The basic must have thing as a game designer are cool game ideas and I would like to present you some of mine here in this blog. On the on hand I can train to write my ideas down in a way other people who are not familiar with my thinking can understand them and on the other hand you can then criticize them as much as possible. These both aspects are very important, you have to work with others in a team in order to create games and so they need to understand your vision which is just achievable by telling them in a proper way. But if you tell somebody your thought you must be ready to accept comments and criticism both are very important for you because you can use them to improve your ideas. No matter how they sound to you, there is always space for improvements and sometimes you need other people to point that out for you.
I think I will present some of them in post starting with "Wouldn't it be cool.." because, well I hope it would be cool if those ideas could be become games.
Let's start with the first one: Since I played
World of Warcraft a lot, I mean really quite some time, it always fascinated me who addictive this game could be. I think it was the progression you character made by getting leveling up and later getting new equipment together with friends was the secret. Because of that I thought how you could adapt this to the new big trend in the gaming industry, the social games.
The social dungeon crawler
Technology: 2D, isometric view
Gameplay: Basically it is a dungeon run game, where you can go to different dungeons with a groups of your friends. In the dungeons the monster would drop coins, armor, weapons and so on so that you get better equipment with every dungeon run. Also you gain experience with takes you to new levels and unlocks new, more dangerous dungeons. Of course the quality of the loot depends on the level of the dungeon. Players can choose for every character a base class like warrior , ranger or mage and specialize with every level. While this all is kinda basic stuff and there are many games which have those features I like to concentrate on the social aspect of the game. In the really good dungeons you can just go with a group from 3 to 5 people so you need to gather your friends. If you have you would automatically join a voice chat when entering the dungeon the exchange and make tactics and so on because the harder dungeon would require more than just basic hit and run. Of course you also can trade your loot with your friends so it's basically a simple World of Warcraft for Facebook.
Story: It's fantasy themed, so most of the dungeons would try to tell a story about a villain or be part of a larger quest to save a kidnapped child or stuff like this.
In the next post of this series I will explain why I have choose to split it each idea into these three categories (technology, gameplay, story) of course together with the next game.