Game Idea Giveaway - Bacon Frenzy

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by Mini Chris:

• what sort of game idea you're looking for
  A platformer that has a different element then the normal platformer or a creative twist on current platformer elements
  

• what your goals are in making this game
  To create my first great game, as so far all my ideas have been not so good and I end up stop making them before they are even finished.
  

The normal idea: Swan Song

The weird idea: Bacon Frenzy


In short, this idea is physics-based platformer (like Gish) with graphics consisting of photographs of food from restaurant advertisements (kind of like And Yet It Moves except with food). That's right. I'll start with the first part.

First of all, you must play Gish if you haven't already. There's a demo. Play it. If for some reason you cannot download and install the game right now, at least watch this excellent design tour video to get an idea of what it's about.

So, now that you understand why it would be desirable to make a physics-based platformer, like Gish, in Flash, we may turn our attention to how. The blob of tar that stars as your avatar in Gish is a mass-spring system consisting of a large number of particles, too many for our poor, overworked Flash Player to reasonably handle. So, for our character, we will use the smallest mass-spring system possible - that is, three particles connected into a triangle. That, as luck would have it, is precisely the shape of a corn chip (or if you prefer, tortilla chip). Thus, our character is a corn chip. With a face, of course.

Here is how our corn chip moves: rotate left and right with the arrow keys (to roll along the ground) and compress into a very short triangle (and make a cute scrunched-up face) when the space bar is held down. Release the space bar and the corn chip jumps. If you want to get a feel for how this would work, try this suspiciously similar physics demo and hold down the left and right arrow keys at the same time, then release them. To get a feel for how the rolling along the ground movement would work, try this other physics demo. Not quite the same, but enough to show that it works.

Here is how our corn chip fights: (there's gotta be fighting, right?) corners are deadly, edges are vulnerable. Pretty simple. Mario can land on a Goomba anywhere as long as he's going down, but our corn chip has to land on a corner. Perhaps some corners are more powerful than others. Anyway, here you've got the basics for a vaguely Gish-ish platformer, where our triangular hero may jump and tumble around a playground of platforms, massacre entire species of innocent food items, collect salsa or something and rescue his girlfriend. Whatever. You are free to flesh out the story and actual gameplay as your inspiration takes you.

Here is how our corn chip is rendered: three lineTo() commands and a beginBitmapFill() with a photographic corn chip texture. You could even crop a rectangular piece out of this image and just use that for the texture bitmap. Anyway, the point is that everything in this game is made of food (or rather, images of food). And not just any food, but that hyper-real, airbrushed food that seems only to exist in advertisements for big restaurant chains. You want the player to be drowning in saliva after just a few minutes of playing this game. Frolicking among rolling hills of crispy bacon glistening with cholesterol, leaping from atop gloriously shiny apples to land on a golden-crusted loaf of artisan bread, obliterating a hostile crowd of sentient jello cubes... There are so many possibilities.

so many possibilities...

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!