/diy/ - Do It Yourself

PARADIGM SHIFT!

Guys.

Guys listen.

My game design accomplice and I have decided to do something crazy.

Anybody ever play Widget Workshop? We're going to essentially combine Widget Workshop with a mech sim.

Just let that sink in for a minute.

Essentially you will be able to install equipment (weapons etc.) onto hardpoints, which you then control using simple (or complex if you choose) 'circuitry' to control what is mounted to the hardpoints. This idea started as a solution for making the game appeal to both 'gamers' and 'simmers,' people who want to just drive around and blow shit up and people who want a nitty-gritty simulator experience. The idea is that if someone wants a regular drive-and-gun experience, they can automate most of the systems in their mech. If someone wants a sim experience, they can wire their systems up with lots of buttons and toggles and inputs and displays, leaving the actual operational decisions up to the pilot.

I know this is a fairly large deviation from what I (and probably most of you) were anticipating in this game, but this is an area in game development that my partner and I have not seen explored.

For example, circuit in pic has a button to fire your machine gun and a toggle for fast or slow rate-of-fire. The toggle switches the fire button input between two 'repeaters' that run the gun at half-speed or full-speed.

At full speed, the gun will presumably overheat. So, a thermometer is hooked up to the gun that detects if it is about to overheat. When the thermometer hits that threshold, it overrides the fast-fire toggle and forces the gun to fire at half-speed, and also kicks in some kinda coolant system.

This is all super rough and up in the air at the moment but I am presently working on a prototype of the system. If all goes well, the emergent property of this system is a game with a distinct feeling of post-apocalyptic jerry-rigging and a control scheme/gameplay that the player has full control over.