free game idea: Robots vs. Dragons

News & General Discussion
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Here’s an idea I dreamt up last night. I think it’s a great idea, but I have too many of those, so if anybody wants to run with it, feel free!

You play a band of robots inhabiting a 2D vertical-slice world (think Dig Dug or Lemmings). Periodically a dragon comes along, and makes several passes strafing your encampment with dragonfire (because, you know, reasons). So you have to build up your robot colony with defenses and weaponry until you are able to kill the dragon (or drive it away, if we want to be slightly less violent).

Game loop:

  • direct your robots to mine/gather resources, with which you
  • build more buildings, which either provide offensive/defensive value, or enable you to
  • make more/different robots and buildings, or gather/process resources more efficiently.

All this bounded by a larger (3-minute?) cycle of the dragon coming by. Any robots caught outside when the dragon comes by get melted down into little piles of metal (which of course your remaining bots can harvest). If all your robots are melted, it’s game-over.

Initially you’d start out with just 1 robot, on the surface of the ground, with warnings about an incoming dragon. You need to direct that robot to get under cover pretty quickly, or he gets melted and that’s that. Once the dragon leaves you get busy mining, chopping down trees, etc. and building stuff, including robot factories that will let you produce more robots.

So I guess it’s basically an RTS, but a rather different one. If it were me, I’d build it on PixelSurface, with the underground areas stratified into regions of different resources (stone, metals, etc.). Perhaps most of the underground would be hidden, except within some radius of the surface or tunnels you’ve made, so there is an exploration aspect to it. There could also be a water table; once you hit that, you need to use more machinery (pumps etc.) before you can go any deeper.

Meanwhile, the top 1/3 of the screen or so would be surface, where you need to build fortifications, plant and protect trees to replace the ones the dragon has burned down (or you’ve already used), etc. There would need to be plenty of things that have to be on the surface — trees, solar panels, etc. — so that you can’t simply burrow underground and stay there.

Anyway. I’d play it. :slight_smile: But feel free to pick it apart, riff on it for your own ideas, etc. Let’s have some fun with the idea itself, if nothing else!

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Wow - it’s amazing you dreampt all that up. I usually dream about being at work during one of those ‘days that just won’t end’ drudging away at something so tedious I’d rather be digging a hole in clay just to fill in another one. As the day finally begins to end, and I’m lumbering out the door exhausted, to finally be able to go home, rest, spend a little time with family until it’s time to get busy again on development stuff — my alarm goes off! Bam! Time to get up and go to work!

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That’s a very nice little game idea @JoeStrout particularly like how it is very simple and yet has some nice depth to it. It’s like perfectly minimalistic focusing on just the very key elements.

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Sounds like fun.

I really enjoyed Creeper World 2, which was a similar kind of 2D vertical slice strategy game.

I feel like the 2D vertical slice has a lot of strategic potential that hasn’t been fully explored yet.

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Agreed, there were a few classics in the pre-3D days (Lemmings and Worms leap to mind), but I’m certain there is much more that could be done.

There’s something just inherently interesting about working underground, I think.

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Did you ever play any of these?
http://clonk.de/

That’s what I immidiately thought of when you first released your pixelsurface asset.

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Nope, never heard of those! They look pretty cool though. Downloading now.

I see the Clonk line is no longer in development… perhaps that creates a vacuum for some enterprising indy? (EDIT: …Or maybe not.)

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Funny thing is half your design reminded me of Dwarf Fortress more than Dig Dug. The original purpose of Dwarf Fortress was focused on mining out resources by controlling the dwarves directly… and then scope creep happened in a big way.

By the way back when this thread was first started I was tempted to joke about this being one of the best ways to advertise an asset that I’ve seen but I didn’t want to derail the thread before it had actually gotten started. :stuck_out_tongue:

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