  
• planet has like 10 slots for the structures, you can build structures by spending resources. Maybe you can also do a research to have more slots on the planet, or you can build space stations that do not allocate slots
  
• structures "build themselves" (there is not a unit that builds structures)
  
• you can gather resources also from asteroids
  
• energy is a resource, you can get it from the sun with solar panel or you can do researches to gather it in other ways (nuclear energy, ...)
  
• ships can move at normal speed without using energy, hyperspace jumps consume energy
  
• units can use the energy to power the shields or the weapons (or other parts that we have to decide yet)
  
• units can be built modularly (shields, weapons, solar panels, ...)
  
• there is a ship designer editor
  
• maybe you can design different models of ships, every different model costs resources (maybe you have to build one factory per model)
  
• or (this was not discussed, I just thought about it) you can build a structure that builds laser cannons, a structure that builds shields, a structure that builds ships bodies (and so on) and then the different modules are joined together
  
• there is a special unit that is used to colonize the planets
  
• you can transform the unit in the base (like the Settlers in Civilization) or you can spend resources to build the base with this unit (we have to decide one or another)
  
• there is a research tree (to build more advanced structures, more advanced ship parts, optimize resource spending, ...)
  
• galaxy and solar systems are random generated (number of planets, color of planets, resources, asteroids, ...)
  
• we need to figure out if it should be a full random generation or it should be balanced in some way, it would be bad if the first planet the user comes in is with no resource at all or so few resources that it's not fun at all to play. We could also do full random generation apart from the first two planets/systems
  
• also the star in the solar system could be randomly generated, in terms of how much energy it gives
  

I've created a project for Unity 2017 and stored it in a private repository on GitLab.
You can find the repository (and ask for access) at https://gitlab.com/matita/space-rts (you would need a free GitLab account first).
I created it on GitLab because I think that Unity Collaborate isn't free anymore, and GitLab offers unlimited private Git repositories with unlimited collaborators, but they are not mutually exclusive, if Collaborate is still free we can use it and back it up on GitLab.

If you need any help to set up Git I can provide it

^ it should be a gif but it doesn't look to gif

Current state of the prototype:
1. planets have 5-10 randomly generated slots of the type [None-Rock-Ocean]
2. when you click on a planet a panel pops up showing current resources and slots on the planet

Next steps
- I want to build a system in which it is possible to create/edit/rename/tweak structures without the need to write any code.
  This would allow designers to play with the values.
  I was thinking to use Unity editor features to adjust the values, otherwise it could be possible to do it with an external file (xml, json, csv, whatever) to be loaded at runtime, but I think it is less straightforward. 
- On the UI the player should be able to click on a slot in planet details popup and decide what structure to build.
  The structure that cost more than the available resources or that are not allowed on the selected slot will be unselectable.
  When the structure is selected, then:
    1. the cost will be deducted to the available resources on the planet
    2. the slot will result occupied by the structure
    3. the planet resources will start changing on a per second basis according to the cost/production of the structure

Some notes
- Population and Power have the same first letter, it would be useful to be able to abbreviate resources with a single letter.
  Should we use Population, Materials and Energy?
- At the moment I find easier to program/more interesting to have resources availability on planet instead of globally.
  Having resources available globally, apart from being a bit unrealistic, could also lead to difficult design decisions: if a planet has a Trading station and the station is destroyed, what happens to its local resources? Are they reset instantly?
  Maybe we can say that with a Trading Station it is possible to establish trading routes between planets and the resources are transferred from planet to planet, not globally
- What happens when there is not enough energy to power the structures? Which structures shut down first?
- For the sake of MVP I would say that the planets are static, they're not orbiting around the star. It would be difficult to calculate trajectories when a ship wants to go from a planet to another planet. We can add it at a later stage of the project.
- This post is public, anyone can read it, even people that are not registered on the forum. Should we move technical discussions on a topic restricted only to the people involved in the project?