Hi my name is Shaun, I am a 24 year old writer. I went to school to learn how to program video games but didn't work out to well when i found out i had a baby on the way. Anyway I have a lot of ideas for video games, for all types of games from wrestling to rpgs and even football. I know if I could get someone to listen that these games would be amazing but getting a company like thq or rockstar to listen to your ideas is impossible. I can't even get ahold of a small indi company. I was just wondering if anyone out there would be intrested in working on a project or two with me or if you could put me in contact with someone who would? I have so many ideas that i hate to see wasted. Some of my ideas realy push the envelope but i think that is needed right now. Anyway any help would be great, I thank you for taking the time to read through this.

Do you want to consider working in table top roleplay game terms, or even a compter roleplay game (google: game maker. I use it, its pretty easy to use). I see you posted in another thread here about someone elses RPG they are thinking about - it was a good idea, so maybe you have other good ideas for an RPG, hey?

Though I'm asking that, this forum is for working on a roleplay game your making. There's no choice about using this part of the forum any other way, any other type of post just shows disrespect for that.

C'mon, I bet you have an idea for an roleplay game, computerised or whatever. :)

Oh i have plenty of ideas. I would like to do a wrestling rpg and i have an idea for a game where you play a serial killer like freddy or jason and you have to kill massive omounts of people and a football game that shows the life of a football player the good and bad. And a mafia game Not like other mafia games but one that is more realistic.

Wrestling.

The game would start out with you creating your wrestler, when you are finished you find yourself walking through a dark alley where you are confronted by 2 skumbags that attempt to rob you, after beating them up you are approached by a wrestling promoter who asks you to join his wrestling school. After learning some basic moves you move on to a back yard wrestling federation in your home town where you accumulate money and points with every match you wrestle. With the money you can buy clothes, houses, cars, moves and even your own federation. The points are used to boost your atributes. After wrestling for several backyard feds you move up to the indi scene where you will wrestle some beter wrestlers. Each state has there own indy fed and after reaching the top of your indy fed you will travle the us to fight for the titles of other states. You can continue to capture the smaller state titles or move on to the bigs. or you can start your own fed. If you choose to continue to capture titles. eventualy you will own all the us titles and will trvale to canada, the uk, mexico and japan. and finaly when there are no other titles to capture again you are given an option. to start your own federation or move up to one of the top three feds. if you chose to move up you battle it out with the best the world has to offer. You can be a loner or build a stable you can be a heel or a face. it's all up to you. But when father time gets the best of you and you retire you are given one last opportunity to come back as the GM of the fed or ride off into the sunset. If you choose to build your own fed then you will have to recruit wrestlers you met along you jurney across the world and try to put togeather a roster that will be able to go toe to toe with the top three feds.

Football...

You are a football player just out of college, when you are drafted to the bigs at first it feels like your dreams have all come true. You signed the deal that gave you that big payday everyone is your friend and you are enjoying life and all it has to offer. But when the season starts you realise it isn't all it was cracked up to be. Now it is time to see what you are made and who you realy are, Do you become the quite guy that lets his talent speak for it self or do you taunt and your opponet and run your mouth every chance you get? Off the field is not much easier on you as you are faced with deciding who your real friends are. Do you go clubing everynight or workout in the team gym? every choice you make has an effect on your stats your team and on your road to the hall of fame.

RPG...

This would be a two part series. 1st part: You play a teenage boy who wakes up one morning in a strange land. As you fight your way through this land of Centaurs, Dryad, Elves, Gnomes, Goblins, Phoenix, Griffins, Spirits, Mermaids, Boobrie, Ashrays, Faries and Unicorns and many other custom monsters and animals. You learn to fight using your sword and magic. You can summon legendery monsters and call on Rusalkis and Sprites to help you. As you level up you learn all kinds of new fighting styles, moves and spells.Along the way you slowly begin to remember how you arived in this land. He remembers sleeping in bed untill a loud bang comes from one of the other rooms in the house, as he goes running down the hallway he sees his little sister being taken off into a vortex by a man in a demonic mask. he jumps through the vortex and his puppy follows. Throughout the game you learn to cast spells on your dog to turn him into different animals and creatures. You goal is to rescue your sister and stop the evil plans of Braeden.
2nd part: You play the role of Braeden. Your beautiful mystical world is under attack by another rival planet. You fight against this planet for half the game untill it seems as though your are going to lose. the village witch tells you about a legendery power that comes at a great cost. after obtaining the power and fighting off the rival planet you go mad with power and a dark cloud shadows your planet. The power causes most of the creatures on the planet to go mad and the love of your life enters a comma it is at this point you go off in search of a cure. You finaly find a way to break this spell and it is by obtaining a little girl from a distant planet that turns out to be Ryu's little sister.

Serial Killer...

