Character Selection Screen

So I've knocked up a character selection screen that, currently is rather devoid of any art work. It's failry simple, uses an array which the player can flick through, each character (currently a whole 2) then display an image of the character (which is currently a placeholder) and more importantly a series of statistics relating to the character at the side. These include the basics such as speed of movement, health and energy replenishment and strength for pushing enemies aside. This is followed by the 3 types of attack and evade, and their relevant statistics, so the player can move through character selection and view the differing statistics for comparison.

I have since changed the buttons to something less awful using a bitmap array and text.

Having finally dispensed with DirectX 9.0c in favour of DX11 and OpenGL, I set about converting some of my custom shaders with ... not particular success.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that isn't supposed to look like that ... This appears to have something to do with hardware skinning being controlled by the GPU when previously it was the CPU. As this only affects a few things I have come up with some workarounds for the fancy custom materials and will come back to this at a later date.

I've also had more of a play around with my XP-Pen display tablet and started to become familiar with the artist app Krita. I am planning on using this for the 2D art in game, and especially the selection screen for character portraits.

Drawing of an old oil painting I did some time years ago.

I also thought about reworking the artwork for Airship Dragoon, and knocked up a colour sketch idea for composition. Might not actually replace the original artwork but could use a new one for Steam's new capsule formats for updates - then again I could go the whole hog and use it for complete new rebranding.

 

I also did a whole load more stuff this month but can't actually remember what it was ...

 

Anyhow, onwards and upwards ...

Lurgy, Ninja Type Dudes, Parallax, Fat Assed Robots and Cat Ears

Last month was all about tentacles. A swarm of tentacles is a fairly big thing, that acts as a movable barrier which can corner an unwary player and slap the hell out of them. One thing that I noticed was that they can turn on a dime, effortless switching direction, which for a big unit looks rather odd. See video below:

Testing Terrifying Tentacles!

So I went off hunting through the movement and aiming code to make the AI use a system similar to the player for rotations. Initially I spent all my time looking in completely the wrong place ... something which seems to happen a lot ... before finding the correct file class and adding a delay that could be set via the objects datablock. This way, small, nimble enemies can turn faster, and hulking great things like tentacles a lot slower.

 Turn Speed; fast, medium and slow

Of course things couldn't just be simple and I quickly realized that my entire AI attack routine was designed around the length of each enemies attack animation - and very few enemies share that data. So an enemy would turn to face the player head on, then start their attack animation and then ... well the player was miles away and out of range. To prevent this obvious pause in starting their attacks I had to write a little snippet of code that took each AI types turn speed, angle required to turn and time to swing at the player into account to make sure that when they landed their blow, it would be at the optimum moment to actually hit their target.

All whilst I was attempting all of this fancy maths malarkey, I was riddled with the vile pox of the lurgy, with puss and ooze coming out of all corners because it's winter and stuff.
 

Being ill really hampers your ability to into 3D vector math ...

This brings me on to modelling the last standard enemy for the game. I still have all the bosses to do (cries into hanky), but the game's rank and file enemies are not complete. Having come up with a rather interesting shader of floaty goo a bit like a lava lamp, I settled on a spear wielding opponent that looked a bit Ninja-ish and called, for want of a better description, the Shadow Sprite. I added that triple eye motif that I see in a lot of Japanese stuff as a signifier of Buddhist mysticism - like that guy with the flour bag on his head with the triple eye motif on it for ... I don't know ... reasons I guess. Having a spear gives a longer than usual range melee attack but also has a narrower angle. Cue me having to go back create new code dealing with attack radius ... radiuses? radius's? radii?

Shadow Sprite surprise!

With the final mob enemy for level 10 completed I set about testing "extended play" aka "endless mode" and found that the difficulty level ramp up quite nicely so didn't really have to tweak my challenge code. I also added a visual effect for deceased radioactive enemies to make it more obvious to the player that there is danger. Some of the enemies spawn as "elites" of various kinds and radiation is one of these. Now when I radioactive enemy is killed they leave a warning sign that that area will cause damage if the player enters it. This only lasts for three seconds.

"Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year! They oughta have 'em, too." - Repo Man, dir. Alex Cox, 1984

Having a break from modelling I had a look at how the PBR branch on github was doing. Rendering really isn't my thing and material systems probably even less, so I just nodded a lot ...

