Not sure about the setting...maybe the inside of a pc case with people popping up from behind things?
(inspired by nudone's avatar)

How about a cash register! It pops open and you see cody & friends and site regs. Almost like those quickshoot games with the NES Light Gun.

I have been thinking about a game recently, and under the ideas posted on here realized that I could use some of the ideas on here to start the beginning of my game. I can't share all of it because there is still a lot to be decided, but basically I want to create a world where everything on it is interactable in one way or another. We could collect the rocks' like JavaJones idea to build castles, weapons etc... and we could take Deozaan's, idea of grow up to store energy for various things and farm food for our people who harvest the materials to build. I think you may see where this is going. Things would eventually get better, stronger, and faster to find and produce and soon you would have a thriving civilization... then the other work begins... Exploration. You explore to find another civilization and then begins the wars and domination factor. We tie all this into a RPG type prehistoric setting, throw in the occasional monster attack (the giant Cody monster) and you need to develop ways to defend yourself and so on.

very ambitious idea mizraim and sounds fun.. be nice to think of some small start you could make on it.. not sure what that would be though!

but you have given me a funny picture of cody as a giant sized creature who can bend down and chomp up a person

good idea gothic.
what id really like to see is a flash game where we can all contribute by making levels for it.
ie some kind of game where there is a level editor.

maybe a lemmings style game with cody's instead of lemmings?

what about something with a "programming" twist to it?
(you have to program the cody's to get to the end of the level?)

Mizraim, sounds like Civilization.

I like the idea of a modular/extensible game a lot. Start small, make it simple and reasonably open architecture. Then everyone can expand on it. If you're a coder, code a new module for it, and you can do it on your own. If you're a level designer, make new levels with the level editor. If you're an artist work on a new character or environments. If it was made modular enough and tools to extend it were made easy to use and widely available, you could end up with a very expansive and cool game at the end. The only concern would be security due to malicious expansions I guess, but you'd use a central directory of verified extensions that people could submit to for verification, like Firefox extension repositories.

I see this as kind of going back to the "good old days" of game development where 1 or 2 people is all it took because the hardware couldn't cope with much anyway, so you had to make games simple. Back in those days someone would be the game designer, story writer, coder, and artist all in one. It didn't take much to do the graphics for Jill of the Jungle. So this could be similar. After all it is the gameplay dynamics that matter most. In a perhaps ironic proof of that the modern Flash technology is being used to enable all kinds of classic and extended classic gameplay dynamics, sometimes with upgraded graphics, but the gameplay is still the star. This resurgence of classic gaming in the mainstream shows it's still all about those simple, enjoyable gameplay mechanics.

- Oshyan

Ah, interesting concept. I like it. So basically Diablo-ish with an RTS twist? I'm sure that's been done, but it sounds like a cool gameplay dynamic, especially if the two aspects are reasonably well balanced. Of course the issue with mixing genres is always that fans of one may not necessarily be fans of another, so although they may enjoy half of the game, the other half may piss them off. Which is why I've always wanted to have basic AI in games to take care of unwanted aspects for people *optionally*. So in your proposed game for example, let's say someone doesn't really care about the Civ aspects and just wants to do the adventuring Diablo parts. When it comes time to do their Civ stuff they can just say "auto-roll" or "let the computer do it" (or even set this as a consistent setting for every turn or whatever) and then the computer does a reasonable (if not exceptional) job and they get to go fight some more. Obviously if anyone wants to master the game they have to get good at both parts, but the *option* of playing either or both is really great.

- Oshyan

Adding multiplayer makes it a lot more feasible and cool, from a gameplay standpoint. The only major issues then are mostly technical - working out the multiplayer and whatnot. Doing a game like the one you mention in simple Flash probably wouldn't be too hard, at least to get a good start on it. But once you start getting into multiplayer I think it'd become rather more difficult. On the plus side of that however the "dungeon explorers" (diablo style) could be doing their thing pretty independently, not even necessarily interacting with other players, while the "kingdom masters" (civ style) would be turn-based, so simple message passing could be used to update the view of each client. Not bad as far as difficulty of programming I would think. But once you got into semi-realtime and if you wanted for example the hack-and-slashers to be able to work with each other or whatever, then you'd probably want to go to a dedicated client of some kind (stand-alone), or a very sophisticated browser component (I *have* seen stuff of that level of sophistication).

