The Great Fluid Imagination Video Game Project
Project Introduction
Like most red-blooded American males who grew up in the age of Atari, Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation, and XBox, I’ve long dreamt of creating a video game. Unfortunately, I have very few skills that would allow me to do such a thing. I’m not a software developer, nor can I draw worth a damn. About the only skill I do have is a strong sense of creativity, and several years experience as a project manager.
Which is why, starting today, but really ramping up in the middle of November when I’m finally done with all my grad school requirements, I’ll be using Fluid Imagination to develop some ideas I’ve had about a brand new video game.
I’m hoping that all you folks will read through the ideas, offer constructive criticism as to how the ideas can be improved, and even suggest new ideas of your own.
The goal of this exercise is to develop a master plan for the project, which could then be used by programmers and artists to develop a playable version of the game.
This may be an exercise in futility, given the constraints of our knowledge and skills, but even if it is, I think the process could be exciting. At the very least, we’ll exercise our deep imaginations by putting them to work in the land of make-believe. It may not be productive, but it will definitely be fun.
The Game
To say we want to build a video game is to say hardly anything at all. If this is going to work, we’ll need to focus our energies and concentrate our imagination all on the same game.
But there are so many friggin’ possibilities, right? From god games like Civilization to first-person shooters like Halo to puzzle games like Tetris to sports simulations like MVP Baseball. Where do we start?
With an executive decision, that’s where. After some consultation with Eliot Johnston (the other person spearheading this project with me), we decided to develop a video game that begins with Chess but that also takes advantage of the possibilities made real by the limitless scope of the virtual world.
The thought process was simple. Chess is one of the best games ever designed, but it’s not exciting enough to succeed as a video game. There’s too much sitting and staring, and waiting for the other person to move. But what if we changed it up a little bit? How could we evolve chess so that it speaks to the gaming paradigms of the 21st century, while at the same time, we stay true to the principles that have made chess so enduring?
That is the project we’ve set out for ourselves.
Our Current Thinking
The first thought we had was to do a cross between Chess and Mortal Kombat. The idea is simple. When you attack a piece on the chess board, the game zooms in and you now have to fight to the death. Whoever wins the fight, keeps the square.
The fun part of this would be coming up with the fighting styles of the various pieces. You’d want to design them in such a way as to pay homage to the piece’s relative strength and range of movement. How would you design a bishop, for example, and how would its strengths and weaknesses compare to a knight’s?
But as fun as such a game might be, it seems a little too obvious, and it runs the risk of becoming a button masher, which are only fun for a little while. To be successful, a game needs to be more than buttons. It needs to have drama.
Thankfully, chess comes with the built-in drama of basic warfare, the thrusts and ripostes of attacking and defending a range of areas across a wider domain. Why would we limit the “new part of the game” to a certain square when we could expand our purview across a whole slew of squares?
Or to put it another way: how do we include the part of chess where the bishop moves from one side of the board to the other? I talked above about “zooming in,” but is there a way to design the game such that you’re not looking at the board from above, but rather, you’re experiencing it on the board?
In this iteration, you don’t just have a bunch of fights in pre-determined locations. Instead, you actually have to approach (or defend) a given position. Think about it terms of a first-person shooter, where you have to navigate your way around a map to reach a given objective. Can that kind of paradigm be brought into the game of chess?
We think it can. But the question is: how?
I could go on with some of the different ideas we’ve had, but I think you get the gist of the project: trying to take chess into the 21st century.
You’ll hear more about this project in the future, but the predominant action will be taking place not here on the Fluid Imagination blog, but over on a Wiki that we’re setting up just for this purpose. We invite all of you to venture on over and start adding to the project immediately.
So…that is the Great Fluid Imagination Video Game Project.
What do you think?