My Ideas: Cataclysm

This is a very noteworthy and more than a little terrifying entry. You see, it will be the first I'll be posting one of my video game ideas; more importantly, it's one of my former "Big 16." For most of my life, I slowly cultivated my ideas, writing design documents when possible, and separating them into categories with time. For years, this division was purely temporal. The first division was the first four games, then the next four, and so on. I soon had four folders of four ideas each, each representing an approximate period of my life.

But I soon realized that this was, well, completely arbitrary, and about the time my fourth folder filled up, I renamed them to reflect my general mental state and design style at the time. The first folder contained what I called Heritage ideas, since they stretched back for years, as far back as high school or even older. They lacked a purposeful design similarity, instead coming from very early whims, adaptations of popular series that I made out of naiveté or practice and altered into original ideas, or the fragments of literal dreams. The second folder, which is as far as today's description will take us, is for the genre ideas. Made early in college, they are, honestly, not the work I'm the proudest of. In short, these are the games I made when a specific genre of game or a single game of that genre appealed to me, and I wanted to make a game that aped and/or improved this genre. In short, this was my "me too" period, and for years I sort of was ashamed at the minimal depth of these games. Yes, the original four games of this set were part of the original Big 16, but I tended to avoid thinking about or working on them.

Well, no more. If I'm going to expose my brain to the public (heh, if my microscopic audience counts,) then this is the perfect place to start. So let's start with the game that probably got the least love over the years: Cataclysm.

Cataclysm's origins were simple. I wanted to make a fighting game. This was in the year 1997 or so. Fighting games were long since passed the point of being new, but the fight for the heart of the genre had begun. As long as the Super Nintendo and Genesis were the consoles du jour, the games had to remain in two dimensions, and Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat flourished. But the same was not true of the arcades, and the first Virtua Fighters and Tekkens began to stake their own territory; territory that would become theirs once the Playstation became that generation's controlling console. Its 3D processing made such games naturals, while the Dark Stalkers and other carriers of the 2D banner were more ideally suited to the less popular Saturn.

As if often the case, I saw this revolution and mostly hated it. I liked ki-based projectiles and the impossible physics two dimensional sprites emphasized. Hell, I wanted it to go farther after seeing games like Dark Stalkers. Years later, Guilty Gear and the various Marvel/Capcom projects helped fill the void, but for the time I wanted to try making a game that used three dimensions but never lost the alien and overkill elements of earlier fighting games.

The result was Cataclysm. Like all games of this folder, I created this basic concept first and the story and setting second. I eventually decided on the clichéd fighting tournament with a sci-fi twist. The Cataclysm of the game was the universe-wide accepted term for the Big Bang, presumably because they determined that the universe followed the Deep Crunch/Big Bang model, and thus our universe's origin meant that the last one died. But that's more than enough depth for a fighting game. The important part was that not all of the Cataclysm split to form the universe. Twenty seven pieces remained more or less whole from this first moment, manifesting as physical objects that granted power.

Empress Verona, the despotic ruler of the Star Wars-style galactic empire, discovered this and managed to gain fourteen of these pieces, becoming nigh-unstoppable. However, until she got her hands on all twenty seven pieces, she would still fall short of perfection. The trouble was that the last thirteen pieces were not just physically within their hosts; they had bonded in various ways and could not be forcefully taken. For her to gain these pieces, she had to compel their owners to voluntarily risk their loss. She started the tournament and used herself as the incentive, promising that she would have a private audience with the tournament's winner.

The game's thirteen original, non-hidden playable characters were these thirteen owners of the Cataclysm, and each wanted a reason for this audience. The power an empress could offer was usually moot, as the Cataclysm wielders could sense each other and would know of her power as well. They fought each other for the right to fight her, though as usual for these games each had their own motivation. Some wanted the power of the unified Cataclysm shards, just as Verona did. Others wanted to fight her to get revenge, after being victims of her empire's military. Some just wanted to get proof of their own skill. Whatever the goal, Verona was unconcerned. After all, even a challenger that managed to earn the Cataclysms of all of their fellow competitors would have only thirteen parts, one less than Verona herself used.

The game featured attempts to make combat much simpler, yet flashier. I was impressed with the idea of having a single button that activated all special moves, selecting a direction or performing a directional combination and pressing the button would let the player use any of the special moves. I was impressed with this until Smash Brothers came out, at least. More important at the time was that most characters had their own system. For example, there was a character named Gemini that was actually a brother and sister from a deer-based humanoid race. The sister was the Cataclysm holder, but only the brother had any fighting training, so she used her Cataclysm shard to merge their bodies. This not only made them a better fighter, this gave them the ability to do two things at once, so they could perform a special move while blocking or use two moves at once. Another character was a ghost trapped in undeath by the Cataclysm. He could phase through attacks or even walls and the floor. Other characters included a demonic alien who could summon minions using the Cataclysm, and an especially stupid character whose stone-based Cataclysm powers were more dangerous than that of other fighters, but they all had a risk of damaging him.

The game was noteworthy for a few others things, not all of which I'm that happy about. For example, the main character, Ares the Earth's champion, was supposedly from Africa, making him the first non-white main character I created. I felt pretty good about that at the time, though he was a completely flat character, and the fact he came from my most reviled idea doesn't help. Fortunately, since then, nearly all games with any characters to speak of have a minority character or characters as the lead or among the main characters. But that's a complicated issue and worth another blog entry entirely.

Other things that bother me these days include the fact that the game's big twist amounted to basically just math (Oh no, the villain has 14 ultimate artifacts of power! And I only have 13 ultimate artifacts of power!) and several silly or flat characters. Ares, for example, was the genetically engineered, amnesiac, cybernetic member of a secret society with an evil father/creator. I'd have to work hard to make him a bigger cliché than that. Another character could use her Cataclysm to make aerial attacks and wanted all the shards to give her the ability of true flight. So this advanced galactic empire spanned the entire universe, but it took twenty seven pieces of ultimate power to fly? Jetpacks weren't invented?

Still, the idea had several kernels of a good idea, like the one-button special movies, and a later idea that replaced block with several types of defenses. Characters could block, parry, evade, etc., and each were a more effective (or the only effective) defense against each attack, adding another layer to offense and defense. Mind you, I mostly "borrowed" this system from the later system of saves that 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons introduced, but it's still new to the fighting game. And with a little work, a galaxy-wide fighting game could introduce very original characters and fighting styles. Though I still needed to work out how capturing shards of the Cataclysm from enemies would improve a character. The easy answer would be to simply give a character one additional special move for every enemy shard captured, but would that be the answer I would have now, if I were to remake the game? I don't think it would be.

Finally, this game (and more importantly my recent analysis of it,) is making me less apprehensive of the idea of making more genre-based ideas. These are not necessarily the dregs of my creativity, not if I refuse to let it be so. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, I entered the first new idea into my genre idea folder since college. The idea is only a page or two in length, but it has a lot of promise. With some effort, I can make it say something more than "me too." What other ideas can I make say that, ideas I may have abandoned?