In this game you startout by creating a guy or gal that looks like you, You then go around killing teenagers. Now this isn't just a slashem up game. You have to be carefull to follow the rules of horror movies for example the killer allways walks and never runs, and never kill a virgin. You also get extra points for special kills, be inovative with your killing styles. If you kille  a couple that are in the middle of having sex you recieve a bonous. stuff like that, as you gain more points you can purchase new outfits and masks and things to decorate your house of horrors. The more renown you become the less you have to leave your home to kill people as kids will come to your house as stupid teenagers in horror movies always do.

Okay here are a few i still have three others that i will post later. But what do you think so far?

Hey Callan I took a look at your website and did a little 5 min draft of how I could fix it up for ya if you want. [URL=http://img183.imageshack.us/my.php?image=neonnj2.jpg][IMG]http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/4610/neonnj2.th.jpg[/img][/URL]

Take this as you will, it's intended as constructive criticism...

How do the concepts you've described vary from any of the dozens of other formulaic computer games out there?

Each seems to involve starting as a mundane teenager/young adult, levelling up, destroying the end of level bad-guy then progressing to the next stage with a new power/manuever/spell in your arsenal.

Where is the role-playing element?

Where is the envelope pushing?

You are right that a lot of games really need this at the moment, especially in the formula driven world of console games (especially those that claim to be RPGs).

Each of the games you've described so far could probably use the "Grand Theft Auto" game engine with a couple of mods. The football game could be a modded version of the sims.

Don't get me wrong, you seem to have put a bit of thought into these concepts, but the computer RPG market  needs something radically different to shake its foundations.

Note that something radically different in these cases doesn't mean showing explicit sex scenes (as in your serial killer game). I can download a mod for the sims that will let me see this. You also need to consider that most games along those lines have heavy scrutiny from censors, so pushing the envelope in that regard will just lead to frustration when your great concepts get edited "for public consumption".

Look at the things that haven't been shown too much in games, like the infamy/renown scale that you've mentioned for your serial killer game (the same could apply to the wrestling game). Explore that in a bit more detail, how does fame impact on the ego of the serial killer (or wrestler)? How does it benefit the character? How does it hinder them?

Work on the differences because these will really make your game stand out, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people out there who can crank out the regular formulas. I know, I've worked with quite a few of them.

V

Hi again Shaun,

Not much time at the moment, but I'd suggest the opposite of Vulp - rather than be different, how are your games really, really going to dig into the regular formula? Take the Capes RPG by Tony LB here - its a supers game, standard formula, but his system really rips into the heart of soul breaking super hero choices. The riddle of steel RPG hits the formula of swords and low sorcery, yet again it hits right at what characters care about most in their lives, amongst all the killing and barbarity.

Lets look at the wrestling game for now, just to keep focused - whats at the heart of wrestling, Shaun? Whats the thing thats there, that's really important? You might want to write down say ten things that you think are important (on some paper or here if you like). Then sleep on it and come back and circle three of them, or some small number, as the ones that are even more important than the rest. Just a quick idea to kick things off - catch you soon! :)

Okay I thought about it and the most important things in wrestling or my game would be your status and fame. I would like to have your Heel Face or Good Bad staus and your fame effect everything in the game. From your matches and pay check all the way to the way npc's react to you and everything inbetween.

I have a quick question. Now I was thinking that  I would start small and design the wrestlers first. But how do I make the wrestlers? Like what program would you use? I have worked with Poser in the past but I am not sure that poser would be good for this type of thing. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

Fame, cool! Now, if it affects everything in the game, every thing that you as a player do in the game...

Isn't it going to effect you, the player? Isn't it going to make you wonder what it'd be like to have all that fame yourself?

Or if you were imagining a personality for your wrestler (and were talking larger than life personality here, like a super hero has), aren't you going to wonder how he would react to that?

Either way, that sort of question has been proven to be a great reason to play a game that not many games have (table top games are the only ones I know that include that right now, though). I'm wondering if that's what you'd like to get at - not the only thing, of course, all the body slams and special moves have to be there. But after the body slam and your  wrestler rises victorious...how does it feel for him at that moment?

Little bit interesting? Just trying to help by figuring what you like.

The reason I would like to make a wrestling game is because there are so many directions you could go in with your char. Anyone that watches wrestling knows that there are so many different types of wrestlers. You can be the lone wolf or build a stable. You could be the egomaniac heel that everyone loves to hate or the beer drinking face that beats up his boss every week. You could be anything you want and take your char in almost any direction. What I was think is that as your fame grows the game will change around you, people treat you different you get your own locker room your house gets bigger and better. Even when your walking around the city the NPC's will ask for your autograph or a picture as you pass by or if your a bad guy they will hiss or cowar to you and evry now and then I would like to have the player get hit with a cup of soda by an upset fan as they walk down the street. Your clothes will get better just everything reacts to your Fame and status.

