I'm sure the question has popped up in our minds at one point or another:

"When I grow up, I want to design a game too ... and it'll be better than anything that's been made before."

So have you ever imagined yourself designing a game, writing a script for a game or otherwise? Thought of any crazy storylines, scenarios or amazing game universes? Let's share some of the crazy ideas we've gotten over the years.



The most ambitious idea I've gotten while playing through Wing Commander, was designing a space combat simulation similar to WC, but one that could be played cooperatively with up to 40 wingmen/wingwomen. Engaging gigantic alien armadas numbering in the thousands with a couple dozen friends sounded like a huge thrill - I'd actually written an entire scenario for it, including branching storylines (a la Wing Commander). Sadly, I ended up studying something other than computer programming, so my plans never came to fruition

If there was a game in any other genre I would've liked to design, it would've been a strategy wargame combined with citybuilding and resource management - something akin to Utopia, but on a grander scale.
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I think nowadays there are so many games, that almost everything I wanted to see implemented into a game, is now done. Of course some ideas I have are never realized, and I always wonder why, am I the only one who wants to see "that" feature in a game.

When I was young, I was a huge fan of sports games, and I think that most sports games that are released are very good and also very realistic. The only thing which I never understood, FIFA97 had an indoor competition, then it was removed, and never again found its way back into the game. I mean, it's not difficult to implement that, if you already have the whole game??

And one thing I wish, is a handball game. I don't know if there is any handball game out there, I only know of Water Polo, which is a C64 game, meaning very old, and which wasn't so bad imo.
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The one game idea I had was release. B-boy on the PS2. Goddamn them!
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One thing I always wanted was a better Elite style game. More recent space trading style games such as the X series and Freelancer have gone a long way forward, adding a lot more, but my vision is slightly different.

I want the game to be more like a proper RPG where you are in direct control of a central character inside of the ship, rather than the ship being used in the game as the main avatar.

I thought about this idea originally when I used to play Frontier and docked with a station or on a planet. Once docked you were then just sitting there in the hanger looking ahead at the inside of the station or landing pad. I wanted to be able to get up out of my seat and walk out into the space station, to explore the community living there and to interact with everyone and everything. If any of you have played Earth and Beyond you will get the idea, but I want it to be taken much further than even that. To be able to actually get up out of your seat on the ship at any time and walk around it interacting with its systems, and to then walk out of the ship into the station, or planet surface. Another game that elements of this are close to my idea is Knights of the Old Republic where you could walk around your ship and out onto the planets and explore.

I want everything that was in KOTOR, but also everything that was in Frontier and X. A complete space based universe where you can travel between planets and systems, with all of the scope of Elite including trading, missions, changing and upgrading ships, but also the ability to leave the ships and explore any planet, finding missions to do on the planets, exploring ancient ruins for artefacts to sell, or cities to trade and recruit new members into your own party who would form a part of your crew (which would be needed in order to pilot larger ships).

In a way I want it to be a proper computer game version of the Megatraveller RPG. The Amiga games based on Megatraveller were pretty good and go some way towards the ideas I have, and also the Amiga game Hard Nova also contained a lot of the ideas I want included, and that was another very good game if you haven't tried it.
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Now there you got the idea for the perfect game Harrison. Also in the cities of the planets you should be able to drive around like in GTA some whole game concepts merged together into one whole big world. Even you could get into a soccer team and play in a league as side quest, or preferably Speedball kind of ballgame (a bit like Blitzball, but in PES style and FIFA package).
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Many would say that this idea would work best as an online MMO style multiplayer game and it probably could, but equally I would like it to remain offline as online MMO style games to suffer a lot from repetition and a lack of interactive scripting that pushes the story forward, instead needing to wait until the server moves the whole universe on to the next phase.

A game that does closely follow my ideas is EVE which is a great MMO space game, but even that doesn't take the player outside of their ship and this is definitely the main element I want included.

And as you say DC, being able to take part in everything happening on planets would be great including sports events. Imagine if you could have a complete network of leagues for the in game sport, and if it was an online game you could all be playing in different leagues on different planets, each trying to work your way across a series of planets towards a central tournament planet at the end of the season. That could be amazing.

