Shadow Covenant

Damn, woke about one hour ago and saw the theme… “Tiny World”…

Been thinking about an idea for one hour now, and I still have nothing concrete…

Until now, only two things come to mind:

1. Generate a procedural world for a side-scroller kind of game, with a very small character… This is what I feel like programming, but I have no game for this… Just a guy moving about in a procedurally generated world, in a Metroidvania style… Doesn’t have anything to do with the theme and it might push my resources a bit too far…
2. A tower defense kind of game: generate a procedural small planet and the player can build stuff on top of it (mines, cannons, power-plants, farms, cities, etc). He has to sustain and evolve the planet, defending it from stuff that comes from space (aliens, meteors, etc).
   The ideia is to do this in 3d, but that has the big problem of spatial perception: the player would be hard pressed to prepare against incoming threats, since they could come from everywhere.
   Going 2d on this idea might be more feasible from a gameplay perspective. Still, I think on this idea and there’s not actually much the player can achieve: he places some stuff around and then waits for an outcome, which sounds pretty boring.

Was hoping that writing this blog post would help come up with something else, but no success there…

Hum… Now for some web-searches on “Tiny World”…

Bah, no help there too…

Ok, let me try a different approach… just throwing some random ideas and see if any of them can be combined into something cool:

1. The world is tiny
2. The character is tiny (breaks the theme, I think)
3. We build the world, having to manage its growth so that it becomes viable for something…
4. We defend a tiny world
5. We fight to conquer a tiny world
6. The world grows/transforms from your actions
7. Our tiny world is dying, need to find a new one (breaks the theme, I think)
8. Our tiny world is dying, need to fix it (breaks the theme, I think)

Not many ideas… Most of my ideas are usually of bigger scope, so tending to “huge world”, more than “tiny”.

Can’t shake the feeling that there’s some grid-based small idea of a game that could be built, using the fact that the playing field is small and lending itself to fast playing sessions, but for the life of me, I can’t come up with anything…

……

Been brainstorming with my wife for a bit, and an idea came up… It’s not a “game idea”, but it gives me a starting point, and maybe a game will evolve from there…

I’m going to do a “voxel”-based construction kit, in which the player can put different color blocks in the world and then there will be some creatures that react in some way to the blocks…

But just making the construction kit will take some time, so I’ll start by that…