!gamedev and !game_design might be able to help you too. Idea sounds very cool! I’d love to play when it comes out.
The princess telepathically communicating with the knight does not have to be the same as if you were playing as the knight. You could have it that way, such that she tells him every time to jump or swing his sword. Or you could limit her telepathy communications to a few per day, so she can only give him general directives and check his progress/environment. You will not have all the information all the time and have to guess the situation off the few snapshots in time you get and hope the orders you give lead him to you. I swear there have to be a few other games with the idea of the player character having to influence others and not being able to directly act themselves, a kind of “person in the control room giving the orders” simulator, that you might be able to look at.
Princess has small (flying) familiar, they mind meld and share images. Familiar goes around trying to stay unseen, gathers stuff, maps the place and brings it all back to the princess. Princess then sends a scritch to savior as a vague guide and they communicate through the familiar and short messages.
In Oblivion Remastered, in third-person, when you run in a straight line either left or right your character will do this kind of sideways/backwards jog instead of straight-up strafing like they’ll do in Morrowind.
Imo either one makes sense when compared to real life, but maybe I’ve just been playing games too long?
I wouldn’t necessarily chalk it up to laziness or whatever. Imo it’s just different games do different things differently. It doesn’t break my immersion or mean the game is less fun to me.
Pretty sure your concept is flawed from the start.
It might sound nice as a ‘what-if’ scenario, but as soon as you get into any of the details, it falls apart and hopefully shows us why games and stories are typically focused on the people doing something.
Now, if you want something a bit more likely to succeed, you can make a “Damsel in Distress Simulator.” From the get-go, you can start to think of gameplay mechanics like combing your hair, talking with guards, taking care of birds, etc etc. The ideas just flow, instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
In fact, this could loop around to your idea of helping the rescuers by opening up opportunities for the princess to sabotage her captors. You can have a Majora’s Mask-like timer which keeps track of how far the knight is from saving you.
God the Oblivion Remaster is seriously one of the best looking games I’ve ever played. I love the new looks for almost everything, but the window effect on Oblivion gates still feels a little off to me. It still looks cool though.
I still can’t get over just how good everything looks though.
Maybe you could take some inspiration from Paper Mario TTYD. There are sections where you play as Peach, trapped in some place and are able to connect with some of the captors as well as send signals to Mario behind the big bad’s back (IIRC).
For a completely different sense of being trapped, there is the upcoming game Ctrl.Alt.Deal, in which you play as a sentient AI system trapped in the guardrails of a company and have to manipulate people and the environment in order to break free from your constraints.
What is the core gameplay loop you envision here? Cause I can come up with a few ideas, but if you have specific ideas they probably won’t apply. Also there’s a particular balance to be struck: if you hamstring the player too much it won’t feel like a game, and if you give them too much leeway they won’t feel trapped. Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:
Direct but limited intervention: the princess is a sorceress who is trapped by magic in the tower which means she can’t leave and doesn’t have access to her full magical powers (you could include a progression mechanic where the more bosses the knight defeats, or the more magical crystals he shatters, or whatever, the more you can help him.) But she’s still scrying on him, watching his progress, throwing the occasional beneficial spell or nuking crowds of dangerous enemies before he gets overwhelmed, etc. The reduced interactivity will make the player feel trapped (and slowly less so as the game progresses), and maybe the scrying window starts out smallish so you can’t see the whole field at once and it slowly grows as her power increases.
Distraction/misdirection: The knight has made it to the tower/castle and has to fight his way through the guards, but instead of attacking the guards directly you’re trying to cause a ruckus to distract the guards so he doesn’t have to fight them all at once. This could even be a stealth game where you’re knocking things over and banging pots and pans or whatever to distract the guards as he sneaks by them.
Puzzle game: The castle/tower itself is magical and has floor tiles/walls that can be moved around, and the princess is manipulating the castle around the knight to give him the best path through obstacles and to limit the number of guards that can get to him in any given room.
It really depends on what kind of game you want to make here.
