You might be surprised, Bison. Some of us are realistic about our prospects.
Here's one what I thought was a pretty good idea I had for a
relatively simple game, apparently a decade ago (date on the document here I'm copy/pasting from is April 2, 2003).
Its a 2D almost shmup type game where you play a dragon with free movement in any direction over a looping world map, as well as being able to step between altitudes relative to the ground plane using multiple parallaxing map layers. Air layers might have dynamically populating alpha masked clouds, and smoke (particularly since fire is the other key element). The dragon breathes fire on things and that fire spreads on it's own to any adjacent flammable tile while AI controlled human units try to put it out and fight the player off. Player munches on said human units. It's all about running around like a maniac venting your destructive urges.
Up for grabs to anyone who comes through here. If anyone does anything with it I'd like a copy, of course. If you turn the idea into the next Angry Birds or Tetris, I trust you to be decent enough to look me up and not let me go on living in this hillbilly shack. Otherwise, meh. Here's the original doc:
The Last Dragon
GAME CONCEPT by Robert Satori
Basic Idea
A little bit of Populous, a little bit of Age of Empires, and a game not like either one of those at all. An arcade game with utterly simple rules: you are a dragon, able to fly around an isometric map setting fires, destroying buildings, eating critters (and humans), and hybernating when things get boring. Of course, the appeal is that it is not just an arcade game like a scrolling shooter where maps are structured with waves of targets and obstacles; rather, the world is a perpetually replenishing ecosystem in which critters multiply and trees grow to fill the wake of your destruction. And you, the dragon, grow fatter and more powerful with age... unless (or until) the humans grow too much themselves and rob you of lifegiving food or fire.
Concept notes: WORLD BASICS
RESOURCESUnlike a full-blown strategy game with myriads of units designed to counter and compliment one another on the battlefield, and numerous resources employed to progress up multiple paths of a complex "tech tree," this world is geared to the sole purpose of surviving and destroying the DRAGON menace. There is no fighting among humans, nor aspirations to other goals. For added simplicity, it is not necessary to model a believable set of resources, as the player will not be concerned with managing the human progress; only putting an end to it. So, ultimately the world needs only two resource types: FOOD and LUMBER. Note that both of these can be readily destroyed by the player, and further they can be made useful to the player.
FOOD
For the human population food equates directly to the population. N food == N humans. Of course, each unit walking around contributes to a regular degradation of food stores, even into the negative. Similarly, food is strength, growth, and life to the player. But for the player there is no distinction at all between a human and food; all forms can be harvested equally.
LUMBER
Trees spawn. Humans can harvest them, and they translate directly to structures and devices (even when the relationship doesn't make sense because the device uses metal or other typical 'resources' in construction). Seemingly, the player would not gain much by destroying trees, especially when FIRE is limited, but that is remedied by the player's need for HEAT (see THE DRAGON section below). Forest fires innately provide the best net result for raising world temperature, since fires spread to more area from a single successful ignition than structural fires -- ignition expense may be significantly less as well; especially when no humans are nearby to combat the ignition.
HUMAN UNITSAgain simplified drastically from the strategy game paradigm, the Human units have only a few basic purposes. Building and Fighting the Dragon are the most basic.
BUILDERS
These are the foundation of noncombatant human units. hey will have subclasses, but that may be handled as a state machine variation within the same unit type. Builders harvest both lumber and food (sub-states or types: lumberjack, hunter, gatherer, farmer), construct buildings, and repair damage to both structures and lumber resources.
FIGHTERS
Although a simplified linear 'tech tree' will be helpful in categorizing more advanced, expensive and effective sub-types in this category, fighters do just one thing: attack the player. Some subtypes may be geared to defending settlement areas, while others form groups to hunt outside the settlement area.
THE DRAGONThe player. This is a
perpetually advancing unit with two basic abilities: eat and destroy. Anything that can't be eaten can be destroyed, and there are direct rewards for doing either of these things.
The dragon's primary desire is to rid the world of humans so that other, less degenerate (and less dangerous) food forms may flourish unhindered. Potentially immortal save for violence, being the Last Dragon is not a terrible concern. The dragon's secondary desire is warmth. Being cold-blooded is only part of that concern (though hibernation instincts are not healthy when dangerous critters abound); heat is the engine for reptilian digestion -- and in turn for production of intestinal gasses, the fuel of DRAGON FIRE. Thus, the warmer the world, the greater the rate of ammunition supply. Truly, dragons are wonderfully self-sufficient creatures, an ecology of perpetual destruction as pure as the stars (and infinitely proud of it).
In terms of resource consumption the dragon is able to increase his store of resources without limit. Food translates directly to 'hit points' and heat (lumber destruction) to dragon fire (using a heuristic based on world temperature above mean 72 degrees fahrenheit per timestep). Although food/hp value is degenerative, as with human units, the amount of loss per timestep is relatively low (and degeneration rate is 0 in hibernation state, though again this is not a good state to be caught in by human hunters).