No idea what's going on but debugging does look pretty

Having spent rather a long time on animation and characters and the like, I went back to trying to remember the work-flow for materials and in particular parallax. I found that a rather enormous 12.7mb 2K normal map texture with a heightmap in the alpha channel didn't seem to have much better quality over half the size which only weighed in at 2.4mb, which is quite the saving for VRAM.

2048px 12.7mb top, 1024px 2.4mb bottom. I can live with that.

Finally I got round to thinking about the yellow placeholder cube, who has represented the player for nth years of development. Filled with horror at the thought of actually having to paint armature weights and rig a character from scratch I booted up the medically resourced makeHuman with the intention of exporting a basic mesh character to work on in Blender. I quickly found that COLLADA export is not that friendly to bone angles with everything defaulting to just one direction rather than following the skeleton, but FBX preserved the bones correctly.

As a test, I had a play about with the sliders to see if I could make a physical match for the 2B model from Nier Automata. Surprisingly only the pinched waist being beyond the standard sliders from the model silhouette I was working from, and the only maxed out sliders were the butt ... which is kinda understandable, considering this is the robot with the highest polygon count arse in gaming.

 All the polys ...

 When you spend all the VRAM on polygons for the robots butt, and can't afford HD textures on the scenery ...

Anyhow, I gave the proportions I wanted to my base mesh, learnt a bit about exporting and then started customising it in Blender. I've started off with a fairly high poly mesh until I decide on what I actually want so that the high and low poly versions will (hopefully) look the same.

I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking cat ears into just the right angle even though I am fairly sure it doesn't matter, but hey OCD and all that ...

So, that's a start on a base model for the player. The idea is to have a high poly model for intro and cut scenes, as well as an animated "Doom" style bust view in the GUI where placeholder banana currently is. However I do kind of think that it might be a bit small for an animated character to be pulling faces from. Once I finalise what the character needs to look like from the rather hazy description I have in my head and multiple character types required, I'll start on the low poly version that will actually be in the centre of the screen, under the player's control.

February has ended and it is officially Meteorological Spring.

World Building Test And The Secret Of Grass

Onwards to world building. I had decided to dispense with the stock terrain and foliage systems, and instead thought of constructing each level out of custom meshes.
With the game's perspective being topdown/high-isometric, I had decided that polycount would not be much of an issue for the whole thing to run smoothly, as not too much of the game world would ever be visible at any one time. I intend to tonemap all of the world geometry with third-party app pureLight, though I've also used Blender to do this previously, and then set the in-game lighting to incorporate lightmaps, so that the diffuse/albedo map is influenced by the tonemap but the normal/specular maps are altered by the dynamic lighting.

Before I could getting cracking on world building, there was the small issue of coming up with a functioning work process, as well as load testing, and the awkward issue of how to get grass to animate without using the forestObject's moving foliage shaders. Players love stuff on screen, and if there's one thing they love more than stuff on screen it's moving stuff on screen.

How do I into grass?

First up, basic construction testing. I decided on a 10x10 mesh with multiple textures of grass, dirt, and rock - 1 drawcall per material. I was not particularly bothered about polycount for testing so there's a lot more geometry than needed. I wanted to create a few islands of grass and rock to make it look more interesting. Specular was initially somewhat overkill and really needed toning down to almost off, but just enough to create some very slight highlights. I modeled the mesh for some physical depth, raising grass and rock layers.

Not bad for a start but the edges of the grass and dirt were a little hard. Of course in real life, grass and dirt don't just fade into one another, but in video games things look odd without blending. I tried various levels of blends but found that just 2 worked fine for what I wanted. Spreading the blend over a metre seemed enough distance  to break up the harshness of the change from dirt to grass.

Satisfied with how modeling was going I moved on to grass and immediately hit problems. I found a grass image to use as a placeholder and covered the grass terrain texture in a couple of thousand planes for testing. With the game's high viewpoint, having straight polys looked bad, so I set about dividing the meshes and bending them over at an angle so everything leaned and tilted. Polys facing directly away from the main lightsource had some strange and frankly annoying blackness to their planes. Using an emissive material solved this - but then everything looked like a uniformed colour and became just an amorphous mass. Adding subscattering to the shadows helped to ease the harsh blackness of the polys but it still didn't appear as though they were being properly illuminated.

So off I went on an intrepid quest to find out what the hell was going wrong via insert-your-favourite-internet-search-engine-here. Normals were the problem. Foliage normals apparently need to point up to receive proper lighting. But alas the ancient 2.44 version of Blender from 2007 which I still use - because ... convenience - cannot into normal editing - however the new 2.76 version can. Luckily most of the hotkeys seem to be the same so it wasn't too difficult to pick up, and normal editing itself is just a modifier.

