Post 3, restart.

Right, old idea: scrapped until a later date. New idea, platform shooter.

Characters (so far):

The Doc.
Player character, has left right movement and is able to jump and duck, so 4 way direction (probably being controlled using the wasd keys or the arrow keys).
Weapon: Vacuum gun, sucks the enemies in and then converts them into antibodies which are shot out. Player must suck enemies in for them to become ammo. There may also be a melee attack too but I won't focus on that to start with.
Health: the player will have a maximum amount of health at the beginning of the game, but if injured will slowly regenerate over time, I don't want there to be any health pick ups in the game other than possibly at the end of each level where the Dr may be able to convert his ammo into health, or something like that. I don't want health packages to increase how vigilant the player is going to have to be and play carefully.

Enemies:
NDV (Nazi Death Virus, see story in a following post)
Main enemy character, can move left or right but cannot jump, can fall though if reaching the end of a platform onto another one. If walking into an object it will bounce off and walk the other way.
Weapon: can fire the virus infecter at the Dr in order to wound him, also colliding with the enemy the doctor will take damage.
Health: as the player progresses through the game the health of the virus will increase to ensure the difficulty increases. At the beginning of the game the user can vacuum all viruses up into ammo, later on the player may have to weaken viruses before sucking them up and converting them into ammo.

Bosses:
Tbc

Allies (maybe):
Immune system + antibodies.

Scene:
1944, Nazi's have developed a bio-weapon virus, the NDV, or NTV auf Deutsch (Nazi Totes-Virus), and are almost prepared to unleash it on both the east and western fronts, which would win them the war in a matter of weeks. Alerted by this, the Dr and his team are sneakily dropped into Berlin to try and stop the Nazis releasing the virus. Upon finding the lab, it turns out the virus was being produced in human beings and could be harvested from dead humans, one by one the doctor and his team destroyed the dead virus factories until just one was left. This body was under the top surveillance of the SS, the reason why, it was still alive. The body only reproduces the virus until it dies, so this factory was purposefully being kept alive to ensure they could keep reproducing the virus. It was far to risky for the Dr and his team so just destroy the factory and didn't want to be inhumane and kill the human straight out.

Instead the Dr, being the genius he was, showed his team a prototype shrink ray he had produced, and persisted that he was to be shrunk by it. After a scary and uncertain attempt at using the machine, the Dr was shrunk down to the size of the virus itself, he sneaked into the human factory via the blood stream with one intention, find out where the cells are being reproduced, and destroy the reproductive factory, at all costs.
           

Post 2, getting started.

Throughout the last week I've conjured up several ideas for my first virus based game. The one I was most up for doing was a turn based strategy game with risk style elements to it. There would be two bases on opposite corners of the screen, and the objective of the game was to take the enemy team base, one team being the virus, the other being antibodies or the immune system. After making several sketches and some notes I was slowly being put off the idea, my thoughts being the potential of stencylworks and whether it was too ambitious for my first project.

The game involved multiple territories much like other war games, and the idea was to take the other teams base or wipe out all of the other teams units, to do this you'd conquer territories then when two enemy territories border, one would attack the other and based on numbers whoever had the most amount of units would win. This seemed pretty straight forward at first, then I thought about having backup, so:

if E was attacking A, then E would be backed up by all the neighbouring e's with units in them, and likewise A would be backed up defending by all of the a's.

e   e     a    a
e   E -  A   a    
e   e     a    a

I guessed not really knowing fully well how I would implement this in stencylworks I didn't know to what complexity I could make this game or maybe it should be something I should save until I have more experience.

This then leaves me with minor ideas and back to the beginning. As the game doesn't have to be something original I feel a bit more comfortable re-doing ideas people have done in the past, but with my own little twist. Working with a topic that could be quite small (a virus being invisible to the naked eye) on a canvas quite large (eg the human body), is quite difficult on the grand scale of things. Then I think about it a little differently, what about a computer virus, 2d scrolling shooter like Megaman, having a character in a virtual universe fighting cyber viruses. But again have my own take on it and do it my own way. Then there's ideas such as "race to the end" where the player controls a virus dodgy obstacles and trying to reach the end to "infect" the system/human.

Having looked into the way a living virus effects a human being it's quite difficult to visualize a game that could be based around that, a few viruses going into a cell which then populates and soon a load of cells are infected, which then again multiplies into a load of other cells being infected until the whole body is infected. This is unless the immune system gets involved, which then shows a defending force almost swallowing the viruses to kill them. But the immune system itself has multiple different ways of defeating viruses, for instance firstly the immune system must identify the virus, then send the right type of antibody to fight it.

I think I'll sit down tonight and have good think about what I'm going to do, then possibly start doing some conceptual drawings and some minor planning.