I’m only a hobbyist promammer but have probably read too much about game design. So all this advice is theoretical, I’m just quoting. All I have read always suggest that theme must follow gameplay, not the other way around. Suggestions are always to work on gameloops and gameplay elements first. Also, if a game can’t be physically prototyped, it isn’t ready for development yet. This is an odd suggestion unless you have tons of experience with board games, most games we play can be traced to physical simulation. RPG, FPS, puzzle games, management games, even visual novels can all be physically gamed. So I would suggest to do that first to find out which gameplay elements make sense with your desired themes. Iterate a lot, then it will be more intuitive and obvious what works with the theme and what doesn’t.
The actual gameplay is based on combat, paintball, and other simulations whose rules are replicated. Call of Duty doesn’t emulate real combat, it’s a shooting range circuit skinned like real combat. The gamefying elements are usually card based, or attribute based, which comes from euro board games. There are games whose weapon customizations are based on RPGs or card based deck building.
Yeah, armies have weapons simulator that shoot blanks and lasers to train for real world operations. There’s also BB guns. Most FPS studios send their developers to these places so they get experience and inspiration for weapon models and interesting level designs or combat scenarios.
Maybe the game is figuring out HOW to send him messages and assistance. Like the princess is trapped in a room full of stuff and she has to figure out that she has to grab a tapestry off the wall and charcoal ash from the fireplace so she can write a big message on the tapestry saying ""I'M IN HERE" and then hang it out the window so the knight can find which room she's in.
And another puzzle could be that she has to figure out how to get a key to the knight who is unable to get past a locked gate in a hallway, so the princess has to find the key, and then she has to figure out that she has to tie it to the waist of a guard who walks around the hallways so that the knight can grab the key off the guard.
Another puzzle could be something with figuring out you have to do something with a rat that scurries between areas.
Another could be doing something with a bird that flies somewhere and does something helpful
Another could be using the toilet tube to drop out a map to the knight waiting below (castle toilets were just a hole in the wall)
Another could be freeing a monster from another cell so the monster will kill all the warriors waiting in the hallway before the knights arrival
Another could be talking to the person who delivers her meals to convince/trick him into doing something outside like drawing an arrow on a hallway wall so the knight knows which way he should go
Etc.
And importantly you can have the story lead to her being in different locations so that the game environment can change to keep it fresh. Like as the knight starts to get close to her location the bad guys will move the princess to a more secure cell (with a wink message to the player audience referencing mario "the princess is in another castle"). And the game can actually start with her trapped in a wing of her home castle with her dad (the king) trying to keep her chaste away from interaction with any men. So she can be trapped in multiple different places throughout the game as the player advances through the game
Some games do, some games don’t. It’s a design choice.
Also, Oblivion was released originally in 2007, and Morrowind in 2002. The consoles, game logic, and gfx were a fraction of what modern games can do, a lot of games (most, in fact) back then didn’t have the fancy animations for all directions. There were likely other backend/engine limitations at the time that don’t exist today, because CPU/GPU power.
ETA: as someone who has coded a 3rd person camera and animations in 3D to work in all directions, it really fucking sucks to do in a well-known engine with online search available from others that have done it before. Now imagine having to code everything like that from scratch into a custom game engine, being one of the firsts to figure it out. I’m also gonna guess other bugs were far more important than which direction the character is walking in TPV, being a Bethesda game and all.
Sims 3 is generally agreed to be the best by the people talk to, but my favourite is sims 2… (probably cause nostalgia :3)
Anyhow 4 is free and runs on mac from what I can see, so… just go with that x3… I personally wouldn’t pay for the DLC and just mod it, but I dunno how macs are in terms of mods
The sims 4 launched at full price, mind you, and later got made free for… some anniversary I believe :3… as a full price game it definitely got a fair bit of slack cause overall it had less content than the previous games, and people didn’t like needing DLC for what they considered base features, but… free is free ¯\(ツ)/¯
Fwiw I still found 4 a lot of fun, it has enough unique features and the loading screens were much shorter than previous games. But I also didn’t play with dlc, so that probably helped.
2 is my favorite but I do agree with others that 3 is better. It has so much customization built in and the more open world is more fun to play in
Oh definitely :3… nothing wrong with 4 as a stand-alone, just series wise at launch it was a bit lackluster :3… there’s definitely still fun to be had with it ^^
!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.
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