Awful game ideas.


That game exists, its an old board game, no idea bout the name.
 
I was brainstorming ideas to make gambling style games more legitimate, because I like gambling. I realized gambling lacks a difficulty curve, so how about this: A gambling game where the odds of winning again go down every time you win.

That's right, baby, I've replaced game progression with game regression. What could be more awful than a game that keeps getting worse the more you play it? It'll be hard to top this one.
 
What could be more awful than a game that keeps getting worse the more you play it?
The game of Life. You get pains all over. Your eyesight goes backwards and it can not be recovered.

Anyway, the thing you want is a variation on this game:
 
There was actually a board game "Go for Broke" iirc, where you started as a millionaire and tried to lose it all... Fun game. Loved playing it
 
Oh man, it's been over a year since my last awful game idea...

I just had one while thinking about Nexomon: Extinction. I call it "Wingmon". You collect monsters, but instead of battling them, you use them to help you pick up chicks. Sort of a cross between Pokémon and a dating sim.

Of course it would come in two versions, can't leave the otome fans hanging.
 
I was brainstorming ideas to make gambling style games more legitimate, because I like gambling. I realized gambling lacks a difficulty curve, so how about this: A gambling game where the odds of winning again go down every time you win.

That's right, baby, I've replaced game progression with game regression. What could be more awful than a game that keeps getting worse the more you play it? It'll be hard to top this one.


Whats also fun is a game where you have to predict losing stock market shares.

picking_bad_stocks.png
 
How about "Flagman". You play as a man with a backpack full of flags. Your goal is to put flags on poo. You are in a park where they take out their dogs to do their poo.
Plant the flag too early and a dog may bite you. There are health items, and rocket items so you can fly from one to the other, stamina, so you can run a bit longer (useful to outrun chasing dogs).
Each level has a target amount of flagged poo's and later levels bring in a zoo of animals, that all behave differently.
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This game is called "nuclear". It's multiplayer. You start with 0 points. Each second each player gets an additional point. The first one that presses the button ends the game, but all the points collected by all the players go to them.
So if there are 50 players, then waiting 1 more second gives you 50 more points if you press the button first. Too early, you get less points, too late you get nothing (because someone else pressed it already).

edit(months later): A different game mode: The game remembers the last time you pressed the button, you can press the button only after the same time passed. So:
Game 1. Player A presses the button after 5 seconds.
Game 2. You need to wait until 5 seconds pass, then anyone can press the button. Press too soon, and not only will it not give you a win, you get a 3 second penalty where you can not press again AND other players will see you pressed already.
 
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Frogger RPG. You are frogger, the frog. But you have a backpack and inventory, and you climb a mountain and get XP. You need to level up your magic to cross/destroy walls to continue. There are a lot on NPC's that want to talk to you, or sell you things. But all you need to do it get to the top. Halfway the game, if you pick up the clues, it is revealed that there is no ending and you can never reach the top.... because.... magic.
Before you quit the game in anger, a screenshot is shown of a frozen frog on the top of the mountain.

There are a few sidequests, like collecting fireflies(with your tongue) (which you can only do if you have a jar, for which you have to do another quest). The sidequest is offered to you by a crying girl with a broken jar.
To get a jar, you need to find a bonsai kitten. For that, you need to find a workplace to craft a rope (if you have collected the materials) and ride a boar like it was a horse. all things to distract you from the main goal.
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You have the nightshift at the SCP facility. Your job is to feed each contained entity. The manual is hard to read. The creatures are hungry. Don't feed them the wrong thing.
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pacman platformer. You are pacman, but this is a platformer. You get upgrades to shoot lazers.
 
