What game?

[Freakazo]

Okay so to give us some direction what should the game be? My personal main focus isn't to build a game, but to learn the other stuff so I'm open to ideas. 

This is my proposal:

How about an arcade style 2d shooter similar to the looks of the game pictures left, with the twist being that the enemies and your "bullets" are semi-realistic particles. For example the "enemy" would be an electron, you can cycle through your weapons and decide to shoot it with a proton, the electron gets attracted by the proton, and with the momentum of the proton they both fly of. If you shot the electron with a photon for example the electron would gain energy and move faster towards the player, so your weapon choice is an important part of gameplay. We should try to make the particles interactions as realistic as possible, but gameplay trumps realism. 

The game could somewhat (Depending on how realistic we do it) be considered educational as it teaches you about the elementary particles and their behaviour.

Comments and other ideas?

[adiasn...@gmail.com]

Sounds a good idea to me :)

I don't think the other guys saw your latest edit, gonna pm them in pm so they can join us here.

[Darwin Froese]

I like this idea, it's definitely an "old classic" that we would be fun and, hopefully, simple game to make. Plus I really like the twist you threw in about the proton/electron stuff!

[DeusexConstantia]

I like the idea and I think it is simple enough to pull it off while still being very challenging to do right.

Main questions (leaving organisation aside) I'd have if we go with this:

- Do we make the ship a particle type too? ( Changeable via interaction with pickups?)
- How many particles
- How deep do we go with the physics ( or alternatively how far up do we go with the chemistry)?

Other ideas:

A 'simple' 3D First Person Platformer with a very gamey momentum physics system.
And with gamey I mean stuff like keeping your speed while turning more or less on a dime.
Your main goal would be to start from Location a, make your way to location B to pick up something ( a message, contraband ) and then make it to a point C. All the while having enemies chase you so you can't loose your momentum.

It's way more complex, but still doable from a coding perspectivve I think (Enemies could be floating so we don't have to code anything more complex than a PacMan Ghost AI and don't have to bother with teaching them to do all the stuff the player does).

From a design perspective the main problems I see are making a control scheme and giving it a feel of flow ( which then becomes a coding problem :D)

[bernar...@gmail.com]

For a first project, I think 2D would be a good idea, and this idea sounds good. Along the same idea proton/electron attraction, what about proton/proton repulsion? ;) So you're saying the particles have mass too?

What DeusexConstantia said about having a feel of flow, that seems like something we need to keep note of.

[Freakazo]

Oh yes, proton - proton, electron - electron repulsion, protons heavy masses, electrons light masses etc. etc.

- Do we make the ship a particle type too? ( Changeable via interaction with pickups?)

I guess you can make the ship a particle too, making it so that you can "grow" your ship by picking up certain particles, I really should brush up on my particle physics knowledge! But as a simple example imagine your space ship is an atom (carbon) you can grow your carbon atom by hitting certain particles, hit a high energy atom fusing your cores together, now you need more electrons to maintain a stable atom and so on. But if you hit a proton with not enough energy to fuse into your core it might split up your core (spaceship), or knock of a few electrons. So certain interactions increases your health whilst others decreases it.
- How many particles.

Enough so that we have to worry about performance (Optimizing it should be a fun challenge), but not too much to be aesthetically displeasing. Guess we'll play around with it and see how it goes.

- How deep do we go with the physics ( or alternatively how far up do we go with the chemistry)?

I suggest we start of with the atomic level (electrons, protons, neutrons and photons) before we worry about about how deep we go. As for up, yeah that would definitely work especially if you can build up your spaceship as a more complex molecule. As an example having a Carbon atom with four hydrogen atoms as shields.

Hah, I'm actually quite excited about such a game now :)

@DeusexConstantia, somewhat reminds me of tribes, Highly recommend you play the game I just love going fast. It's like an addiction.