YEAR 2 - BA2b - brainstorm

We all decided almost immediately that (3) was far too open and so any ideas that fell into this category were not right for the project. (1) seemed like a healthy challenge but any ideas we came up for it seemed too small for the size of the team and the length of the project. The two ideas that really stuck out to us were both in category (2):

[IDEA1] Cat Ship (working title) (if FTL was an RTS)
 - A side on 1v1 RTS set on pirate ships controlled by cats. The player must invest in various cat based weapons, defences and production as they go with the ultimate goal of destroying the opponents ship. The ship itself is stationary but the player can invest in different upgrades (the different rooms of the ship) and this determines what they will develop. Clicking on rooms in the opponents ship tells your weapons to focus that room. You can use this to stuns the growth of your opponents plans and/or earn you gold for more upgrades.

The game could include multiple unlockable costumes and ship skins with the potential to be monetized with optional micro-transactions.

[Good Points]
- Very marketable (everyone likes pirate cats)
- RTS is starting to gain popularity on ios (Clash of Clans) but has yet to fully engage the casual audience so it has the potential to fill a gap in the market.
- A good ratio of 2D to 3D with a healthy dose of design and programming (perfect for our team composition)

[Challenges/ Problems]
- The scope might be a bit small
- Similar theme/feel to a lot of other casual games (might blend in too much)

We also had plans for a (worms-like turn based version of the game)


[IDEA2] Doll House (subversive 'The Sims')
- A story telling game for lets players and fans of The Sims and subversive play (The idea originated from reading chapter 2 of Mary Flanagans book 'CRITICAL PLAY: Radical Games Design' and wondering what would happen if someone made a virtual doll house about subversive play)

A side view of a doll house with a 7 day/night cycle where the player has the ability to move dolls from room to room by clicking and dragging. the dolls each have their own randomly generated stats and desires and this determined how they might react to any given circumstance (taking into account what room they're in, who they're with, their mood, wants etc). The layout of the house may have some element of RNG too . It is up to the player to decide where to move the dolls but what the dolls get up to is of their own decision and the unexpected is to be expected. Over the course of 7 days in the house random events can occur including ghosts, mole infestations, zombie uprisings, squatters, plane crashes, alternate dimensions and more normal things like daily deliveries of packages. Whether the dolls end up happy, dead or something else is up to you (kind-of).

the idea is that if the player wants to they can try to keep these characters alive and learn about who they might be whilst surviving weird events and creating a new story each time OR they can subvert the play and try to get the characters into ridiculous situations where they are forced to murder/eat/attack/cheat on eachother or other entities in the house.

Also, after each playthrough the player can unlock new potential room types, character traits and objects.

The game could be monetized with expansions such as:
Medieval Edition  - torture dungeons, famine, witches, cults
Fantasy Edition - various fantasy races, dragons, questing

[Good Points]
- Very Marketable
- The kind of game that lets players would love to play given the huge amount of potential interactions and creativity they can bring to it.
- Never been done before (as far as I'm aware)
- High replay value
- Potentially cover real world issues and is quite shocking and weird. Should get lots of publicity on social media.
- Lots of fans of The Sims > No good Sims games released recently
- Good quantity of work to keep us busy for the whole 6 weeks
- Good ratio of work. The game should keep all 5 of us busy.
- Large scale but flexible. All we really need to make this good are the core systems and a few variables and interactions but it's almost infinitely scale-able and the more we do, the more open ended the game will feel.

[Challenges/Problems]
- Potentially boring players if they lose the feeling of being autonomous or nothing interesting happens
+ Possible fix would be to include achievements for various events the player can try to cause, lots of RNG, daily (ingame) events and packages with new objects the dolls can use
- Potentially very complicated programming and prone to bugs given the RNG and that it's not the kind of game I've ever made before.