Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Back Up Plan

So if I get the vertical slice finished and it seems like its not going to work, this is the back up plan.

I'll have art and UI started, plus everything around the current 2 core mechanics should be able to work independently of each other. So rather than attacking each other's cred with musical recognition, we'll bring out more RPG-ish gameplay elements and have them fight each other with music instead.

In this scenario, players are a musician, tasked with finding talent and forming a band, and then clearing up the streets. Battles are fought in standard RPG fashion, by choosing attacks or magic, etc, but the difference here will be that the choices you make each turn carry on and have an effect on the next turn. Choosing the right move to follow up strengthens  your attack. Repeating the same attack over and over, or switching attacks at the wrong time weakens them. Consider it (intentionally) like forming a song, play the verse, hook into the chorus and then back to the verse.

Similarly, your band mate's attacks layer, creating harmony or discord in addition to their own effects. Your enemies will be doing the same thing, but you can always anticipate their flow and out do them, or even just drown them out with a guitar solo or something.

Naturally, typical RPG classes are replaced with musicians, and they can level and differentiate as they grow. Your drummer starts out just being able to keep a beat, but depending on how you play him/her they could grow into anything from a death metal drummer to a electronica beat programmer. I'm not sure of the exact correlation between standard RPG classes and what I should do here (or even if I should try and aim for standardized classes), but I would base each musician types strengths off of what they really do, i.e. drummers provide the foundation, set the pace and keep things moving. Guitars are at the forefront and do all the attacking and showboating. Singers bring the soul, etc.

So the biggest problem with this is that it's a lot more work than what I'm doing now. I can reuse pretty much all the art assets, but I'd probably have to do a fair amount more. I would also need to look at progression and probably write some kind of narrative as well. The systems involved are a lot more complicated as well, and I'd need to also add some kind of more in depth player progression system (RPG style). I'd also probably need to do some assorted music tracks for background, or even to match the attacks. Also the name would have to change. Probably from SoundsLike to SoundsFight.

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