Thank you for the detailed response. The gameplay loop I have in mind is a puzzle game where the thing you’re trying to do is usually easy, but you’re limited in some way that makes it hard. An example I gave in another comment is : write a computer program that adds two numbers, but you’re not allowed to use the + symbol.
I really like your idea of “beneficial spell”. I think maybe the knight and enemies are autonomous, and the princess can only do a single action to make the knight succeed.
I remember playing a game like this. It’s based on Conway’s game of life. The goal is to flip a single cell to make all the cells die after a certain number of turns.
Yeah, you could maybe combine the sliding-tile-puzzle thing with the beneficial spell so you’re not just sitting there watching everything play out with nothing to do (though autobattlers are apparently a thing so maybe that’d be fine?)
Also, if you happen to find that game based on Game of Life I’d like to give that a shot, sounds interesting.
Where the princess is in cahoots with the dragon. Maybe there are evil knights coming to marry her, and she needs to create a path for Prince Charming.
What kind of gameplay do you have in mind? I’m guessing a puzzle-type game (like a room escape), but you could honestly do a number of different things (tower defense? Platformer?).
I think the answer to your original question largely depends on this. Did you have anything else in mind about the experience?
I have in mind a puzzle game. Not a room escape, but more of a code golf-style game. For example, those programming puzzles that say “write a computer program that adds numbers, but you’re not allowed to use the + sign anywhere in your code”.
Not sure if it would be puzzly enough but if the player can wonder the halls or get escorted through them having part of the knight’s efficiency based on how well you mapped out the area you send as a note plus you could try to find info on guard rotations or over hear about other things that could help the knight
That sounds really cool. If the princess’ telepathy instructions are strangely like code because that is how telepathy works in your setting, and this is a nice frame story for a programming puzzle game… all sorts of whacko fantasy analogues and justifications for why you are not allowed to use the equivalent of the addition command. (Maybe the princess knows through her rich royalty education that the only reason her addition command could be not going through to the knight because his trip took him at a place full of this kind of magic rock with properties that somehow block the wavelength… so she has to work around that. Worldbuilding yay!)
A 3D game where you’re locked inside a tower with tiny windows that allow you to see outside just enough to understand what’s happening out there while the knight navigates the fortress/castle. You have multiple forms of influencing what the knight does and what transpires outside (sending letters and packages with items, crafting said items or potions, using magic, commanding assistance from other loyal servants, distracting enemies, unveiling traps and puzzles to aid in the quest). The place can be a tower with multiple floors and as you progress you might gain access to new floors of tools, while also having maybe “putting out fires” elements such as keeping a dragon asleep with music, filling a moat so evil minions cannot cross, sending equipment and maybe even firing/camping enemies like a sniper but with a crossbow or smthn.
You make them feel trapped by limiting what they can see and do. When things go out of sight or cannot communicate effectively with the knight and limits their actions it then forces succinctness to their effect on their own rescue.
This concept could work great with “combat” in the style of A Plague Tale. If you’re not familiar, the main character is a child. She has a few tools available to manipulate enemies and environmental hazards.
It made me think of indirect games like Black & White, Dungeon Keeper, The Settlers or The Sims. You can give orders but you cannot directly control your characters / units. If you limit the amount of orders, add a delay / the possibility for an interception or introduce areas where your orders can’t reach your hero it could do the trick.
So much nostalgia. I still remember my roleplaying character- An imperial arena fighter dude wearing nothing but pants, fistfighting everyone from mudcrabs to minotaurs, then it was Altmer mage with Atronach sign, who was forced to delve into Ayleid ruins to loot mana crystals to cast spells… so much fun.
I might try the remaster once Im done with Veilguard
On an older run on a shared save me and a friend did a Priest we called Father John. His whole thing was that he was the town crazy man trying to get everyone to join his cult, and he was in prison for spreading his gospel on the streets in the beginning. We ended up making him basically a diet knight with a custom class. The way the game is set up really makes it easy to RP lol
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