Game Idea 3498

Seems like when I start slowing down on programming one of my game ideas, I start getting an influx of new ideas. I try to resist starting yet another project, but eventually convince myself that this is the one I'm going to finish, which of course never happens.

However, there does seem to be a theme that can categorize all of my ideas: something new and never done before, or pushes the limits. This might be part of my problem as I've never truly 'finished' a game project I've came up with. Thus, I'm not completely familiar with all the aspects of game making.

Even when I set out to make a simple game or a clone of a game, I wind up trying to do something new and never done before (atleast not to my knowledge). This is probably also where I get stuck and start to slow down and loose interest in the project.

Right now I can't think of a good name for the idea I have. For now I've deemed it Game 3498 which I may or may not later discuss here or in another post (depends if I get motivated to start working on it instead). I just chose some random numbers as if I had serialized all my ideas (I haven't came up with 3500 ideas.... yet)

I might as well try to catalog these ideas if for no other reason to keep them from circulating in my brain. I don't think I'm going to apply any kind of format in describing these games so they are going to be rather varied in detail.

Py-berspace
This was inspired by the game Decker (should be available at www.sourceforge.net) where you play as a hacker completing mischievous contracts to gain money and fame. It's set in a futuristic world where hackers do a matrix-like plug in to the servers and events play out in this virtual world. Different rooms representing the CPU, data stores, and I/O ports. You can try to stealth around avoiding detection and queries from bots, or you can attack and take on the defenses of the server.

The idea for Pyberspace was essentially the same but I was going to expand on the gameplay. In decker there would just be 2-3 contracts available at a time which may or may not be at places you have been. Every time you connected to the 'matrix' the level would be generated randomly, progressively getting larger / longer the farther in the game. The downside was once you accepted a contract you couldn't take on others until you completed that one or it expired. There didn't seem to be any consistent world or results/rewards for extra efforts.

I decided to take a stab at graph theory and try to create a mock Internet with backbone servers and ISPs, etc. using them as nodes. On top of that I was going to simulate traffic loads on the connection so that taking certain paths down would strain other paths, and that commandeering machines would effectively increase you bandwidth. This was the other part of the game as I've read the recent trend in black hat hacking is to install little clients, pseudo-viruses if you will. The article I read compared them to terrorist sleeper cells. The client would sit idly and listen in on an IRC channel for commands to be issued on. When a command is received it would hijack the connection (usually these are used for distributed denial of service [DDoS] attacks). The unfortunate target is pummeled by thousands if not millions of requests all from different machines, thus they can't just ban a few IP addresses. Further more the machines doing the attacks are actual legitimate clients who are unaware of the action and probably unaffected by the action.

I was going to use this as part of the game play, you slowly take over machines to build an army of 'zombies' as they are called. You can use these zombies to help you attack the larger and more lucrative targets while protecting your identity. Perhaps when you get hit or loose a 'life' it translates to loosing these zombies (which you can perhaps later reacquire).

I named it Pyberspace as I was trying to code it in Python using Pygame. I think I got stuck mainly on trying to get some kind of an interface and on coming up with a decent and fast graphing system for modeling an Internet of sorts.

I might write more on my current idea later. Right now I think I'm going to get working on it some more.