Steampunk Blues

Since we're throwing around ideas and looking for something a bit different, I thought I'd mention this one. Some of you might remember this idea from my first-quarter illustration project. It should be easy enough to pull off in almost any game engine.

STEAMPUNK BLUES

The premise: Lemmings meets Guitar Hero (or similar). Players take the role of a lone hobo, and try to keep up with the commands on screen in order to keep their following of steam-powered, clockwork rats. Make too many mistakes, and your little army of steam-rats will start to fall out of sync with the rest - causing them to fall to their death, be blown to smithereens, get pulverised by an enormous piledriver, etc. The goal is to get to one of the possible endings of a branching play area with as many of your rats intact as possible.

I see a lot of opportunities for player involvement and feedback in the basic gameplay. Your little army clangs and hisses satisfyingly in unison with the rhythm (unless you fuck up), and the various ways in which your steamrats can meet their demise could be extremely entertaining. Depending on the type of rhythm mechanic employed in the game (more like GH, DDR, or preferably someething completely unique in itself), it could be possible to even leave the player with multiple choices as to how they solve various 'problems' presented by a gameplay area (in co-op mode, this would also encourage player communication, which is a good thing). This element of actual choice would elevate rhythm-based gameplay to an unexplored area, beyond anything like GH or DDR.

The initial proposal for an art style here would be a fusion of hardcore steampunk and pop-culture, superflat styles. The game would also offer a unique flavour of music, with a variety of acoustic blues music over industrial clangs and hisses. Think Trent Reznor if he had SOUL

Difficulty tuning would be easy, and the game could support multiple players in a sort of co-op mode.

so, to recap the key points here:

- unique gameplay, a fusion of two genres that brings something new to both
- possibility for a strong multiplayer experience that encourages communication
- should be easy enough to pull off in almost any game engine
- unique art style, a fusion of the hardcore and what's hip
- lots of room for creativity character and world design
- scalable and tunable
- cool music that emphasizes the unique theme

So yeah! If any of you dig the idea, mess around with it. Does it give you any ideas? What would this game play like if you were to make it?

I think this idea rocks, I love rhythm games, steampunk, and blues!
I remember this idea from illustration and I like it a lot, I wonder if it's doable with the UnrealEngine...?

You should come up with some more for this, I for one would like to see what you have, this would be a lot of fun.

Since I got nothing to do and nothing brewing in my mind I'll try and work up some screenshots and maybe make up some things to help envision your idea a bit better in hopes it will be to your liking.

christmas is over! I am backz0rz and my capitalization and spelling has plummeted to new depths D:

so yeah! I played with the idea of a hybrid rhythm RTS game a bit more in my head over the past week, and actually had a few insights into what could be possible (within a reasonable time frame, I mean), and what sort of rhythmic gameplay would be suited to PC controls. I'll write some of it up later today and post it. I'd still like to hear more from other team members, especially the RTS fans since I haven't played a ton of RTS games lately and would love to see what would be cool in that arena.

any thoughts?

I was thinking it might be a good idea to keep the game light on RTS and rythm aspects. Rather than trying to inject rythm into an RTS I think maybe we could take good, fun aspects of the RTS and rythm genres and fuse them with some more conventional action/adventure.

Maybe something like only 8-10 rats can be controlled at once, and they automatically follow you, so you just take control of some, go where you need to go and give them a command and they follow, this could help to keep the player IN the game and not feel like an observer, which is how I feel when I play most RTS games.

Some good things to check out in terms of simpler RTS games, GrimGrimoire is an excelent game that makes RTS easy, and I've read that FF12: Revenant Wings is a simple RTS as well, but I onlu just got it so I'm not to sure yet.

Anyway, I still love this idea, but it could pose a problem, you mentioned the term steampunk, now I'm going to have some trouble thinking of ideas that are NOT steampunk, I really love steampunk. We should definately have a good design discussion about this game.

RTS ... you guys mean real time strategy right or am I off track :O
EDIT: Damn i had a good idea but iw asn't sure if you guys were talking abt RTS at the time shit shit agughghghgh Dec.27/07

right on the money buddy.