Goodbye horrible black stuff ruining the aesthetics of my foliage

I had decided that making an animated texture for moving grass would give the look I desired with very low overhead. I had created a huge level with over 9000 meshes for load testing, and just to see how bad it would be,  I used bone animation to move the grass polys and the framerate immdiately died to around 20 fps. So, just as expected then, back to animated textures.

I created a high poly grass mesh in Blender based on this little gem found on the internet (http://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=18#p53), and then animated it using multiple bones, and rendered out the frames. I tried various frame numbers and speeds, and it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the more frames an animation has, the better it looks, so I settled on 32 frames. I found that the grass didn't really need much movement in the animation, and in fact looked better with less, rather than wildly thrashing about with higher movement. The renders also scaled nicely. Originally taken at 256 pixels, it gave a rather terrifying size of 8192 pixels, way more than older GPUs would want to cope with. It could be reduced via "nearest neighbour" to prevent blurring to 64x2048 and still look good.

One thing which I had noticed was an annoying uniformity of movement in the animation which gave an unpleasant  "swelling" effect. Setting different planes to different parts of the UV map meant that they played different parts of the animation and helped break up the regularity. I also decided to create multiple animations based on differing meshes and combine them all into a single atlas/mega texture. I ended up with 1 thick grass render with lots of grass stalks, a thinner medium one, and 2 thin small ones. I then combined the 2 small ones to be anew  medium one, and finally added the other medium to create a new thick mesh. All in all, this gave meanimations for 6 different sized grass clumps to help combat the sameness of just one animated texture. Combined together on a single 2048 pixel image, there was plenty of space for further cosmetic variations such as colour, lightness/darkness, saturation changes and the sort.
I had a little play around with alpha reference to see the difference have thick to thin grass made.

Quite happy with conquering the secrets of grass I moved on to load bearing. I had previously created a 1 kilometre level, filling it 10,300 copies of the mesh. Viewed in it's totality it was 119 million polys, 124,000 drawcalls and a mspf of 666.667 - which gave me a sudden urge to play Iron Maiden's greatest hits. However, even close in the result was 40 million polys and 5 fps. A quick check of culling revealed ... well, not as much culling as I had hoped. With the camera set back and angled a lot more was rendering in the fustrum than was actually visible. Of course during these tests I had no "Level Of Detail" for my 10K meshes. I made multiple levels of LOD and set up the options preferences so that they reduced polys and materials the lower you set it, but also LODed hard outside of the immediate camera view. In the end I had things down to show the highest LOD on screen all at once with 70 fps, 665K polys with 913 drawcalls and half of that is shadowing which won't feature as much once I start using lightmaps and the diffuse material filters the main dynamic light source.

I also tested less instances of meshes, combining 9 of them into a single object. This reduced the total number of meshes from 10,300 to a mere 1,160. Polys went up slightly to 772K, drawcalls fell dramatically to just 235 - a third of which was shadows, and fps rose to a thrilling 100+ fps. All of which was somewhat to be expected.

So here's what that all looks like with the additions of screen spaced ambient occlusion and a vignette shader around the edges. I think having the grass bent over a little more might help aesthetically, but I'm quite pleased with the result and the performance.

Airship Dragoon End Of Winter Sale and Streamline Mode

It is the final weekend of "The Big It's Really Cold Winter Sale" and uber-hardcore, squad tactics, indie game "Airship Dragoon" is half price direct from the developer. Comes with a DRM free download and a Steam key. (ends Monday 12th January 2015)
http://www.yorkshirerifles.com/webpages/store.html

There is also a new update in the pipeline which will (hopefully) be released in the next week or two featuring a new "STREAMLINE" gameplay mode. This mode creates infinte ammunition for weapons, removing the need to equip extra bullets. Inventories can be manipulated without using up those precious Action Points, so dropping, picking up and using new items come at no cost. It's Airship Dragoon - streamlined! The original style is still available and now known as "Hardcore" mode, and the two modes can be switched at will before any tactical battle - including in the middle of a campaign - via the options menu.
There has also been some rebalancing of Ai and the Dastardly Pirates of Pangea, and a few fixes for issues which had previously snuck in.
Using cover is now more important than ever. Targets partially obscured by cover now give a negative (-10%) accuracy modifier, whilst targets out in the open have a bonus (+20%) to the shooter's aim. So a trooper in "Cautious" tactic (crouching) has a massive +50% bonus when firing on an enemy using "Standard" tactic with no cover (previously it was +30%).

