Earlier today, I stumbled across a thread on the steam forums for Godus asking for people's opinions on what their ideal god game would be ([url]http://steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/864980277996564546/[/url]). I've been trying to come up with gameplay ideas for such a game for awhile, and I wanted to ask you guys what you think.
Note I don't come around here often, so if this is in the wrong section or anything, feel free to move the thread.
Bible Adventures on NES
The You Testament
Black and White was really nice. I played the second one, but one thing that really bothered me about it was that, even as a god, you could not do anything outside your influence. What would be nice is to offer complete control over your "area" and still allow small actions outside of your "area."
Another thing that I really like is when god games have resources but they're not yours. They belong to the people you're watching.
Black and White mixed with From Dust, and Reus.
Basically if I want to god be I want to be GOD not some part god that can kinda do cool things but can't really.
I'd love there to be many possible paths the people can end up going. Maybe that way I could have one colony be all scientific and shit while the other was all natural and caring. Then set fire to everything and see who lives!
Manipulate the environment, or let it randomly change over time.
Determine the choices that people make over time, or let them have free will.
Have aliens that you can/can't control, that can interfere with your people.
Be able to change the laws of the universe.
The possibilities are endless..
A sandbox God-game is what i've always dreamed of.
So bear with me here,
Having been raised on B&W I love the ability to raise a population devoted to you, waging war and influence over foreign God's and their populations. The developers had it pretty smack on, but i always felt there could be more to it...
[b]Divine relations[/b] - Instead of just conquering your rival Deities, i'd love to see a more political involvement.
-For instance, let's say you're warring with a neighboring village who worships a Dog God of War. Instead of sending your farmers to die, you use your divine powers to dry up the Enemy village's river nearby. Their crops suffer and dissent begins to spread in their town as hunger strikes. Doubt in their deity, villagers being to convert to your city. Eventually all of them are asking to enter your border. You can choose to destroy them or save them. Send your pet to battle theirs and perhaps you can adopt the once rival into a new tool of your own as a Demi-God. Who will watch over your people and provide bonuses to military (being a War God).
[b]Control yet Chaos[/b] - I think the player should have more control, yet less at the same time. You influence the land and nature, but not the people themselves. You can intervene and provide instruction to the peasants, but for the most part they do their own thing.
-For instance, let's say you start out with a Desert people in small tents. They subsist off the local fauna (hunting and foraging) as well as trade with other tribes when they find them. To improve the society you don't build farms or Granaries, instead you draw a ravine from the ocean far off in the distance. Water flows into the area and as a result grass begins to grow, the people begin to plant farms, and agriculture becomes dominant in your society. To arm them you bless the land with deposits of iron and coal. With a little divine help they begin to mine and as a result forges and armories pop up. Troops begin to train and populations begin to grow and conquer.
[b]Size Matters[/b] - With today's technology, I think the game should adopt a lesson from games such as Spore and Civilization. Going from the small to the grand.
- For instance, you start out with a small nomadic village of Desert foragers and as time goes on you refine them into a War-idolizing band of soldiers who conquer the continent and eventually the globe. Fighting one or two other large Gods who have managed to survive this far. Technologies have developed and populaces have grown in size. End it at the Globe or go inter-stellar? Of course distances would have to be shortened and unrealistic, like many stylized games out now. But that would only add to the character I think.
[b]Personal Development[/b] - Much like Black & White i liked the personal development tree, but always felt it should have more effect. As you develop your personal deity and upgrade your skills, the population should reflect it. A God who idolizes agriculture (skills to grow crops, bring rains, etc) would reflect as such with a society rich in granaries and fields. Lots of herds and water mills would dot the land. Whereas a God who idolizes wealth and trade (skills to enrich the minerals of the land, encourage trade by making rivers or carving paths through mountains) would be reflected by a population rich in trade stalls and gold trimmed buildings of stone and Iron.
I can keep going, but I think you get the general idea. I've had this guy scribbled in a book for years :v: Do something with it!
Mine would be a game where you don't directly control or influence civilizations at all, you only control the environment. Want to make a tribe leave an area? Start cranking up the heat and turn it into a desert, or entice them to move somewhere else by providing more resources. You can plant forests, build the landscape, create fauna and resource deposits, and edit the climate and environment.
Maps are huge and randomly generated, with civilizations all starting as hunter-gatherers and nomads. You control one of many civilizations.
Your goal, at least in the competitive modes, is to guide your civilization to greatness. The larger your civilization becomes, the larger your zone of control for which to edit things, the more freedom you have to edit, and the more powerful your edits are. Your civilization will develop technology by themselves overtime, but you can speed up the process by giving them a less volatile and more abundant living space. Conquering or mingling with other civilizations will also grant your peoples tech from those civs. Tech would end sometime around the bronze age (although if we are talking hypotheticals, it would be nice to see it go way further). You have no direct control over things like war, but you can influence battle by changing the weather, for instance.
Civilizations develop in relation to their environment. If their environment is hostile, they will have a bleak, warlike culture. If it is peaceful, they will be less inclined to go to war. If resources are abundant, civilizations become more isolated. If there is a lack of resources, they either go to war to gain them or become more open and decide to trade for goods.