I'm actually liking this idea of the wrestling game.

My wife used to be a huge wrestling fan, and while she only watches it occasionally now, we've still got a few friends who are heavily into it.

You could easily run a game with a fame scale, running from low level "Only known by a few hard-core fans" through to high level "Stars in advertisements for car companies and has their own breakfast cereal!".

Then apply a conflicted scale as well. On one side of the conflicted scale you have "Bad-Ass" (or something similar), in the middle you have the wrestlers who sometimes play the villain and sometimes the hero, and at the other end of the scale you have "All-American Hero" (or something similar). If you sit on the "Bad-Ass" side of the scale you get a bonus to combat techniques that involve fighting dirty and you might gain a bonus from the booing crowd. If you sit on the "All-American Hero" side of the scale, you'd gain a bonus for more traditional combat moves and for the cheers of the crowd. This could work a bit like the spectator bonuses in Bloodbowl.

If you're running the game like the WWE, you also gain the benefits of complicated storylines involving grudges between certain wrestlers, tag team effects, etc. If you sucessfully go through the storyline, you might gain a new enemy in the wrestling circuit but your fame might increase, or you might make a new ally if you offer someone mercy in the ring during a match that is set up by a tyrant in the wrestling management.

There is plenty of potential for behind the scenes action in this type of game, but to fit the genre I guess every storyline should end up with a showdown between two or more wrestlers.

[hr]

As for using "Poser", there's plenty of great wrestling props on some of the free download sites, I've even found a couple of boxing rings and cage-match style cages.

Are you planning to just use the program to depict the wrestlers performing moves and interacting with their environment? Or are you looking for something more interactive with the character design? Are you looking for a program that will allow the construction of characters in relation to a group of attributes and other character features?

If you're just wanting to use the program to illustrate your game then Poser could be a suitable choice. If you're wanting something more complex and interactive, I'd look elsewhere.

But that's a discussion for another part of the forum.

V
 

yeah and with this game unlike the wwe games i would the user to have full control of the wrestler. Like when walking down the ramp to the ring and all. example as your walking down the ramp you hit X and you flip off the crowd (bad guy) or give high fives (good guy). And i would also like to bale to take the action out of the ring and into the stands or backstage out to the parking lot.

Hi again, Shaun,

Do you want this game to catch you by surprise at all? I don't mean being hit with a cup of soda every so often - really surprise you. A result you just didn't see coming? Or do you want it to turn out exactly as you envision it?

Please don't read any negative qualities into either of those - this isn't a trick question, both are valid. But both are very different and not nessersarily compatable. So it's time to find out what choice you've made.

I don't think it is a simple yes I want it my way or no I don't. I mean obviously I have my vision, and thats what I think will work best bceause it is my vision. But on the other hand I am always open to inovative ideas. I mean thats the reason I am making the game to begin with. The thing is I can come up with a basic idea and if someone gives me another idea to add to it I can take the ball and run with it. So I do like my ideas but at the same time I am open to change. Simply put if someone has a better idea to myself I can accept that and run with it.

Hey guys. This is a moderator post.

First, I've removed the thread about Thisdude's book. This site is not about promoting your stuff in that way; effectively, you've spammed your own thread. You can put a link to the book in your signature if you like; signatures should be in normal lettering and not include pictures.

Second, the Forge is about developing role-playing games of a particular sort. Computer games of the kind being discussed here are not the topic, especially not at this very raw level of design.

So, this thread must end. No one is to post further to it.

Thisdude, you're welcome to keep posting here, if you're interested in the topic of the site.

Best, Ron

Okay Ron I have a few comments.
1. I wasn't spamming, My book will not be released for a month or 2. I was simply telling everyone that I was being published because I was excited but if you find it to be spam fine remove the link it's no big deal anyway.
2. I thought this forum was for first thoughts? Talking about game ideas. I have seen a million other posts that are just like mine. But mine is a problem?
3. Why does it matter what we talk about? Is it hurting you or the forums in any way shape or form? I mean if people do not want to read it they don't have to. I just don't see the problem with a couple of adults talking about a common intrest that is on a forum exactly for that purpose.

Explain to me what is wrong with this thread? I don't understand. I am not disrespecting you in any way I am just trying to understan your problem with my thread about games. That I posted on a forum about games. and you are absolutly right I didn't know this wasn't for video games but have been thinking about making it into a board game since i have arived here.

You are not developing a role-playing game. Your posts are off-topic for the site. It took a little while for me to be sure, but now I am.

You've also violated moderation by posting to a closed thread. That's why it's locked now. The Forge isn't like the internet at large; there is only one person who says what is and isn't spam, and what is or isn't on-topic, which is me.

Moderation at the Forge can be questioned - anyone can send me a private message, or anyone can ask in the Site Discussion forum. But you can't defy moderation like that.

Best, Ron