Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Plague rewrite - your design thoughts wanted

I'm in London and unemployed right now, which leaves me with loads of unallocated time that I can use to upskill (and spend going for runs in the sun). I've started learning C# and XNA and am planning on releasing a new variant of Plague - it'll have similar gameplay but with different design trade-offs.

I'm concentrating on programming, with the game as an after thought (but also a concrete testbed in which to write lots of code). As such I'm happy to outsource lots of design decisions.

Here is what I am thinking at this point:
  1. Top down shooter
  2. Procedural map generation
  3. Procedural weapon generation
  4. Line of sight for game agents
  5. Hive mind for zombies (so they dont all have individual memories which was quite expensive)
  6. Tower defence elements
  7. RTS style controls for friendly agents
  8. Much less AI for friendly agents?
  9. Keep game fast (probably lose cellular automata fire and explosions)
  10. Open world gameplay (I really hated the confined maps of Plague) - not sure how I'm going to do this - any hints?
  11. Unlimited ammo?
  12. Recharging health?
There are about a billion design decisions to be made within this design outline, and I'd be keen to hear your thoughts. If anyone wants to help out, please let me know. There will be plenty of testing/balancing required.