Friday, June 30, 2006

Game Idea: Alien Life

This is an idea that will require more tweaking down the line, but here is what I have so far:

You belong to a somewhat advanced race of beings who have mastered space travel but still have yet to explore all the planets of their immediate area of the galaxy. There are two philosophies where it comes to exploration of new worlds which are populated with lifeforms: The biologists, who use their technology to silently monitor the local flora and fauna, with various stealth technologies and recording tools to help them with this endeavor. There are also the game hunters, who take trophies from the most promising-looking dangers the planet has to offer in terms of wildlife. Both of these sects play very differently, with different goals and different ways of checking progress.

The biologist's game will involve visiting a new planet, and taking as many samples, photographs and behavioral notes on the creatures of that planet as they can. The more data you secure on a planet's population, the bigger your budget gets from the scientific community and the better equipment and storage space on your ship you receive. Capturing or killing live specimens however is against the ethics of the biologist and the game will tend to penalize any attempts to do so. As your technology becomes better and better, you will be able to monitor all sorts of bizarre lifeforms, from those existing outside the natural spectrum of light (which would require infra-red photography) to those which live high in the planet's atmosphere, or warps in and out of subspace to move around at great speed, both of which would require very precise and specialized equipment to monitor.

The big game hunter's game will be a little more direct: they receive money from the size and rarity of the types of creatures they take down. Like the biologist, the money they receive from doing their job will assist with grander and more elaborate tools to increase their effectiveness, but in this case that means weaponry. However, there will be times when the hunter will become overwhelmed (such as a colossal beast on one world simply being too big to kill with their existing weaponry) and so will need to return to that world at a later time. Since the hunter is somewhat devoid of morals, they can also plunder the world's natural resources on the side or capture the animals for selling to zoos situated around their civilisation's corner of the galaxy. Capturing animals will require you to upgrade your ship to accommodate lifeforms, which will end up detracting heavily from your weapons budget but may end up being just as lucrative as hunting for trophies. This career switch to the subclass "poacher" is just one of many slight career detours the biologists (though they would get the equivalent "researcher" role for taking many flora samples instead of poaching animals) and hunters may decide to embark upon.

With both games, the same worlds will crop up for both and yet offer very different experiences. For example, one world may be highly beneficial to the biologist and not the hunter (if it was full of plantlife and smaller animals) and vice versa (a planet whose dominant race has all but exterminated the weaker life forms, or domesticated them for food, and will provide a worthy challenge for the hunters to take down). A planet may contain a giant predator that only awakes when his food source becomes threatened, in which case only the hunter would find out about it originally. So if a player plays the hunter's game first, they can find a way to awaken the giant beast for their biologist player since they'll know it exists. Playing both explorer classes will allow for greater depth and understanding of the galaxy.

While this game could work easily as an expansive single-player universe (like the scope of an Elder Scrolls game, only covering more planets), it could also work very well as a galaxy-sized MMORPG like Star Wars Galaxies. The players would team up with other players of their respective ethical slant (peaceful research or violent money-grabbing) and prepare for their journey in the hub (which would be territory - anything from a planet to a spacestation - controlled by their space-faring race) before heading to one of the unexplored planets of their system to find new lifeforms. While they would receive minimal funds for photographing/killing a common lifeform that everyone else on the server has found, they could pool their resources and skill to find a rarer creature and be possibly the first to discover it, in which case they would get to name it and everything and the name would stay on the server for everyone else to see. Of course, they would make less money apiece for a combined effort, so a lot of players will want to go solo for a higher payout. New planets would be added as the MMO game is expanded (which would be explained in-game as a new planet being discovered by your race's astronomers), so there'll always be something new to find.

That's it so far in a nutshell. I'll work on how the game will actually be played (I'm thinking third-person action, with a first-person switch for photography/hunting/searching for life) and various other factors with the game that still need deciding. I'm really trying to go for an immersive atmospheric feel while walking around and monitoring the wildlife of the planets for this game, as well as a very diverse experience from one planet to the next, ranging from simple things like a jungle planet similar to Earth to complex ecosystems like a planet that has very low gravity with lifeforms that reflect this. I also really want to see a good nature photography game supplemented with some inventive technology, since the closest thing to it at present is Pokemon Snap which is about as limiting as you can get in terms of exploration (you have to follow a set rail path for one thing).