Metroid Prime Meets Quake... Sort of.
The Above pic is from the indie game "In the Kingdom." An artstyle like that but a bit less minimalist would ideally be what I'm aiming for.
So I have this idea about a game. It essentially came from the fact that there are a ton of Metroid clones, but no Metroid Prime clones. Metroid Prime is an amazing game, but I don't think the games fully explored what could be done.
On an unrelated day, I was thinking about the evolution of first person games, and thought about how cool it would be if those influenced the powerups. For instance, the game starts out with your character badly injured. They need to find something to treat the wound, but until then, all they have are some strong painkillers. While on these and injured, the game plays out like a Tile-Based dungeon crawler.
In this section, I think it could also be cool if you don't have a weapon. Enemies move when you do and in a set pattern, so it ends up playing like first person hitman go. You eventually get your first weapon and heal up so the game switches to a Half Life-esque shooter aqnd you can come back and murder mofos.
To begin with though, you move at an average modern first person shooter pace, but eventually you gain the ability to move as fast as you do in games like Painkiller or Doom - maybe even implementing mechanics like strafe jumping, bunnyhopping, and rocket jumping to get to areas you couldn't before.
Naturally, I'd crib some things from Dark Souls, because, you know, I'm me. I'd steal the checkpoint system and the vertical world design. I'd maybe even implement a health system along the lines of the estus flask system so I could balance the game around knowing how much health the player should have in a given area without resorting to Regenerating Health. Fuck Regenerating health.
I want things like Health and damage upgrades, but I want the game to be doable without them. I want atacks to be mostly projectile based or melee, so they can be easily damaged, and I want bosses to attack to the rythm of the music playing.
My ideal art style would be a mix of gothic horror and science fiction. I'd like to use a similar colour palatte to the first Devil May Cry - Lots of greys, blacks, and reds. There'd be a bit of quake in there, and I'd love to make it either a 2.5d-ish pixel art game ala Build Engine games or something more along the lines of quake 1 with simplistic textures and whatnot but with more colours.
Storywise, I'd merge Metroid Prime and Dark Souls: Very few to no cutscenes, with some minor exposition delivered via a small amount of NPCs that move about the world. I'd totally crib the Scanner from Metroid Prime, because every game should have that.
Weapons I could use:
-Stake gun like whats in FEAR and Painkiller.
-A shotgun that sounds as meaty as the one in Brutal Doom. Best shotgun ever.
-A rocket launcher. Duh.
- A gun that shoots saw blades, because Ravenholm.
-A circular saw could be the melee weapon because High Tension. Could also be used to cut through bars in prison area.
The game should be gory. I want gibs. ALL THE GIBS!
Yeah... the game is fucking ambitious and I'll probably never make it, but there's my idea.
My Super Metroid Clone
I thought about how I'd never make it and then thought about making a 2D Metroidvania that could serve as a predecessor to the Metroid Prime game. Like my other idea, it would be kind genre bending.
Again, I'd go with a somewhat horror aesthetic, and due to this, I'd crib some elements from the 2D Oddworld games. More specifically, the chase sequences. If you've played those games, you'd probably remember the super harrowing sections where a Scrab, Paramite, or Slog would relentlessly chase you, and you'd have to do platforming and solve puzzles quickly in order to prevail. Again, I'd have these sections at the beginning and have you be defenseless.
I'd also steal the way that game handles stealth, with a bit of fine tuning of course. In the early sections, enemies will kill you in one hit. This makes stealth tense. When you get your weapon though, I still want one hit kills, at least for a little bit. To balance this out, I'd have a 1 or 2 second window where a laser sight is pointed at the player character and shown to be charging. That way, to survive, you either have to kill them before they kill you, or get into cover before they fire.
Even when you get your first weapon though, I want there to be enemies that are still invincible or very hard to kill - at least until you get your another, better weapon.
I want the player to feel vulnerable, but I want to counter that vulnerability with moments of immense power. For instance, those enemies giving you trouble in the stealth section? When you get your gun, you get a chance to turn the tables. Having trouble taking on multiple enemies? I'd have a section where you ride an alien life form and just destroy everything in your path for a little bit, similar to the end section of Inside. Abe's Exoddus did this really well, for example the bit where you ran over sligs in your fucking mine car:
I also want the powerups in the game to serve multiple purposes. For instance, I want one ability to be an AoE damage spell. Since this is a projectile based game, with later areas verging on bullet hell, I also want said AoE to clear the screen of bullets to give the player a breather. Ideally, every ability you get that is tied to progression should also be useful in combat.
Again, I'd love to make boss attack patterns tie into the music.
I might actually try to make this game one day.
(WonderBoy)
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