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"The Idea Fairy" courtesy of http://www.themeatly.com

In other news, I've been umming and ahhing about starting a new indie game project. I expect like most devs, ideas are not hard to come by but finalizing which concept is the crux of the issue. After developing an uber-hardcore strategy game, I quite fancy a change of pace to something more action orientated ... and a shorter development cycle. So to this effect, I am planning on creating one or two quick and dirt technical demos to test basic gameplay design.

Concept One: Top down (or possibly isometric for bombing runs) style steampunk/dieselpunk aerial shoot 'em up. Lot's of rear "pusher" props, giant armoured airships as a sky navy blasting big guns at each other and flak cannons at incoming bombers. Intercept and strafe the bombers, fight it out in a melee of small aircraft, duel the enemy ace, torpedo the airship destroyer, all with the emphasis on short, sharp dogfights.

Early Fighter bomber concept

I had a quick mockup of sizes using real world (World War 2) naval ships and aircraft just to see what the scale looked like.

The big green arc is one kilometre from the 200m radius circle. Yellow rectangles are various naval ship sizes (battleship, cruiser, destroyer), and the big  triangle on the left has the dimensions of a Mosquito bomber, whilst the small one on the right is fighter sized. First impressions, things need to be bigger.

Concept Two: Top down (or possibly isometric) arcade action roguelite, with emphasis on swarms of enemies, boss battles, randomization, probably permadeath, level progression, power up collectables and unlockables.
The player (character on foot) makes their way through each level, searching for power ups, collectables, new equipment and weapons, and the means to exit to the next level through a boss battle whilst assailed by randomly spawning enemies. Placement of all objects in the world is randomized, including start and exit points. Shooting monsters gives points, points make prizes with increased collectable drops.
The player would have one or two weapons, a light attack with fast cool down, heavy attack with longer cool down, extra ability which would probably be defensive like dodge, speedrun, lay boobytrap, depending on collectable and some special object with either a time limited effect or single use like airstrikes, freeze/confuse enemies, invulnerability and the sort. The emphasis would be on wide and varied collectables with increasingly frenzied arcade action.
Alas no predesign pics of this as it currently exists in the murky vapours of my mind.

Anyhow, these are two ideas which I will be testing with technical demos later in the month to see how the concepts translate to actual gameplay. First things first though, and that's the "Streamline" update for Airship Dragoon version 1.6.

Idea Fairy And The Next Game Concept

Airship Dragoon - walls now 0.2 world units lower!

Airship Dragoon has had a few fixes and tweaks since going up on Steam. I must say that Steam's updating system is great, literally pulling the changes from files and compressing them. I fixed an issue with the game not working on Windows XP, fixed a couple of strange bugs which had never happened before - and could not see what had caused them to happen now (fuuuuu-), and made a few general changes such as decreasing low walls by 0.2 units to make it easier to shoot over them.

Idea Fairy courtesy of http://www.themeatly.com

Whilst I have been updating and tweaking Airship Dragoon now that it's up on Steam, I have also been slowly doing the mental arithmetic of drawing up new game concepts for my next project. Frankly there have been a few ... a few thousand, because creative ideas and how to implement those concepts has never been an issue. Most get stored somewhere in the back of the memory banks whilst ones which are currently more interesting to my own whims and fancies, or seem to have greater viability are left to simmer in the subconscious at gas mark 3 (that's  160 Celsius / 325 Fahrenheit for those of you using electric brains). In the end, after much stewing, I narrowed it down to three ideas spread across three separate genres: Action, RPG, Adventure. And so, without any real screenshots, video or any actual visual reference for demonstration, I will attempt to explain my thoughts into some sort of coherent description which may or may not give a good understanding of what is bubbling away inside my head. CAUTION: TEXT AHEAD!

The Action Based Idea:

Concept:
Top-down steampunk/dieselpunk flight-sim/shmup with open-ended/branching narrative campaign.

