Think someone is going to steal your game idea? Well, you’re wrong, and to prove it, this week, I’m posting all of my favorite ideas that I want to make games out of.
Today, I’ll tell you about Guys! Stop Pressing Buttons!
Here’s a familiar situation: You’ve got a bunch of people over, conversation is bubbling along, lots of noise, lots of chaos, typical party atmosphere. Suddenly, someone notices your Rock Hero drums and blurts out, “DUDE! Let’s play Rock Hero!”
You, your blurting friend, and two other people head over to the GamexBox and hook up the instruments. You have lots of experience with the game, you play on Expert, baby, but none of the others have played before.
You go to work getting the game set up, signing everyone in, helping people choose avatars, and ten minutes later, just as you’ve found the perfect song and are about to press start, some innocent novice, trying to familiarize himself with his guitar, presses a button and resets the whole thing.
You exhale. You get over it. You set it all back up, and then your drummer, feeling restless, hits the red pad. Twenty minutes have passed. It happens again. And again. And again. And you snap and people start getting hurt.
I call it… Guys! Stop Pressing Buttons!
At its core, G!SPB! is a game of multitasking. Your objective is to set up a game of Rock Hero under the constant threat of your numskull friends hitting a button and making you start over. You do this by juggling two tasks:
Setting up the game — This is done through a string of microgames asking you to do such things as plug in controllers, sign in players, choose avatars, find specific songs, add Nanosoft points, buy DLC, answer instant messages, decline friend requests, switch to 1080p, turn on the surround sound, calibrate the audio delay, and so on. These can be more abstract things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with rhythm games, but the more of these little “Hahahaha, I’ve done that before!” moments we can create for the player, the more fun and hilarious it’ll be.
Keeping your friends from pressing buttons — While you’re focussed on the microgames, your friends are growing impatient and, over time, become more likely to accidentally hit a button to mess you up. The only way to stop them is to look away from the game setup so you can walk over and attack them, side-scrolling beat ‘em up style. But you get more points the quicker you finish setting the game up, so there’s an incentive to hold off on attacking your friends for as long as possible, adding lots of tension to the game.
As you play, you earn upgrade points (money, XP, whatever works) that you use to buy new skills and powers. Things like stun spells, stronger attacks, smarter friends, more time during the microgames, etc. Your friends get better at playing Rock Hero over time, as well, eventually to the point where you can enter Rock Hero competitions to win money and fame!
Coming 2012 for iPhone, iPad, and hey who knows what else! Something with a controller, perhaps?
Ha! A game where the whole mechanic is just trying to accomplish a mundane task — since the entry of nanny-themed time-management games, I guess everything is now considered fair game (pun intended) — but I like the twist of it being trying to play a game that you’re trying to accomplish in the game.
Reminds me of an idea I had for a game awhile ago where you have ti feed your player-character the right foods at the right times so that s/he doesn’t get diarrhea (from too much fiber) or constipated (from too little). It’d probably be popular with that demographic of women over age 40 who play the hell out of so-called “casual games” nowadays.
TMI: Part of what gave me the idea was …well, let’s just say my fiancee has IBS & leave it at that.
I personally don’t want to actually make that game. Any more than anyone who actually worked as a nanny would want to play a nanny-themed time-management game, I’d imagine.
By the way, I wasn’t just trying to make a snide, sarcastic, subtle suggestion that your game-about-trying-to-play-a-game was shitty. Though if I’d wanted to do that, the Oh Crap! game concept comment would’ve been a great way to do it. Unfortunately, I really did have that idea come to me as a game.
It’s free for the taking. Steal my idea, please — preferably taking all memory of it from my mind…
Nannys go home and play office manager games.
Office managers go home and play nanny games.
Students go home and play MineCraft.