GREEPING NET'S GAME IDEAS: PAST, PRESENT, MAYBE FUTURE? My Strange Ideas & Attempts at Ideas using BASIC, AGS, OHRRPGCE, CIA, and a ton of other game "engines" |
Since I was a kid and saw a screenshot of the unreleased "Lord of the Rings" game from Parker Bros. in some kind of Parker Brothers Atari 2600 game catalog, I wanted to get into game development. Thing is, I'm great at art, later at music, but I SUCK at programming for the most part. I'm basically, for all intents and purposes, a hacker, and not a real programmer. Maybe it was not studying calculus/algebra properly, maybe it was the fact that I never had a desire to get into programming, maybe it was my fear of being called a "nerd" back in high school....any one of those things, but I did get some ideas going. So here's where some of my ideas came from.
CreepingNet's Insane Game Ideas 1997-present - Stuff I actually Built (or attempted to) High School Cheerleader Rescue ~ BASIC, 1997 ~ This was my first attempt to program a text adventure when I was like, I dunno, 15. I would get tired of playing DOS Games at night and then turn to Advanced BASIC for the Tandy 1000, and write the most obnoxious, non-sequiteur mess of spaghetti code mostly using if/then/or statements for just about everything! The basic plot of HSCR was that you were some nameless teenage guy who was supposed to have a date night with his girlfriend, and somehow, not very well outlined, you find yourself at the high school on a rainy night - and you have to find your way to the boiler room to fight a tentacle monster via puzzles to save your girlfriend from this otherwise backstory-less tentacle monster. The thing had the cohesiveness of a Chargeman Ken Anime episode, and even included a few obnoxious easter-eggs showing rampant abuse of the screen-mode function (which would have limited this to the Tandy 1000 series anyway). The school was a over-simplified and very lightly modified rip-off of Opelika Middle School actually, lol. Even the Band Room and Auditorium was in the same place. There was also a lot of bizzare teenaged humor in there that I'd probably find cringey now. I'd make later attempts. Mike Quest (2001) ~ (AGS, 2001) - This was the original 16-color version drawn in Microsoft paint for windows 3.1 that I showed nobody. Basically, it was more of a "tech demo" than a graphical adventure game, and it looked alright, but I think this was where I really started to realize I needed better artwork tools (something that ran in mode 13) to make a game like Iw anted to see. Mike Quest (Attempt 2, 2002) ~ (AGS, 2002) - This was probably the most memorable early idea I worked on. It was VERY ambitious. Basically, I based portions of my plot on things I'd dreamt up while asleep. The story was based around my childhood arch nemesis from my nightmares - Mr. Flower, a ghost/ghoul/demon/boogeyman that floats 3" off the floor, has pale white skin and yellow eyes, lots of warts, and torments people through their dreams by converting them into nightmares. He also can travel through television sets in your dreams, unless they are newer models. So basically, he was the antagonist, me and a few characters based around people I knew mostly, were the protagonists, and we had a lot of various side characters, a lot of which were made up. The Key to Surreality (2003) ~ (AGS, 2003) - Tired of trying my own ego-centric ideas, or so someone else put it (I think it was my mom), I was having a little too much fun in Graf-X II in DOS one night and had a crazy idea to make a game that was totally sci-fi and disjoined (and not to mention based on obnoxious and rampant abuse of various Graf-X II graphics functions). I only ever started on it in 03', and kinda' gave up on it in 05'. It also lead to some experiments in PIX and Image Processor to create something more interesting. It was basically an attempt to excuse me making abstract art and using it as scenery ina video game. Mike Quest (version 3, 2005) ~ AGS ~ This was really the final version of Mike Quest which instead moved the protagonist's age up into my mid 20's and changed his lifestyle into a guy living in a house alone, tormented by his childhood boogeyman using a multiverse idea in it's execution where when he goes to sleep, his house becomes a errie hellhole. And eventually, he traces the issues into the abandoned underground of