Inspiration:
Descent Freespace (Volition 1998), Wings (Cinemaware 1990), Total Air War (DID/Infogrames 1998), World War 2 Pacific Naval/Carrier Battles

Outline:
Freespace bridged the link between arcade-action and simulation very well with it's simplified space flight model, and originally the idea was conceived as a steampunk/dieselpunk Freespace, set high above the clouds. However it didn't take long for me to decide that I really did not want to make a flight simulation, no matter how Freespace-like. So I thought about removing the Z axis completely and having a top down camera. Gravitating more to an action-simulation than a shoot 'em up as I've never been much of a shmup player  due rubbish reflexes, a disdain of lots of flashing lights, low blood pressure and whatever the opposite of ADHD is.

Core Gameplay:
Sticking with many of Freespace's features, such as individually damageable locations, slowly recharging afterburners for sudden turns of speed (nitro fuel injection for the sake of naming in this case), and multiple aircraft types split into 3 main categories of interceptor/dogfighter/bomber with different engines (speed), aerilons (manoeuvrability), airframe/hull damage and armour (total hitpoints), and hardpoints for guns and rockets/bombs/torpedoes. All of which can be individually damaged to reduce their capacity, so hit an engine and overall speed drops, blast apart an aerilon and turning is reduced.

I would envision the ability to pull various evasive manoeuvres to avoid incoming fire on the 2D axis (xy top down) such as displacement roll/rolling scissors, high yo-yo/barrel roll and Immelman Turn. Each evasion would move the aircraft out of the line of fire (be invulnerable for a short time) and lose momentum depending on aircraft manoeuvrability and size of airframe (possibly allowing for the enemy to overshoot). Thus a small, high aeroloned (pretty sure that ain't a real word but considering what gets into the Oxford English Dictionary these days it hardly bears worrying about) dogfighter would be able to pull many more evasions than a large, poorly moving bomber. Drop speed below minimum and the aircraft stalls instead, spinning off with loss of control for a few seconds which should be enough for pursuing fighters to make Swiss cheese out of it. Bombs, rockets and torpedoes would have finite ammunition (only what you can carry) whilst MGs, 50 cals and 20mm cannons would have infinite rounds but with cool-downs.

I was thinking of having an aerial navy, hence the World War 2 Pacific Naval/Carrier Battles influence, but obviously replacing boats with airships and zeppelins, so once again somewhat like how Freespace saw it's own capital ships and cruisers. Each water navy type would have an aerial equivalent such as Carriers, Dreadnoughts, Cruisers, Destroyers, DD AA Escorts, Frigates, Corvettes and Freighters. All the big capital ships would be designed to fight each other with big guns, and thus find it difficult to defend themselves from smaller, faster fighters and bombers ("We count thirty Rebel ships, Lord Vader, but they're so small they're evading our turbolasers."). Throw in some sort of orbital/hovering installation to work as a sky bound airport.

Aircraft capability would be loosely based on a mixture of World War 2 equivalents and also Freespace's similar archetypes (light bomber, heavy bomber, etc). I am considering using a physics based formula for aircraft construction, each part having a certain weight and aerodynamic quality, more guns (heavy) increase firepower but reduce speed, more than aerilons (light) increase manoeuvrability with smaller speed loss but make the aircraft a larger target due to their additional size, armour is heavy which means a larger airframe and more drag, an extra engine adds x1.5 thrust not 2 because of it's own drag and the need for a larger airframe to accommodate it.

This is a quick concept I knocked up of a fast bomber based on a de Havilland Mosquito equivalent (air intakes probably need to go away). I was going to use it for a quick and dirty technical demo but then never had the opportunity/spare time.

Expanded Gameplay:
Campaign-wise I was thinking of something of a mixture between Wings and Total Air War, driven by player combat performance and off-duty player decisions.

Wings went through the whole of the First World War with one mission a week, inter spaced with news bulletins about the war, rumours around the airfield and of the historical aces of the time. New pilots would arrive to replace ones killed in action, for both Ai and the player, with survivors becoming familiar names in the squadron for the player.

Total Air War on the other hand had more player agency. Two African sides would square-up to each other, both backed by NATO/Soviet airforces. Missions would be randomly generated using an algorithm and the player could accept or decline them. Wiping our 3A made the skies safer for your own planes, as blasting airfields reduced enemy hostile potential. Players also had some command over airbourne jets and using an AWACs could divert assets to intercept.

I would envision multiple missions to select from, each with varying difficulties, the more challenging, the more likely the damage to enemy war effort in that sector. Do well get wider mission selection, do less well selection decreases. As the war rages new equipment and aircraft would become available. Many losses of these upgrades would cause a shortage in availability and mean falling back on inferior choices whilst the airforce restocked. The player's personal performance during missions would directly contribute to the direction of the war.

