- Lomztein

While walking to school today, I thought of an idea of a game that might be kind of interesting to do once I’m done with Project Virus. The game would essentially be two infinite train tracks, with two trains driving parallel to each other. The trains would be made out of individual wagons, which could be of many different types with various strengths and weaknesses. Some of these types of wagons would have hardpoints on top and sides, where weapons could be mounted upon.

The idea is that these two trains with a collection of wagons and perhaps too many guns would fight until one blew up. I’m thinking about taking inspiration from Guns of Icarus when it comes to weapon types and damage models. The weapons would only be one part of the game though, but would be your main damage dealers.

The different types of wagons, such as ammo containers, power plants or JET BOOSTERS! I’m also thinking about having specialized weapon wagons, with specialized weaponry such as a tesla coil, which when used on an enemy wagon would disable all its systems for an amount of time. To counter this, a special “Faraday Wagon” could exists, which would perhaps have less armor, but be immune to these EMP-like effects. I’m thinking the majority of wagons would have two hardpoints, while specialized weapon wagons had none, and special heavy armed wagons could have 3 or 4 hardpoints.

The different equipment you could place on hardpoints could be different weapons with each their strength and weaknesses. Other than that, another hardpoint equipment could be repair drones that could be ordered to repair ones train. Perhaps a shield projector which would protect a selected wagon from ballistic damage.

Another type of wagon I’m just now thinking about could have soldiers on top. While this would be able to dish out a lot of damage quickly, they could easily be countered with machine gun spam, unless shielded. However, as these are biological beings, they would auto-repair slowly from damage, but once lost would be unrecoverable. It could be pretty cool though to scrape a dead splattered guy from the floor, and somehow reassembly him - at least without causing him too much panic.

The image I’m picturing in my head is primarily of a heavy anti armor cannon that just fired on an enemy wagon, obliterating it and completely crashing the rest of the wagons behind it. The wagons are flying around in the air with fire around them. For the sake of it, perhaps any still functional cannons could still fire if the target came within range of motion. In theory, that would be easier to implement than stopping their firing.

So while cannons are all good and such, they are going to need supplies. Three kinds of supplies are in my mind - energy, ammunition and fuel. Energy would be generated by the front, and additional energy could be produced from power plants. All automatic weapons would require a little energy to run, which the front should supply enough of. Energy based weapons and equipment however would require much more energy, requiring power plants if you’d want to penetrate your enemy’s ballistic shields. Ammunition would only by used by ballistic weapons, and would be plentiful in most cases, as perhaps both the front, armed wagons and specialized ammo wagons would contain them.

In terms of combat arrangements, I’d like it to be kind of a tournament style thing. With this I mean that all players start out on the button, and fight two and two. After that match, the winners would go to the next step and fight other winners two by two. This would repeat until only one remains, just like any other tournament. Between fights, players could perhaps repair their trains and purchase new equipment from money they gained during their last fight. In terms of money, they could either be based on scrap from their defeated opponent, or be a fixed amount each round. If from scrap, there could be additional tactical possibilities with using precision weapons that would leave as much scrap as possible.

Like any other game idea anyone has ever had, there is no guarantee this is even a good idea, and even less possible to pull off for someone still young and inexperienced in terms of game development and design.

I’d like it to be online multiplayer, but currently I have no idea how Unity’s multiplayer functionality actually works, but I’m sure I can learn it without too many issues. The gameplay itself doesn’t have much unpredictable movement, so the multiplayer implementation itself shouldn’t be too difficult.

Now, having a cool idea come into life is not the only reason I want to make this. I also want to use it as a possibility to get into higher levels of art. I’ve never really been a good artist, and I’d really like to change that into something else. First and foremost because I want to create more passive art, as well as it would allow me to create relatively high definition games by myself, until I find a team to work with. While some might say graphics doesn’t make a game, I highly disagree. I’ve made prototypes without textures at all, and I can without a doubt say that it heavily affects game play. While aesthetic is no doubt way more important than technology alone, we’re still gonna need to make out the details. This would further allow me to finally start proper work on Microsquad, The very definition of what I’d call an awesome sounding game idea, but way, waaaay to complicated for me to currently do alone.

This scope is likely to change, likely to never happen and even more likely to still be too big for me. A lot of design decisions must be made, and it’s gonna require some heavy duty programming. The programming part shouldn’t be too difficult, and I think I can look to management games about how I should manage power and ammunition.

So that’s about that. I’ve been up way too late writing this now, and if I’d just have the same motivation for homework as I do this, I’m sure my grades would improve greatly.



Oh well, thanks for reading my ramblings!