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Don't break my pots! (Zelda meets defend the tower)
You own a pottery. Link is near your Pottery. You get 60 seconds to place your pots in a dungeon, and protect them with arrow shooting walls, pitfalls, baddies, and what not that roams in dungeons. After your time is up, a few links find your dungeon. Try to at least have 1 unbroken pot when all Links are dead, or it's game over.

edit: higher levels have more Link's, but also longer dungeons
 
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This game is called "nuclear". It's multiplayer. You start with 0 points. Each second each player gets an additional point. The first one that presses the button ends the game, but all the points collected by all the players go to them.
Not a bad concept except that there needs to be a reason to drive the score/time higher. Otherwise I'd just mash the button at the first score. It's be low, but always in the lead
 
Not a bad concept except that there needs to be a reason to drive the score/time higher. Otherwise I'd just mash the button at the first score. It's be low, but always in the lead
Time penalties? Winner gets 100ms delay added (or something proportional to waiting time, so, if you press after 1 seconds, you get a 5 seconds delay, but if all the players wait 60 seconds, and only then the winner takes all, then the time penalty is minimal).
Losers slowly get 50 ms less delay each time, so the penalty is not permanent.

Or winner can not win anymore.

Or: The game takes always 30 seconds. You have no idea if others pressed the button already. Press too early: get less points. Press too late, you are n-th winner, and the points you get are proportional lower.
I think this one is the most balanced: Here you get n-1 points. Play alone: zero points each time. Play with 2: winner gets 1 point. Play with 12: Winner gets 11 points, runner-up gets 10 points.... the last one gets zero points. Best out of $X games gets an avatar item as price.
 
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The game takes always 30 seconds. You have no idea if others pressed the button already. Press too early: get less points. Press too late, you are n-th winner, and the points you get are proportional lower.
Yeah, that's not actually that bad an idea. Would fit in quite well as a Pyra Panic minigame (if somebody actually makes one)
 
Now that ED has tweeted that Pyra is still on track to ship in the next three weeks, I'm kinda thinking about taking up development again. I might get sabotaged, but I can cross that bridge when I get to it. I'm not gonna use git this time, as that's more for collaboration than file hosting. I don't really feel like collaborating.

My only problem now is that I haven't settled on an awful game idea to use. I was thinking about making a sort of life sim where you challenge in-game characters to matches everyday. I was gonna make the outcome of the matches random, but I don't want every character to just regress to a mean of 50%, so I'd let the player assign power levels to each character they create, and also have things like daily power level modifiers.

Of course, not being a fan of waiting or time stress, I'd let the player decide when each day ends.
 
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git is actually not just about collaboration, which is nice, but about how to organize the flow of development. any version control system (git, hg, etc.) can help you manage making changes and avoid going down the hole of a breaking change that you don't know how to repair. this is not something i fully appreciated until working for a software company, where i started to see how to break down changes to my code in more manageable chunks (iterative development). i have a few non-git code projects where i started making a sweeping change, but never finished, and now i've forgotten what still needs to change, so it doesn't even compile anymore. git can help you roll back to a working state (as long as you've been committing changes along the way), and also helps you see what changes you've made so far.
 
That's true, but it's perhaps that promise that's got me to states where the project is in between diffs. I experimented with my multiprocessing lib by adding threads to monitor the queues so that you didn't have to do it youself in between your own processing, but even being careful with locks I still ended up with something that seemed to enter race conditions more often than I'd like at all. So I rolled it back, but at the same time I'd been improving the documentation, and trying to backport all those diffs to the docs just made it too much like hard work. It shouldn't be too hard to go back to now, but I've not felt the inspiration yet. The other project seems to have died because of a change in the environement, or at least that's the only thing I can narrow it down to. The code hasn't changed, but now it does one little thing then stops. That's also a mutliprocessing project, the one that inspired the lib I'm talking about above. I need to flex the debugger on it, or at the very least instrument the message queues to figure out where it's not talking right.
 
Being able to rollback code is nice, but can't that be achieved by maintaining two separate folders on your own system? Which I remember having to do when using git anyway, so that I would only upload completed changes.
 
You can do that relatively easy using temporary branches in git. That to my mind is the only real benefit that git has over hg as an RCS, although the real reason I settled on using git was because it's easier to get your stuff published if you use git versus using hg. Which reminds me, git is also less precious about retaining history; git allowed be to go back and change my recorded email address, which I don't think is supported by hg.
 
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