Like in Wings, there would be a between combat section, possibly displayed like a Visual Novel for interaction, where the CO or Ai pilots would have a chat, exchange rumours, post news, and the player might be able to request transfer to another unit which specialises in interceptors, fighters or bombers, thus giving more selectable missions to personal taste.

With interceptors, dogfighters, bombers, a wide range of variously capable zeppelins and floating airfields there should be a wide choice of missions.  Straight forward reduce enemy numbers by dogfighting, intercept the bombers, attack the airships whilst fighters protect bombers and target, escort freighters and protect the supply lines, raid the supply dump, hunt the carrier, etc, etc. Also old fighter planes look really cool if you turn them into pushers with the propellers at the back.

After Thought:
This should be the quickest of my game ideas to complete ... allegedly ... and a faster turnover would be much appreciated after Airship Dragoon took nearly 3 years (mostly due to 3 rewrites ... which we won't be doing again).

Links to other peoples' artwork which might help give a better visual idea:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/25163007@N07/sets Lego!
http://linseed.deviantart.com/art/Further-Fictional-Airships-95199829
http://csp499.deviantart.com/art/Warhawks-Lusivakian-Airships-277978465
http://csp499.deviantart.com/art/Warhawks-Almenian-Airships-268368040
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The RPG Based Idea:

Concept:
Narrative based, isometric RPG set in an open world, using real time movement and possible stealth, turn-based melee combat with a steampunk and orientalist aesthetic.

Inspiration:
Various half-forgotten tactical RPGs ('90s), Suikoden Series (Konami 1995 onwards), Tactics Ogre (Square Enix 1995), Gunnm: Martian Memory (Yukito 1998), Shui Hu Zhuan / Outlaws Of The Marshes (Shi Nai'an 14th Century) aka All Men Are Brothers, aka The Water Margin, aka 108 Heroes Of Lang Shan Po, aka Suikoden

Outline:
Originally conceived as an open world, roaming brawler with a stealth option for sneaking past enemies. Having not actually played one since the heady days of coin-up arcades with Double Dragon and the like, I decided to take part in the 2014 Seven Day Roguelike Challenge (7DRL) and created a quick and dirty mock-up. With a working isometric camera, rudimentary controls, randomized level/maze generation (it was supposed to be a roguelike), a completely broken stealth mechanic but I was more interested in testing the action-combat idea here, I quickly came to the view that roaming brawler was not for me, as I do tend to favour more thoughtful turn-based combat over panicky button mashing.

Here's the post mortem of that 7 Day Roguelike Roaming Brawler.
http://yorkshirerifles.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-7-day-roguelike-challenge-2014-post.html

At least it has the isometric camera view I am thinking of using.

The player moves around an open world in real-time from an isometric viewpoint, picking up missions from NPCs met on their travels, and using a mixture of stealth and turn-based combat to complete said missions. Successful completion grants XP/skills/power-ups/new attacks/etc. Some missions would be tied to each other, so if you have helped NPC X, it could help making NPC  Y more benign later.

Core Gameplay:
Large open world which the player can traverse and explore as they see fit. Meeting various NPCs give the option of accepting missions. The player moves using standard real-time isometric movement (up, down, left, right) and can crouch for stealth and sneak through grass/bushes to avoid hostile NPCs. Moving very much in the same manner as Gunnm: Martian Memory (which I have never played, but I saw gameplay video and it was similar to what I had in mind).

Combat is initiated by getting close to an enemy at which point the action becomes turn-based. The enemy takes a stance (unless surprised/ambushed in which the player gets a free attack) which confers certain bonuses, and the player selects a fighting stance/first attack from those available, and then a follow up or a counter from another list. Choices would be a mixture of defensive and offensive manoeuvres. Combat is resolved asynchronously and if the opponent is still standing a new set of attacks and counters are presented for continuing combat (or fleeing if things are not going well). Think of it as an expanded rock/paper/scissors with additional modifiers. New stances, techniques, attacks can be gifted/taught to the player on successful completion of certain missions or by defeating certain stronger opponents (boss battles).

