Paddle Game Idea

[Jacob Roman]

I've been wanting to do something like this forever, but what if I were to create a game similar to Arkanoid / Breakout, only its a scroller / shootem up game in 3D. The screen will automatically move in any direction in 3D, and you gotta break or shoot your way out of it. Once in awhile you'll end up in rooms you gotta break yourself out of by clearing the blocks, while at the same time juggling the ball. And there will be boss battles of course, both either while scrolling, or even boss rooms. What do you think? All ideas are welcome on the table.

[dunfiddlin]

Hate to be a web blanket, especially as an Arkanoid fan, but there's a reason that the idea has never gone into true 3D (well, lots of them actually). That it's playable at all is entirely due to the ball travelling in a plane entirely in front of the paddle. In a room, what counts as losable life? If the ball is infinitely elastic as Arkanoid requires wouldn't a 3d target space simply involve firing once and waiting for the ball to ricochet around until every target is hit (discounting the greatly increased risk of infinite loops!) What would there be for the player to do? If on the other hand the model is the infinite corridor, what happens if the ball goes through a wall and simply never comes back? And if it does come back how are you supposed to know where it's going to arrive. Even the normal 2D gameplay would be near impossible if the players eye level was effectively through the paddle. I just can't see it catching on.

[Jacob Roman]

The X and Z plane would be the area to work with. So anytime the ball flys past you behind the camera, you lose a life. The camera will be slightly behind and above the player facing down at slight angle. The rooms and worlds will be a close corrdor based game. And I plan to use sweep test collision algorithm, so there will be no going through bricls or walls. And no worries about the ball flying away. However theres a twist. Youll be moving through the worlds on autopilot. So even though you can move left and right, slightly up, and slightly down, theres a chance the bricks or walls will crush you. The autopilot moving is not limited to just forward, but up/down, backwards, sideways, etc.

[dilettante]

Hmm, from the subject I was expecting something about naked frat boys chasing each other with crudely made cricket bats. Whew! What a relief.

[Shaggy Hiker]

If I understand this right, I think this would be a game that would only really make sense on a Kinect/Wii interface. Frankly, it sounds like it might have some serious limit to playability as a couch-surfing game because it's a bit hard to see what the reward system would be. Score alone can hold people for a time, but games, these days, generally have to generate a sense of accomplishment and purpose. Having hidden goodies behind bricks would boost the reward perks a little, but an objective would boost it more. However, if you made it a game based on Kinect/Wii, you might turn it into a game something like combat-raquetteball. In fact, you could even introduce enemies who would be doing the same thing, except that if they hit you it would kill you, and you could take them out just like any block. You could call it Tea Bag Tempest.

[dilettante]

You could call it Tea Bag Tempest.

See my previous post here.

[dilettante]

On a (slightly) more serious note...

Anyone seen any phone/tablet games that make use of built-in GPS to let players fire on each other with mortars? Sort of like the ancient "Artillary" PC games, using GPS (mortar phone and target phone) plus the inputted azimuth, elevation, charge, projectile weight, etc. to determine hits and damage.