Saturday, May 08, 2010

Psychic Ball

Ok, here is the idea for this game: Psychic Ball.

Two players, red and blue, use their psychic abilities (real psychic abilities - not any in game simulation) to compete in an online battle.

Random number generators award points at random, and it is set up kind of like tennis, rally score, point score, game score, set score, to determine a winner (best 2/3 sets).

I want it to feel like a fighting game though. This is serious competition. Graphics will have some fighters that look like martial arts combatants from Virtua Fighter or something, as avatars for players. Also, I think I'll steal the ranking system from Virtua Fighter (also used in the board game Go) that goes from 10th to 1st Kyu, and then from 1st to 10th Dan. I think it's really fun to rank up in games, and fewer levels makes them more significant. I was thinking 23 levels total (since that's my favorite number) with maybe Master, Ascended Master, and Deity being the top three ranks.

From what I have read and heard about psychic abilities, some people should definitely be able to be better at this than others. Also, playing with a group focused on you winning should have an exponential affect on your ability to affect the randomness of the numbers being generated.

I had this idea originally when I took my first programming (or second) class in college, but I went for a poker simulation instead. I think I made the wrong choice. I was afraid of being made fun of or whatever, but there are a million poker simulations. There is only one (or, actually zero at this point) Psychic Ball.

Ok, I guess I need to get on the ball so that I beat the competition in terms of producing this game. I am really interested in keeping statistics on this game so a nice database server up and running to track player stats etc is really important to me. But, not to brag or anything (actually, exactly to brag), I am really good at database design, so this should be no problem.

If you are a talented writer, artist, designer, business person, psychologist (psychology are good at statistics and studies, so could help me determine what is relevant data), or anyone, and have some ideas and would like to contribute, please contact me by leaving a comment. I can use all the help I can get. (I'm kind of busy with work lately - at least I have a job.)

The truth is, Ryan and I have talked at length about making a game, but Ryan things psychic abilities are hogwash so is extremely reluctant to contribute or support me in this. Which is really discouraging. But when I think about it, and plan it, and start sketching and designing ideas, screen shot thumbs, databases, etc. I get totally psyched up and jazzed about the whole thing, so I think I'm going to focus on this as my primary creative project for a while.

I really need to focus on one thing, too. Too many times have I focused on an idea just for a few moments, and even though its a fabulous one, let it fade into history forever. This one is different though. I know because its been at the back of my mind since early in college. I haven't seen anyone else perusing anything like it. Ryan discourages me. Yet, I still am totally passionate and excited about it.

If you support me in this endeavor, leave your support in the form of a comment as well. That would be very helpful.

Wish me the best of luck. I hope I can get something cool up and running very fast. I advertise that I am an agile developer, so this is a test of my abilities to deliver my quickly changing design requirements. I'll build a prototype fast, get it up and running for demonstration, and go from there.

Lots of love to all my readers,
Zanthir

1 Comments:

At 7:26 PM, Blogger zanthir said...

Oh, and Ryan, when you read this, sorry for painting you as the discouraging friend. You are constantly encouraging me to program and code games, etc. You only discouraged me on this one particular idea, because you weren't interested. There's nothing wrong with that.

Now that I'm committing myself to going ahead with this, feel free to change your mind about supporting this game too. Actually, I think you said you'd help with this game already, you just didn't think it was a great idea, and you'd much rather work on other games. It's that pressure that led me to write about 23 pages of design documents for that other game. I should have been writing (still should) write it about Psychic Ball, since I have so much more love for it, and it is so different from other games out there.

 

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