Final Thoughts

The Exercise

The following examples are by no means intended to be suggestions for great games. Rather, they're here to demonstrate the brainstorming process I've been discussing. Let's mix and match types of gameplay, just to see what happens.

Example #1: A Racing Game with Building, Combat, and Sneaking

You must race across post-apocalyptic America, building cars out of the scraps of debris you find along the way. These cars have been "weaponized" (loaded down with guns, cannons, and so on, as well as defensive armor), so the game includes lots of fighting with your enemies.

Each car only lasts for a limited period of time, so you've got to use your car to find other metal scraps with which to build your next car, before your current car expires. At the end of your car's life, because it's going to die anyway, you load it with explosives and use it as a bomb to destroy an enemy's car or installation.

You can eventually learn how to go into stealth mode and turn you and your car invisible turning it visible once again, just before you attack your foes.

Example #2: A Fighting Game with Sneaking, Resource Management, and Training of NPCs

Strange, vicious creatures have attacked and conquered parts of Earth.

You've got to build an army of these same creatures, who'll then fight as your warriors, against their own kind. You accomplish this by sneaking into the creatures' habitat and, when they're asleep, stealing one or more of the baby creatures. If the parents wake up, you must fight off the dangerous and cunning beasts.

Once you have the baby creatures, you then need to raise them until they're of fighting age. There's quite a bit of resource management in keeping them alive. There's also extensive fighting that results from defending them both from predators, as well as from their parent's rescue attempts. Once they're grown, they become part of your army, to be called upon at will to do your bidding.

Example #3: An Online Combat Game with Superhuman Abilities and with Making and Breaking Alliances (Betrayal)

There are, in the game, many different superpowers a person can possess, such as:

• You can zoom across the landscape at superhuman speeds.

• For a short period, you can change your appearance to look like an enemy.

• You can command weapons to go off and fight by themselves, although only within a limited radius of where you're located.

In the no man's land that the world has become, you have to make alliances with other superhumans and work as a group.

The problem is that when a group of superbeings work together, and each person in the group has different powers, then the group gives off a "manna ring." It's a ring of power that your group exudes, going out about 30 feet in all directions from where any member of your group stands. As long as the members of your group within eyesight of each other, the manna ring surrounds each person.

Any enemy who comes within your group's spatial manna ring gets a power-up of their own i.e., they become amped up by tapping your group's power. So, the very thing that makes you strong your alliance has the side effect of also empowering any enemies you fight at close range.

Conversely, the best way to fight a group that has more power than your group is to split up the members of the target group so that they can't team up on any of your group members, and then have your group engage them one-on-one, tapping their superior power (their manna ring) to even your own chances.

Here's how alliances and betrayal enters into it: Each alliance can have no more than four people. You may come upon another superhuman whose abilities and powers would be more helpful to your groups' survival than one of your existing members. So there will be incentives to shed your group member and bring the new superbeing into your group. Or perhaps the person shed will be you, in which case, for your own protection, you've got to find or start another alliance.

Some groups may decide they won't betray each other, and will maintain the original group, out of friendship, or for some another reason. That can be done, but the powers of each member of such a group will gradually fade. Thus there's an incentive to continually be swapping out members.

This has, by the way, a social element, in that it always forces players to team up with new players.

Exercise Summary

As mentioned, the point of the exercises wasn't to come up with great game concepts, but merely to demonstrate a certain brainstorming method for creating interesting gameplay, using the taxonomy of types of fun.