#Game Idea 37

This week’s idea is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History. Here comes…

Game Idea #37

Angelus Novus

Backstory

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History)

The Game

In this board game for an unlimited number of players your group goal is to help the ‘Angel of History’ to survive Progress with as little loss as possible. While Progress (which is embodied by a number of specific game mechanics) will come up with new thoughts and concepts that it will articulate in order to trigger fatal events such as Hiroshima or Auschwitz, your goal as players will be to combine alternative thoughts and concepts in order to cancel out or avoid the fatal events to happen and create a ‘clean’ streak in history.

Game Idea #36

A few years ago I’ve lost a very close friend in an “accident” that seemed unimagibly absurd at that time: A rock fell on his head, in the middle of the crowdest of all cities… He was a very special person and together with some friends we were always thinking to make him the main character of a weird game. Yesterday, when I was thinking on an event for this game (it is codenamed “The Marquis” btw) — I imagined a somewhat “slapstickish” scene in which you push a piano down the stairways so that it smashes the opponents that follow you —  I suddenly thought it could be fun to play the role of a waiter… on a ship in a storm. ;) Here comes…

Game Idea #36

The Waiter

The Waiter is a switchable FPS/TPS game in which you play the role of a waiter who serves at dinner tables of elite customers during a trip through the ocean. The goal of the game is to complete the service sequence with as less mistakes as possible, which basically will require the player to balance his movements against those of the ship caused by waves. There will be some cute rewards at the end of each sequence, such as a rendezvous with the noble young  lady or gentleman at the table ;)

Different challenges will be posed to the player through service sequences in different transportation vehicles such as trains, busses and airplanes.

The Waiter is a fun game that requires some skill. But sometimes all you need is a bit of luck!

Game Idea #35

This week I’m going to present to you a word game which was inspired by French linguist Emile Benveniste’s theory of layers of signification. Enjoy!

Game Idea #35

Emil

Emil is a word game for 3-5 players. The game starts with as many closed letter-cards in the center as there are players.  The rest of the letter-cards is equally distributed among the players. During game turns, the players will first unveil the closed letter-cards, generate as many words and sentences as possible from the letters  available in the center, and then add one card from the cards they possess. The players will prefer to add a letter that makes it difficult for the player who follows to create new words. When all players have added one new card, each one will remove one of the cards in the center. The player who scored the most points when all letter-cards have been played and removed, wins the game.

A player can alter the state of the game dramatically by carrying the generation of meaning from the word level to the sentence level. Once a player manages to create a sentence with the letters in the center, she doubles the score for each word in that sentence. If the following players cannot generate sentences and generate words, then they will only receive half the points they would normally receive for words. Therefore it’s critical to be able to build sentences.

 

Game Idea #34

This week’s game is about fortune telling and anticipation. Enjoy! :)

Game Idea #34

Your Daily Horoscope

Your Daily Horoscope is a puzzle game in which you have to interpret your daily horoscope in order to achieve success or to avoid problems in the simulated world through which you have to guide your avatar throughout the day.

The game will place certain events onto our path during the day and then generate a horoscope which “encripts” and presents these events in a broadly interpretable horoscope language. Our goal is, through a combination of guesswork and evidence, to spend our days in the most benefitial way by avoiding unfortunate events and by championing onto our opportunities. A simple happening such a stranger giving us roses will turn into an dilemma: Should we accept the roses or reject it? Maybe we will be the one who has roses when the boss asks for them and get a promotion… The horoscope might help us in making our decision.

Your Daily Horoscope will be a fun game, especially at the moments in which the plot is revealed and we fully understand the true meaning of the horoscope and see how obvious it was that these things would happen! Hundreds of possible scenarios will ensure that we will have a lot of puzzles to solve.

Game Idea #33

I’m continuing with ideas for the Nintento Wii. This one is the simulation of a simple kids game: Bouncing Balls. Here comes…

Game Idea #33

Bouncey

Bouncey is a ball bouncing simulation to be presented under the thematic umbrella of kids street games. Your goal is to keep a soccer ball bouncing as long as you can, without allowing it to touch the ground. You can also play certain bouncing tricks, like using your shoulders or letting the ball rest on top of your head, neck or back. In the long term you will unlock the ball bouncing tricks of famous soccer stars such as Christiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho or David Beckham.

The game will use a pair of special signalling sources which can be mounted on shoes, knee, neck and head and are compatible with the Nintento Wii’s motion detection system.