FPS Game Ideas


You might be tempted to think that all the great first-person shooter ideas have already been done to death. I doubt that's true. There are a few ideas that have been tried and have not been terribly successful—that doesn't mean that they can never be successful. Maybe with a bit of tweaking, you could make a successful version of a game that previously bombed. That's an important concept to keep in the back of your head.

One such example that immediately comes to mind is the Western—you know, the Wild, Wild West. There have been a ton of successful Hollywood Western movies. But there haven't been any equivalent games. That's an assignment for someone out there, and if it is ever going to be fulfilled, it will likely be an independent like you that does it.

One of the games I'd really like to see someone create in the FPS genre is a chess game played out with individual battles between pieces, where you can have each player able to engage in combat appropriate to the chess pieces as they are moved. There are game play issues that would need to be resolved, but that's something a clever designer would overcome. Here are some of the issues that would have to be tackled:

  • Who decides the moves if the game is team based?

  • Should each piece have different combat styles?

  • Should the standard rules of chess play (movement rules, for example) prevail?

  • Might you need to modify them slightly?

  • Should you ever have an overhead board view?

If you broaden the scope a bit and don't focus on the shooter part of the FPS genre, the horizon starts to recede—first-person perspective play without the shooting has been barely touched.

Firefighting is one such topic that seems like it might be ripe for a game, especially team-based play. You could do forest fires, building fires, and so on. The biggest challenge would be the fire-propagation algorithms, such as the following:

  • Exactly what conditions cause this item or that item to burst into flames?

  • How does smoke move through a forest, a building, and so on, and how do you render that?

  • How do you score the game?

  • How realistic should the game be?




3D Game Programming All in One
3D Game Programming All in One (Course Technology PTR Game Development Series)
ISBN: 159200136X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 197

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