Then there is a sandbox mode in which all your powers are at the top upgrade level, and you don't have to guide any civilization. You can mess with the civilizations on your map as you please, but be mindful; the one limit is that if you kill all the humans, there will no longer be humans to mess with and you have to start over. There is no goal in the mode: just fiddle around and shape the earth as you please.
When I think of my ideal god game, all I think of is an ideal Spore. Here are some of my ideas. Not all of them, and obviously I didn't list all of the infinite possibilities, features, and abilities that would exist within the game. This game's contents are meant to be incredibly realistic. The game's realization itself, is probably just the opposite. Here it is.
At the beginning, the game starts transparently on your desktop. There's a white ball outlined with black on the center of your screen. You click the dot and provoke its explosion. Immediately the matter begins to diffuse in the form of white dust and gas across your screen as your desktop disappears, and fades into the blackness of space. In a few seconds, the picture has been painted and you can now freely fly through the universe you just created, watching physics do its work to slow down the racing white-hot matter, allowing nebulae and stars and big rocks to form. Then you see planetary systems and galaxies and black holes. By the way, the timescale of this game can be controlled. Anyway, you can fly slow or fast, onto or into anything in the universe.
Now, where does the "god" of this game come in? It would manifest in different ways, but in the beginning, you would be able to develop elements within stars by flying into the center of any star, zooming into a molecular level, and clicking and dragging upon structures, increasing and decreasing temperatures, modifying the contents and properties of atoms (protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks and shit). Of course, not any element could survive in the center of the sun, or at least not in the form you might want, so you may have to screw with your environment a bit.
After all that star business, you can zoom out of the star and wait for the fruits of your labors to appear through chain reactions. Dust given off by the stars form unique planets with the elements you developed. You can try and wait for things to happen, or do some divine intervention by mixing atoms to create compounds on a planet. Again, not any element or compound can survive on whatever barren planet you have, so experiment. In addition to creating elements and compounds, you can multiply and strategically place them in different areas, fling gas and dust and comets from elsewhere upon the planet, raise or lower the temperature, sculpt the layers and surface of the planet, and more. The next step might be trying to make an atmosphere, and water, and hopefully life.
Once life is created, you have the ability to build upon its physicality and behavior in a free, open-ended Organism Editor (with certain restraints and limitations). You can also possess life (watching from a first-person or third person view, even if the life doesn't have eyes or ears) and do the things it has the ability to do. You, as God, may make better choices than the life itself. And if you're bored of playing as a microbe or whatever it is, you can just de-possess the life and switch to something else, or just remain being god.
At any point in your career as God, you can just sit back and watch how the things you do affect the universe. Even after the Big Bang, if you did nothing, things would still happen. But the beauty of a God game is that you have control over the outcomes of existence. And in this game, it's important to set goals for yourself, otherwise you won't have anything to do and you won't have fun. As you gain more experience as God, you also earn powers that you can influence the universe with--nonliving and living. Also, like in Spore, there are many types of editors in which you can create buildings, vehicles, contraptions, or whatever you want as long as you have access to the necessary materials. \
The game would continue on for a very long time, procedurally generating things and seamlessly causing chain reactions throughout the universe. Life would evolve, alone or by your hand, and they would interact in countless ways. Some life might be sentient, some smart, some dumb, some peaceful, some warlike--but these are just broad examples of things that may happen in the simulated universe. The life may gradually influence the world and the universe around it more and more. Eventually organisms might have the ability to travel space. Some organisms might be thinking of you as they live their lives. But anyway, this sort of thing would happen for a while. At a normal timescale, you could play the game in your universe for months.
However, as the matter in the universe continues losing energy and stops diffusing, it would begin to move backwards--inwardly, towards an increasingly massive black hole in the center of the universe. Eventually, everything would be gone. All matter and energy would be sucked in, and the screen would fade from black and return you to your desktop. Maybe you would want to accomplish something before this happens. Maybe your goal would be to find a way to stop this from happening. Either way, if it does, that's the end of your universe. Of course, with all the matter in that black hole, further and further condensing into the small point, the game has simply come full circle. You can always start over again.
Wow, these are some freaking awesome responses/ideas, guys - WAY better than I was expecting. A mixture of what Keys and BananaFoam were talking about is kind of what I've always wanted, but much more fleshed out than my general ideas.
Anderson, your idea sounds like it would be freaking awesome as well, but I feel like it would only appeal to a small player base. I also think modern hardware is still a little ways off from being able to handle something like that to the extent that you're describing, but given the right development team and horsepower, it would be a hell of a thing.
[QUOTE=shadowndacorner;45699705]Anderson, your idea sounds like it would be freaking awesome as well, but I feel like it would only appeal to a small player base. I also think modern hardware is still a little ways off from being able to handle something like that to the extent that you're describing, but given the right development team and horsepower, it would be a hell of a thing.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I definitely agree with you. Mostly what I want is a better version of Spore--containing what they promised in 2005 and more. No engine, no software nor hardware could recreate what I have in my mind. But using merely the concepts, a game could come close enough. Pseudo-chemistry and pseudo-evolution? I think it could be done. Creative tools? Of course. And with an easy-to-use interface, example-goals to follow when playing the game, and a wide variety of God-abilities to play with, I think the game could have a very big audience. It could be called Aster (a cellular structure shaped like a star). Or Zenith (the point on the celestial sphere vertically above a given position or observer/a highest point or state; culmination).
a device that instantly induces a lucid dream wherein you also have total control
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