Unfinished Ideas

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 | Editorial

“It’s the weird colour scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls, which are labeled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it.” - Zaphod Beeblebrox

I absolutely love concepts that stretch your imagination. For instance Unfinished Swan:

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Now how cool is that? I wonder if we’ll be seeing invisible white-on-white or black-on-black people and animals that react to getting splattered… or that don’t. What if you’re invisible and the world around you can’t see you or your ink, but you can’t see them either until you ink them? I’m reminded of the play Harvey by Mary Chase where in the final line could be taken that while Elwood can see Harvey, the 6 foot tall white rabbit, when no one else can that maybe Harvey can see humans that the other Pooka’s (mythical creatures for which Harvey is one) can’t. Here’s another idea, what if this were an echolocation sort of thing so that you could pulse outward and have all surfaces a fixed difference from the point of the pulse light up. It sparks the imagination.

Funny that it’s often the simplest concepts that provide the most spark. Unfinished Swan is simple. No textures or complex mapping. It leaves a lot to the imagination and consequently work as as a kind of canvas for the imagination. Naturally Unfinished Swan is hardly the first to do this. If you haven’t played them, here are a few games that’s simple presentation and off-the-beaten-path game play have inspired me:

Tumiki Fighters - While it’s getting the Wiiware treatment, when I played this game I envisioned something more like a magnetic mecha game where you build a giant warship around you. Captures ships would be configured to act as as arms, legs, armor, etc. Throw in a procedurally generated map that as you kris-cross from point to point your path determines what enemies you faced and this could be the coolest game I ever dreamed up.

rRootage - Also from Aba games I love the idea of an enemy that reacts to how you destroy it. My first thought was something organic, but what if the magnetic mecha from above were now the enemy?

Stellar Assault / Shadow Squadron for the 32X - There aren’t enough games like this. X-Wing was cool, but X-Wing didn’t allow 2 players on the same screen by having one aim the cannon while the other pilots the ship. Replay mode was apparently nicked from Star Wars on the Sharp X68000, but I still love it. Unfortunately it was saddled to the ill fated 32X meaning your options to play it now are limited to either hit-or-miss used computer stores or the evils of emulation.

Robot Odyssey - I’ve said this before, but the game is impossible to win without a masters degree in electrical engineering, and is the very definition of open ended. “Sandbox” has nothing on this. If you’re brave Droid Quest faithfully recreates the game for you to play, but I think it needs a rewrite to be more marketable by adding characters to interact with and solutions you can buy if you do some mundane grinding task in the game (preferably one that would build the skills to help you make your own solutions the next time you play).