Extended Gameplay:
I mentioned Shi Nai'an in the inspiration section and his 14th Century telephone directory of a novel and one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. The story popularised the 108 heroes, and in gaming terms is probably best known as Suikoden. I came across the Water Margin when I was 4 (somethings I have a great memory for, whilst others, such as what day it is, do not seem so important) from the BBC2 version (1977) of Nippon Television's 1973 series (filmed on location in China ... during the Cultural Revolution ... must have been interesting for a Japanese film crew ... )which went out at 5.30pm and my mother let me stay up for. Though heavily cut for British tea-time audience and stuck on what was at the time the Beeb's arty channel, it still had plenty of claret splashing around, severed limbs and rape ... the latter not actually in the original book but you know what the Japanese are like (I'm surprised they didn't throw squid starspawn and a schoolgirl in there - or maybe they did and that was one of the bits cut for British TV), as our noble heroes battle government corruption to save the land. Thirty plus years later and I bought the box set on DVD, and a few years after decided to finally read the translation of the six hundred year old book. With 108 heroes being quite prominent in contemporary media culture (Tarantino, Suidoken, et al) I was somewhat surprised to find that their actions were not all that noble ... and that some of "their methods were unsound" ...

So I was thinking that as a narrative backdrop The Water Margin was rather interesting with a world in near anarchy and a corrupt governmental technocracy. Also working along the lines of Suidoken (which again, I have not actually player but read up on and seen gameplay videos of) where the player has to recruit the characters, I would envision the player completing 108 tasks, 108 achievements, and thus gaining 108 bonuses/upgrades/skills/etc. Missions would be structured with a difficulty setting based on how large the reward is and how much effort is involved. The  hardest missions would be those which traversed large areas to complete with many dangers in the way - but I would make sure that there was never any doubling back, no fetch and return quests because only masochists like that sort of thing. I would hope that many missions would be solvable with a choice of stealth or combat. For example "steal the sacred sword/smexy lewt/McGuffin from the palace/guard house/temple of badasses" gives the option of beating seven bells out of everyone who gets in the way, or alternatively sneaking through the long grass, bushes to get inside and then hiding in the shadows to avoid patrolling enemies before quietly escaping.

The more open violence employed, the more infamous the player, and the more the authorities will take note of the player which would make freely moving around more difficult; "walks into town, walks past the jail with bored soldiers hanging around - hey is that my wanted poster? Oh shi-"
The world would be open, with the player free to decide which missions to take when. There would be a day and night system, the latter giving much larger bonuses for stealth and the likelihood of having less roaming hostiles, but more bandits, robbers and wild animals/possibly monsters outside of protected urbanised areas. Missions themselves could have a good range of variety and styles from as simple as lay flowers on a grave at close by location A, to obtain McGuffin B from the bandit mountain, to rescue BroDude C from the fort at location D, to defeat big bad BroDude E, and so on.

An aspect of moral choice could also be developed. If you kill the corrupt priest who spies for the government, then who looks after the orphans? Obtain vengeance for someone but they want their enemy's blood line destroyed, how far are you willing to go? To (roughly) quote  from  the novel, "Heaven's vengeance for murdering one is the same for murdering one thousand". The player would still get the achievement for completing the main part of the mission, but may not gain personal reward for either being overly violent or overlay passive.

I would consider having a save game system based around safe houses, so the player would find a pub, chapel, graveyard depending on location and be able to rest up, save the game, hide from enemies or fast forward time until sunrise or sunset.

After Thought:
There would be a fair bit of art required for this one as well as working out the many missions, 108 achievements is rather a big thing - but it definitely has to 108 or the reference does not work. If you mention Suikoden/108 Heroes people have a better understanding of where you are coming from. The rudimentary controls work as tested in the 7DRL except for the turn-based combat. I'd consider making the actual game world modular for ease of reusing assets and things such as trees are now quite easily created thanks to the glorious Forester Pro which can randomly generate them in a few clicks. Using isometric and camera distance could really reduce the amount of objects on screen at any one time, thus allowing for higher tris counts in localised areas without hammering performance. I might also consider lightmapping the whole thing rather than using dynamic shadowing and spend the savings on more complicated poly modelling.

No real image galleries to show on this one as it should be fairly self-explanatory.
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The Adventure Based Idea:

Concept:
Third-person survival horror and exploration game where the player can interact with the environment by jumping, climbing and shinning/dangling along ledges.

