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.