A sentiment I’m sure many other gamers share is the belief that we could do it better. “If only I were in charge” we think “the latest installment of X would not have been so casual and dire!” Well, I’ve been bouncing around a videogame idea in my head for some time now, and I’m thinking that when I finish my current novel – not too far off now – I’m going to switch away from writing and begin learning how I might make this thing. I thought I would throw the idea out there to see if anyone has any ideas they might like to add to it, or general comments! Anything welcome!
My working name for this thing is An Ancient Evil Has Awoken. The twist is that said ancient evil is you – the objective of the game is to use your malevolent powers to wipe out the human race, evolving from newly-awoken small-timer to Eldritch Abomination. My design document at the moment proposes three main avenues of attack; the inducement of natural disasters, the use of psychic abilities to mess with human’s minds, and finally the use of supernatural events like Biblical plagues or creating zombies or things like that.
I envision the game to play as something between a cross of Pandemic and Populous. You would acquire your resource – tentatively called Terror – through things you do, as well as a slow trickle from the natural disasters (As in actual natural ones) and expend it on causing more death and mayhem. The world would be divided into a number of zones, and as the humans begin to grow aware that things are not right, they would develop more effective defenses against you and eventually could find a way to either destroy you, or to save themselves some other way. Of course the idea of a malevolent god out to destroy humanity is going to be a bit scarier than just bad things happening, so you’ve got a major decision to make; are you overt, increasing terror but making humans more able to resist you, or covert, which gives you a much more constrained ‘budget’ but lets you work in relative peace.
It should be possible though to do things in a variety of ways, and the player should fundamentally feel they are in control of how they are destroying the world. Ideally you would be able to cause an obscene amount of global mayhem without ever doing anything overtly recognizable as supernatural or weird. An economic crash here, a war there, and in the end you can just step in to finish off the survivors.
What say you, fellow malevolent omnicidal lunatics? Any ideas, thoughts, comments?
I like the concept. Like it a lot in fact and I would definitively give a try to your game. Right off the bat I’m thinking of a small indie thing like Atom Zombie smasher. You asked for ideas and one thing that caught my attention was the humans mounting a defence agaisnt you vs the types of disasters you use.
What I mean is that I feel players should have some sort of control over how much exposure they get by choosing what type of disasters they use. Natural disasters and wars would cause low terror but also give low exposure, giving an option of a more stealth based game versue full blown supernatural disasters which are very potent but attract lots of attention.
I think giving players the option to choose which style they want to op for would make for great replay value. Do I go stealth or heavy handed? Do I use stealth but supernatural once in a while to take out specific enemies? etc…
That is exactly the sort of thing I am thinking of :D
And here I’ve recently been thinking that there needs to be a game where you control an evil god :D