Inspiration:
Tomb Raider (Core/Eidos 1996), Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional 2010), Dark Seed (Incentive/Cyberdreams 1992), Cthulhu Mythos (HP Lovecraft 1930s), Macabre Surrealism (HR Giger, Zdzislaw Beksinski, Wayne Berlowe, Sibylle Ruppert)

Outline:
Some years ago I replayed the start of original Tomb Raider and was struck by just how much the game left you alone. You could wander around, happily exploring to your heart's content without the game going out of it's way to force you to take part in the story. I was thinking along the lines of an adventure game where the player could scale certain vertical surfaces, jump across gaps/chasms, shin or dangle along ledges and generally free climb to explore the environment. Marrying this with the survival horror genre, the player would be unarmed and incapable of straightforward violence but could possibly leverage or knock over parts of the environment, whilst moving through ever more disturbing environments.

Core Gameplay:
The player explores, alone, unarmed and on foot. The emphasis is on environmental interaction and various surfaces throughout levels can be climbed. Often levels will have a puzzle element (usually just pathfinding) as a way of escaping them, though the prominence of the gameplay is on exploring. Thin ledges can be edged along or dangled off. Falling is generally considered bad.

Though this is survival horror, the stress is on the horror of macabre surrealism rather than a combat based threat. There would be certain times the player is directly hunted by creatures and have to escape via manipulating the environment or fleeing, but this would not be constant. More so the threat of bumping into something hostile whilst manoeuvring through increasingly disturbing aesthetics of each level would be key to building atmosphere and the sense of threat.

Extended Gameplay:
I am going to be a little coy about the narrative here, as the meat of a narrative based adventure is what happens in the story, and this is much more story specific than the other ideas so I intend to stick to explaining loose game mechanics. The game would start off in a contemporary timeline with the environments steadily becoming more and more horrifying. Along the way would be certain frescoes/statutes and the like which when activated would impart information via hallucination or actual animation depicting something to do with an alien narrative, somewhat akin to what happens in the story of HP Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness" (1931) when the protagonist walks through the long dead city of the Elder Things. These objects would be supplementary to the main narrative. There would not be, under any circumstances, a game mechanic of find all of the scattered bits of paper someone had written notes on.

Apart from the exploration element there would be a certain amount of interaction with some physical objects such as pushing, shoving and knocking over, and it could be possible to treat these as weapons if done correctly.

The environments would be varied, with differing colour schemes. I much prefer artistically lit design for atmosphere rather than simple hard to see in darkness. I also prefer my horror to be subtly unsettling and build tension rather than opt for jump scares. Many scenarios would be about experience menacing rather than constantly running and hiding from it until it goes away and then attempting to move on again. Creature-wise, I am very much thinking along the lines of Lovecraftian nightmares, starfish alien, frightening abominations rather than the guy in a rubber suit concept. I am currently uncertain about having an "insanity" mechanic to the gameplay.

Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I did find the ending weak ... what do you expect me to do, just sit there until the very last moment - which I'm not sure exactly when it will happen - whilst naked floating guy summons unspeakable evil, or wade in and stop him as soon as possible? To this effect I imagine multiple game endings based not only on direct and obvious choices the player makes, but also on how aggressively or cautiously they play the game.

After Thought:
This is probably the most creatively challenging of the three concepts, and annoyingly, probably the most commercially viable - though I am not really basing on that on anything concrete beyond the words horror, explore and Cthulhu tend to attract attention. It would require a lot of art, and a lot of that art would have to be custom/specific rather than more generic, and easier to create, models like mere rocks and trees. Whilst I have a big library of motion captured human animations, modelling and animating monstrous Things is another matter and one that I can see being very consuming. Rendering-wise, I am imagining it to be somewhat high poly (in dev terms), using a lot of tonemapping for shadowing and colour effect. Dispensing with dynamic lighting could save a lot on performance and thus really allow for some high tris environments.

Links to other peoples' Macabre Surrealist artwork which might help give a better visual idea. Viewing before going to sleep not recommended ;)
http://www.artgalleryartist.com/HRGigerart/index.htm
http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/galleries/zdzislaw-beksinski/index.htm
http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/galleries/wayne-barlow/index.htm
Sibylle Ruppert Google Image Search (can't find a decent web gallery of all of her work).
Macabre Surrealism Google Image Search.
And anything written by HP Lovecraft but I do recommend; At The Mountains Of Madness.
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So, those are the concepts which have been swimming around/festering in the back of my subconscious whilst I have continued to upgrade and fix Airship Dragoon. These three ideas are most viable of the many, many designs which form within the spongy bit between my ears, and constantly, incessantly, jockey with one another for position, and my attention.

Oh, omnipresent Idea Fairy, why will you not let me rest!? Oh, cruel Idea Fairy, a pox upon you!