Game Idea A Week: The Seven Games of Evil Edgar

Week Fifty-Two (04/10/2010)

The idea for this week is a game of game genres. Evil Edgar is a game designer who has created 7 games from 7 genres to capture the souls of innocent players. You must explore the game worlds to find and free the 7 people trapped inside his 7 games.

Platform:

PC, XBox 360, PS3

Genre:

Exploration

Why it needs to be made:

In most games you play as the hero of the game. What if you weren't the hero, but an onlooker? How would you work out who was the hero? This game explores these notions.

Description:

Edgar is a game designer tired of catering to the whims of his players. He decides to build 7 games from 7 genres to trap 7 players so they are forced to play his games forever while he drains their souls. One of the players he traps is a good friend of yours, Cindy. You must save Cindy and the others from Evil Edgar's fiendish games.

To save the trapped players you must enter each of the games and search to find the player and free them from the game. Each game is based on a different popular game genre and has its own unique game mechanics and point of view. However, within each game world your task has the same core mechanic, exploration.

When you enter a new game world you are far away from the center of attention, where the hero (aka trapped player) is currently. This means that the level of detail on the surroundings is poor and everything is in black and white. As you travel closer to the hero, buildings have more detail and colour comes back to the world. You are able to talk to NPCs who will tell you of the great hero and where they were last seen. On top of this, each game genre has an additional way of determining where the hero is within the game world.

The 7 game genres that Evil Edgar has used are listed below, along with the key methods you will be able to use to find the trapped player.

• FPS: Find the hero by following the trail of dead bodies.
• RPG: characters with power will show up on your mini-map as you journey. The trapped player will be the character with the most special powers.
• Platformer: follow the path of collected stars/coins.
• RTS: search the world in top down view for the side that has the largest army.
• Car racing: look for the races that are in a repeat loop until the trapped player wins.
• Sims-style world: look for the largest house and the happiest Sims.
• Adventure game: look for unlocked doors and solved puzzles to work out which direction to go next.

When you think you have found the trapped player you so that they can select be released from the game world. If you choose wrongly and pick a NPC then Edgar will know where you are for 30 seconds. During this time there will be no differences in any direction (making it difficult to navigate) and any NPCs in the area will chase you away from the hero's location. When you find and choose the real trapped player, they will be released from the game and you can move on to the next game genre to save the next person.

All of the games will have a common theme of Gothic characters or surroundings. Some will be set in modern day cities and others during Victorian times. For example, the enemies in the FPS game are gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

All games have crates and boxes, so there will be a side goal to collect all of the crates in every game. Once all the crates are collected from a particular game, that game world will collapse on itself so that no more players will ever be able to get captured by Edgar. However, in order to complete each level and progress, you only need to find the trapped player and release them.

When you have completed all 7 of the games you will need to find Edgar in his own personal virtual lair. His lair is built using mechanics from all of the game genres, so you will need to use the techniques you have learned in the other games to hunt down Edgar and remove him from his seat of power.

Why it will be a compelling game:

Although the game is diverse in that it is made up of 7 different game genres, you will be using the same core exploration mechanic in all of the games. This means that there is interesting diversity in the surroundings, but the player is not constantly learning a completely new game.

Other thoughts:

It may be necessary to force the order in which the games are completed so that the difficulty increases the closer you get to Edgar's Lair. However, it would give a much greater feeling of freedom if you could choose how to complete the game.