Friday, December 01, 2006

Game Idea: Hammerspace

So the genesis of this idea was to think of something that had the manic energy and sheer fun value of the highly acclaimed Katamari Damacy, a series I've only had the fortune to play when its second incarnation We Heart Katamari was finally released over here. Thank you once again Europe, for being spectacularly slow on the ball. Literally in this case.

The idea follows a cartoon character drawn in the "classic" sense, styled on someone like Felix the Cat or Bugs Bunny but entirely original otherwise, who discovers one day that the interdimensional pocket that all cartoon "props" derive from (the eponymous Hammerspace) is fresh out of deadly weaponry and random comedy items, and he goes on a quest to refill it before the cartoon world suffers from the lack of attention and funding by the "real world" that would ensue from an insufficient level of graphic cartoon violence in their animated entertainment.

A note on the name: Hammerspace is so named by Japanese animators to describe how cartoon characters can pick up items of varying size seemingly out of midair. The "hammer" that the name refers to is the hammer present in that old standard of Japanese comedy: "lecherous man gets punished by cute girl with a needlessly gigantic hammer", which she pulls out of nowhere to defend her honor with.

The game's main premise (find objects lying around and collect them in the hammerspace) works with either a 2D or 3D environment, ideally suited therefore for any console. The game will be a standard platformer in most respects, with your cartoon hero having various powers and means to move around the stages and collect the objects to place in hammerspace, which you'll have access to being a cartoon character and all. Like Katamari, you can explore the level to your heart's content without worrying too much about health or damage, but instead keeping an ever-vigilant eye on the time-limit. Finding certain "tool" items while you're out collecting will allow you to use those tools to reach more items/locations hidden within the stage: e.g. you could find a pogo-stick, place it in the hammerspace, move to where a platform is too high for you to reach and bounce up there by removing it from the hammerspace and using it. There'll also be some passive tools such as a hoover attachment, which will automatically attach itselft to the hammerspace portal to suck up smaller objects as you pass over them (instead of wasting time collecting them singly). Since the hammerspace inventory is carried along with you after every stage it'll steadily increase its carrying capacity to fit all the new items in as you go through the game. This results in a larger hammerspace with a larger entry portal, allowing you to squeeze larger objects inside. This means you could replay an earlier level with a bigger hammerspace and could now collect more of the larger items in that stage (and net you a better score for that timed runthrough).

Graphically, I was thinking each individual stage could "borrow" an animation style and employ it, allowing for a different-looking bunch of objects per stage. So the first stage could be a classic Looney Tunes style landscape and the next could be a stereotypical Japanese anime stage complete with giant robots, cute schoolgirls and various bizarre background jokes involving cats. There could even be a semi-realistic claymation/stop-motion stage, but I don't know how easy that would be to pull off.

The majority of objects are just lying around waiting to be collected, and it's simply a matter of running over to where they are and picking them up. These are the simple objects (or "Class C objects") and having a collection made entirely of Class C objects for a given stage will net you a fairly crappy score. It would still allow you to effectively "pass" that level and unlock the next, however.

The Class B objects are a little trickier. These objects tend to either be part of a set (and collecting the whole set nets you a bonus), requires some disassembly (e.g. there's a giant sword held in place by various straps nailed to a wall, and if you can remove all the nails and straps you'll get the sword which will be worth a lot of points) or are generally hard to reach (like a group of valuable objects on top of a tall building which you have to climb).

Class A objects are the ones that will require various power-ups to reach or find. They'll be golden-colored and there'll be a set number of them per level. The usable "tool" items also count as Class A, and tend to only be given to you in either a special tutorial or are carefully hidden. They are the only objects you can remove from the hammerspace after putting them in, and you'll only need one of each since you'll be recalling the same tool each time you want to use it.

Finally, Class S objects will be unlocked as you reach the end of the game and the collection tools at your disposal become ever more powerful/abstract. These will include gigantic background items that would never fit in the hammerspace normally to, perhaps, bizarre items like thoughts and speech bubbles. You could even start to saturate the landscapes of some brightly colored stages after finding the appropriate tool, removing all their colors which will appear in the hammerspace inventory as that color's paint. Some stages may have unique colors in them, so you'd have to revisit them to find that particular color (for instance, there may only be one stage that has a purple-colored object). It'd be cool to get even more metaphysical than that, such as sound effects (leaping from a tall building into a pool for a big "splash!" and then collecting the "splash!"), background music (hope you like silence for the rest of the level) or collecting parts of the player's HUD so you can't see what's left of the time limit.
Since it is a cartoon world and all, I'd only be restrained by the technology of whatever console I was working with (or whichever programmers I'd be working with for that matter).

I purposely chose an idea like Katamari that could work in 2D because I'm not entirely convinced Katamari does actually work in 2D. I know there are instances of 2D Katamari games (and so many parody animated .gifs, usually involving Nintendo characters), but really the emphasis is on the katamari itself, a giant sphere that slowly increases in volume and expands outwards. Spheres don't really work in 2D. But even a simple 2D platformer with the scale of Metroid or Mario would still all sorts of different places to hide objects to find and collect, allowing this game idea to work.