HIBERNATIONHas two purposes. When hibernating, time is sped up drastically. So the player should be given the option of hibernating at any time when resources are low and there are no humans in the world (boring time). Since stored Dragon Fire will persist without degeneration (and continue to grow so long as world temperature remains above the mean) this could leave the player stronger for facing the next wave of human population, even as world temperature drops during the wait. If attacked, time progression will return to normal, and the Dragon Fire reserve will allow the player to rise quickly to fight, and eat, the attackers.
The other purpose is negative, and not under player control. If the world temperature drops below the mean and Dragon Fire is exhausted, hibernation will be forced on the player, with little time for preparation and no certainty that it will ever end. Human structures increase world temperature as well, so recovery is a possibility, but if the dragon is located by human hunters and attacked in this state, though time progression again reverts, with no Dragon Fire reserve the player will only be able to watch as humans carve up the comatose avatar (and eventually haul away the carcass to their storehouses as food).
GAME GOALSI suppose there should be an ultimate winning condition. But for a start there should be records kept of Dragon survival. How long you can survive; how powerful you can become. These are goals, a kind of score, well suited to an arcade-style game.
However, perhaps the final goal could be an ultimate age of survival. Living to see the end of the world in a glorious blaze of heavenly fire -- the sun expanding to a red giant and obliterating everything; a fitting end for a virtually immortal creature, I think. Perhaps something else.
To reach such a goal, the arcade standard of perpetually more challenging waves of play should be used. In this game the regeneration of resources (trees and food) persists at a fixed rate. In the beginning perhaps humans only spawn fresh again after 1000 game years. And then only 1, then 2, then 3, and so on, per cycle. Given ten cycles, the spawn begins to occur more frequently, after 900, 800, 700, 600 game years, and so on, still increasing in spawn, capping these spawns at a maximum of 100 humans spawned every 100 years (or something that makes sense in the actual system). With resources being consumed quickly such end phases would leave both humans and the dragon in tight straits -- while the dragon begins to have more difficulty generating heat from limited lumber resources (even if able to eat the humans before they evolve to dangerous forms), humans face starvation quickly without swarming upon those same meager resources like locusts. If the dragon is forced into hibernation by dropping world temperatures, the situation would likely not be rectified before the dragon is slain in his sleep (since humans would not be brought to such a screeching halt, though it may take another spawn or two before resources recover enough to support the human population).
What I just described is a kind of A-Life environment. Not the most complex one, or even complex at all, since the ecology is artificially altered on a regular basis, the factors of survival are not dependent upon efficiency of the units (except for the player, but that's another matter), and all elements are identical to others of the same type without significant variance. I do not consider this anything near the kind of challenge a legitimate simulation would be; just enough to make it interesting for the dragon.
THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO SEE I think of games as foundations that can be built upon. This concept is no different. Ideally this game would be designed in a fairly open-ended fashion, so that the A-Life aspect might be refined by others to a level of detail comparable to strategy games like AoE, with many kinds of units, or many variations of human culture, or simply changed stylistically to fit other themes of human society (cowboys with sixshooters or aliens with rayguns). And as computers become more and more capable, the world might be made larger and larger, until it spans thousands of screens and the hunt for human settlements becomes a new challenge.
The game map should wrap around (simply removing the RADAR/HUD display common to strategy games will help in changing the feel of flying over an isometric world, but removing the 'edges' in favour of a continuing loop in all directions will make the hunt all the more immersive, I believe). A random map generator is always nice, as well.
Three or four levels of detail used, allowing the dragon to scout more territory from high altitudes (though individual humans are only visible/edible from the lowest altitude and the highest is partially obscured by a translucent layer of clouds in the style of recent scrolling shooters
[this was originally written in 2003, remember]). This is just a stylistic image, though, not really important to the essential game.
ADDITIONAL/DISCARDED IDEAS
When this concept first dawned on me I envisioned the game progressing through multiple levels of human development. Many successive maps in which humans progress in key stages from tree-swinging primitives to modern-day computer geeks (with interim stages including Roman centurions and Old West gunslingers as well as the Medieval style associated with dragons). This idea came from looking at scrolling shooters, in which such broad stylistic changes through a series of levels is the standard. This notion was discarded with the thought that I would want to work on resources for this game and realizing the volume of unique resources something like that would require. Not happening! But, yes, definitely thought about it. IF ANYONE CARES TO SWIPE THIS IDEA I HOPE THEY WILL DO IT THIS WAY (hint hint).
(snip)
Yeah, I have too many rods in the fire now to be able to work on resources for this. That was then. On some level the idea still interests me; maybe it'll interest someone else. Especially now that things like sprite-based fire simulation can be done with 3D hardware support for cast shadows and particle smoke by the truckload in an essentially 2D game without it being much of a performance hit.
*If anyone realizes something based on this concept, please do not tie it inseparably to Steamworks. I do not do business with Valve, and that would be a bit of a kick in the nuts.