The only other thing to deal with then is making sure you have a good balance of player types. What if most people want to play hack-and-slash? Are there enough missions for them? Missions must be generated by the civ-style players, so if they're not doing enough battles, then there may not be. You'd have to spawn/allow AI players both to get more missions for the diablo players and to ensure enough opponents for the civ players. Counting on there always being enough players at either level would be a mistake. Also what if one player or another doesn't finish their game/turn? You have to have a cut-off point where the AI takes over. Presumably the diablo players would have to complete a dungeon/battle for the civ player to see a battle conclusion screen (or they die and the civ player sees a failure) - but what if the diablo player disconnects or just idles in the dungeon without completing? You have to be able to take it over with AI. To reduce load it'd probably just be a dice roll based on a few simple factors (how well the diablo player has done so far in the dungeon perhaps).

Oh wait, one more thing. There's the social element of it too. Not so much pairing people up with other people who are friends, but at the least you need a mechanism to regulate and distribute players to each other, since the civ and diablo players are complementary and basically a team. So how do you determine who gets the best fighter in the game? Does he get to pick who he plays with? Probably. But then you get a fairly small elite who will probably dominate the game together, so you have to deal with that. Making assignment more random would solve that, and to some degree the diablo players might not care since they get to keep fighting almost no matter what, but it would probably still be annoying for people not to be able to choose teammates. If you made games somewhat short, so no one could gain a long-term upper hand, that might solve some of the problems.

Anyway, lots to think about. Game design is fun.

- Oshyan

There are some nice tutorials on flash game design.  I've been looking into a few on platform games in flash using a tile editor (which would make it easy for others to design levels):

http://oos.moxiecode.com/
http://www.strille.net/tutorials/part1_scrolling.php

I envision something more real-time. Like an RTS where you can move your character around and build things, but also go off to fight. Except with one person instead of many units. I guess the best (yet still very, very terrible) comparison I can come up with is something like an MMORPG but with building aspects that appear in Second Life.

I said it was a bad comparison.

Still, I think if it was done right, it could be like a 2D RTS, where you control only one character. When the game starts, you can stick around the castle to build it up and work on defenses and homes and things, and when you get bored with that or if you need to, you can go with your army (or solo, I guess) and go explore and try to find the other people and fight them if you want.

Or perhaps a better example would be something with the character control and visual design of Diablo II but where the city can be attacked and destroyed or built up.

I don't think it necessarily needs to be PvP, or that different factions need to be at war all the time.

But again this is getting too complex. I think it would be nice, and along with Mizraim's idea of something that we start small with and add more to it as time goes on to make it a more full game.

This project is very ambitious, and would almost certainly take longer than a month, but could be playable in various stages throughout time.

Defending the castle would have the benefits of growth. If anyone played Utopia on the SNES, there were places where food was processed. I kind of see the same idea behind fortifying the castle. It could be like sending food to the troops, giving moral, or like in Civ, if your nation was destroyed, you had to settle a new town before too many rounds or you would disband, not seeing a purpose to fight for a nation that has no future. I'm out of time but I will revisit this for a better explanation. Thanks for the links and point of views.

Interesting concepts but it sounds like that *depends* on multiplayer functionality fundamentally, and that's a tall order for a web-based game - or if non-web based, then it would probably require a central server, or people to run servers. Not impossible, just additional complication we probably don't want to start with.

As far as the rewards of building and maintaining the castle, I understand the traditional goals of that in a regular civ-like RTS. It sounded like it was being suggested that it be different than that though, particularly in the sense that the user only controlled one guy. Would people follow you? Would additional units just run around with AI and do their own business? Lots of questions are raised in this scenario.

- Oshyan