The problem is that this idea is huge in scope when you consider how long it takes to develop just one of these parts as a game in itself, so developing and creating all of this within one universe would be an immense undertaking. It would be easily worth it though.

Something that could work would be plugin games, where new games get released and bolt on to the main game like an expansion, or they could also be played on their own if purchased alone. That way you could expand the game adding sports events, car racing, exploration of new planets etc... to the game.
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Frontier Theft Auto ... something like that could be pretty huge (literally). The ability to control your character, being able to walk around the ship/spacestation/planet is something I've been thinking about as well for the space combat sim I had in mind. It would surely add a lot of character development, and thus allow the player the grow more attached to the characters. Many games ignore the emotional aspect, I think ... how are you supposed to give a damn when, for example, an NPC dies, if you haven't had a chance to know him/her? Wing Commander managed to touch the emotional strings, so did Final Fantasy VII.

An MMORPG Frontier would be brilliant - but you would need a LOT of players in order to create the sense of a true living, breathing universe. That, and huge amount of resources to design all the planets and locations. The possibilities would be endless, though ... you could be a merchant, a pirate, a bounty hunter, resource miner, anything. You could venture into uncharted space and try to discover new planets. You could try flying into a wormhole and see where you end up. The space's the limit

The Game Masters could even introduce world events every now and then, such as introducing deadly alien invasions that requires thousands of players to cooperatively combat.
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Some great ideas there.

Another idea could be for players to be able to design their own planets, space stations, craft etc... thus expanding the universe and giving players even more places to visit. The designing could be introduced in the form of tech tree development similar to a realtime RTS, so the player gets to choose the evolution and development of their planet based on the choices they take within their planets eco and tech tree branches.

This way planets could evolve with a lot of unique permutations making each planet unique. This is a danger with games like this having large numbers of planets where each starts to become similar. Giving the player control over the evolution and development of a planet would prevent this from happening.

Maybe each player controlled planet could actually be like a guild hall, but rather than just allowing only guide members to see and use it, all players in the game could visit it's space ports and stations as long as they can get clearance from the guide controlling it. That could be a very cool concept. Whole guides could even be given a star system, so that as they evolve and expand they could move out and colonise each of the planets in their own solar system.

This would be a mixture of SimEarth (for the planet and lifeform development) and RTS tech tree development (for the placement of cities, population development, type of space port/stations that can be built, types of space craft that can be developed and then sold to other players etc).

This could then lead to some EVE style gameplay, with other player guides aligning with each other, joining different solar systems into alliances and federations, to control mining resources and other production, as well as controlling areas of space and systems. Military elements could also be introduced where each player is aligned to a certain home planet, and so with the military from that origin. Being aligned with different solar systems and Military could then get you better missions within those systems.

Equally players could choose to become pirates and sit outside of systems waiting on those travelling alone on cargo runs. Or players could choose to stay independent, running cargo or smuggling illegal items or people between systems.

Player controlled systems could also introduce self policing, when players can choose to become a member of the police force protecting that system, and being aligned with other systems and a certain home world could have the advantage of being able to call for military or external police help if your system came under attack from pirates or opposition systems.
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Further to the planet evolution idea, I think that each player would get to evolve and develop their own planet as a kind of side game to the main space exploration, and once they are happy with their planet they can then bring their new solar system "online" and it would be placed randomly within the universe, and become aligned to the closest homeworld. This would then add a random element of new systems suddenly appearing in a region allowing players somewhere new to explore. And if a player designed system become popular, it gains development points based on number of visitors so that the original developer can continue to evolve it further. And if it becomes popular enough to become part of a group of systems then all members can be given control to develop further.

Also to protect again players getting annoyed, systems could designate themselves as being neutral, as that players could not directly attack and try to overtake or destroy the system's players, or a system could align itself with a group and then become a part of their side in the main universes power struggle, gaining backup from other players to protect it.
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This is getting very complex, but it's a very interesting idea. Of course you have a huge imagination and it would be very hard to realize such a project, but perahps we'll get something like this in near future. We should print out this topic and send it to several developers.
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