the crappy little town he moved into. Corporate Warfare (2009, AGS) ~ AGS ~ This one still exists and I've been picking away at it for, oh, I dunno, about 12 years now. The premise is that you are Jeremy, a down on his luck ex-husband, estranged father, and failed worker bee in the American business system. One morning you wake up next to the company that f***ed you over and an opportunity presents for him to seek out his revenge, when a disgrungled parking garage attendant throws his uniform away in the garbage can next to his one-man homeless encampment next to the former business - Waterstone & Egress. The game is a point' n' click graphical adventure where you perform every awful thing you can in a company to solve puzzles, and ultimatley take down (and take over) the company. These include acts such as altering a stolen access card, exploiting exploited VISA workers, exploiting acts of corporate espionage against another competitor, and of course, engaging the golden parachute. Mr. Flowers (2015) ~ AGS ~ Inspired by Five Nights at Freddy's, I decided to come up with a point n' click graphical adventure crossed with survival horror. Basically, I retooled the whole "Mike Quest" idea now to revolve around someone else - Evan Earwig, son of Eldon Earwig, whose brother, Ernie Earwig used to own a Television repair shop in the 1980's, and had to close it due to paranomal activities. However, he needs a new night watchman to watch over the store (to prevent urbexers from getting killed by the possessed electronics), and reluctantly gives Eldon's son Evan a job there as a disciplinary measure. Except Evan has his own ideas of moving away with the money he's earning. So you have to survive a week at Ernie's TV Repair to earn bus fare to run away from home. Mr. Flower's II: The Tower of Terrors (2016) ~ AGS ~ another idea adapted from the Defunct Mike Quest. One weekend, Ernie employs the homeless guy from the first game to help him put the TV's back into the basement and cement over it, so he no longer needs a night watchman for the store. While loading TV's into the basement, the guy has an accident and ends up in some demented version of Dark Land from "Running Guy 3" - Mr. Flower's very own demented (and deadly) 8-bit Video Game, where you now must navigate every demented area of this patchy island in hell to get home - via the Tower of Terrors - a 900 foot tall television antenna and portal between the dream world, and the real world. Purgatory (2016) ~ AGS ~ An interesting and spiritual point'n'click graphical adventure where you get to play as someone who just died, and now is cast into the Desert of Sin - a deserted wasteland with various "Oasis" based on the seven deadly sins. You must properly navigate them to get the good ending, or indulge in your human wanton self-destructive habits to get the bad one. Five Nights at Freddy's 486 (2016) ~ AGS ~ A Five Nights at Freddy's game that runs on a 486 using the Adventure Game Studio game engine. Now based in a new location, in the same fictional place all my games at the time took place in, you play as a night watchman hired to watch over the local Freddy Fazbear's Pizza chain #486 (built in April 1986) only to find yes, here too, we have possessed Animatronics from a great slaughter at a 6 year old's birthday party on opening day. This location is particularly special because it's the last location to feature Fredbear along side Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica, and features probably the most threatening version of Foxy ever devices - so threatening, I never finished drawing the sprites! Tony Hollandaise: Private Eye for Crivate Eye! (2017) ~ AGS ~ a point' n' click parody of 1940's private investigator dramas that literally clicks every single stereotype. Play as Tony Hollandaise as he helps a rich if somewhat mysterious Dame Broad from potential murder and life insurance fraud in the Black & White world of the 1940's. Enjoy such normal 1940's activities such as chain smoking while drinking scotch at jazz clubs to find stool pidgeons, roughing up transients and gangsters, driving around in cars that look like slugs, or solving crime in a time when the word "Color pallet" did not exist yet! The game was intended to be all in black and white, and a rampant excuse for me to use "Joisey" and "mid-atlantic" accents in the "talkie" version. A game so 40's, you'll pull a rabbit outta' your butt! Sol's Quest for S*icide (2017) ~ AGS ~ During a dark time in my life I started coming up with a game that sorta' sympathized with the life of a modern day nice guy living in a metropolitan era. Meet Sol, newly fired, newly dumped, can't make his rent, or his bills, and now he has one idea - to take his own life - however every attempt he makes through the game, leads him down another adventure as the world tries to stop him. Eventually leading ot a surprising ending. Corporate Warfare II (2017) ~ AGS ~ You play as Jeremy's brother who is down on his luck and has been homeless since about age 18. He has to get out of a haunted church doing various shitty chores like cleaning the toilets, scrubbing the clergy's quarters, and picking up Minister Dreadnaught's porno messes. Follow Jeff through multiple businesses in the town, as he screws up his way to the top to join his brother at Waterstone and Egress (new branding pending). Razzle Cat's Seafood (2018) ~ AGS ~ Tired of being strictly tethered to Scott Cawthon's franchise for the idea for a survival horror game in the FNaF vein, I decided to try and make, instead, a rival franchise in Devil's Lick Nevada - where the Murderock lore took place - in the form of Razzle Cat's Seafood, a children's entertainment resturant based in Devil's Lick,a nd favorite of Mikey Ferox as a kid. This was to explain the lore of the mask I Wore as that character. Same sorta deal, survive the night, animatronics out to kill you, yadda yadda, just with some original characters. Ferox (2018) ~ AGS ~ While in the band, I also thought about making a graphical adventure about my character's backstory. Basically, you play as Mikey Ferox, a orphaned kid who was treated like the black sheep of the Ferox family, and later abandoned by the family when they started heading to Reno. I never actually drew any scenes or began programming on it, I was just too busy with life to get any deeper into it. Cat Quest (2019) ~ OHRRPGCE ~ This was the first OHRRPGCE game I started creating. Cat Quest was a Dragon-Quest-Alike (Dragon Warrior) style RPG that would feature CATS for all the kingdom's characters. Dragon Quest for DOS (2019) ~ OHRRPGCE/Game Maker ~ Later I had an idea to try porting something I knew well to DOS using OHRRPGCE - Dragon Quest - the original 1986 JPRG, but I never completed it. IIRC, I worked on this on the GEM 286 in it's final years with me. Some Kinda' New Pong Game (2020) ~ GAME MAKER ~ I've been poking at this in RS-Gamemaker for awhile. Basically, it's just an industrial themed version of Pong with some additional fun bits added to it to make it look more awesome, and less like a 1970's video gaming relic. I figured I'd start at the beginning instead by trying to make this idea work and flesh it out. However, I don't think it ever completed. Dragon Quest I-IV + Classic 1 & 2 for DOS (2021) ~ BASIC, x86 ASM, or C++ ~ Another idea I had for porting Dragon Quest, would be just to make a straight up DOS version compatible with the intel 8088 on up. Attack noises could come from the internal speaker, and then music could be supported on all platforms from Gameblaster/Tandy on up. Cool ideas were to add hotkeys, support VGA graphics that looked better than the NES color pallet, allow for enhanced tilesets (ie II/III/IV) in the earlier games (using the NES tile sets), and maybe even support for clicking on the commands with a mouse. BACKROOMS ~ BATARI BASIC or 6502 Assembly ~ I was just thinking about Atari games at one point and had this idea.....what if we created an Atari 2600 game that just randomly generated rooms and spawned the same random enemies randomly over and over again. Think about it - a game with it's own simple algorithm that draws background graphics where anything yellow is impassable, and anything gray or beigey is passable! And maybe even take this same algorithm, and add it to different color pallets! Leave some odd, or even RANDOM button/joystick combination to "no-clip" and leave it non-documented in the manual. Maybe put in a timer for how long you'll last in the backrooms before either dying or no-clipping to the frontrooms! It could be VERY Similiar to Adventure - but instead of finding some object in some lost castle somewhere, maybe instead, the goal is to exit into reality. |