My Ideas: Cheating in the Wish Fullfillment Category

Before I start today's blog, I have to admit something; of the five major sections that I do here, this is increasingly my favorite. I'm running out of things to discuss about my life, at least not non-depressing ones, and even the rants are trickier, but I always am eager to share the work I've made, even in this limited format. Yes, I know that pretty much nobody reads it, but in a way that helps, and in another way completely it doesn't really matter. What matters is that out there, I have made at least that smallest contribution to the collective information and ideas of the world. It's very cathartic.

That being said, this is a fairly embarrassing update. You see, of the sixteen ideas that formerly made up my portfolio, plus the new ones of the last couple of years and the overarching mythology tying them together, I'd say I currently have three ideas that I consider my favorites. These are ideas I constantly study, revise, go over in my head, and even live out or at least imagine the dialogue and characters thereof. If given the chance, I would accept the job of making any of these games into an actual product in an instant. However, there is a tiny part of my brain that gives a different answer in the hypothetical universe where I am given the chance to make any game I want in exactly the way I want it to be made. This alternate answer is the game I named Goliath, and the reason for this answer can be summed up simply: pure fanboy-ism.

Goliath is, at its heart, a futuristic action game using a city as the setting. In other words, it's a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game set in the future. The innovations were pretty drastic, though. For one thing, you don't play as a person. Your character is Goliath, an experimental shape-shifting robot created for the military. Early in the game, you are lost by the unit that created you, leaving you to wander the city on your own. Over time, you get the ability to assume various forms, starting with a hovering, futuristic car, and later including a giant, robotic, cat-like creature, a humanoid better suited to individual fights, and finally a cat/bird hybrid form capable of flight. So, in other words, it's a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game set in the future, except you play as the car.

The other main innovation, and the one that motivates my cynical response above, is that the game doesn't have a normal, linear plot. Instead, it was intended to be an anthology divided into many chapters. Each chapter can be separated from the others by months, years, or even decades, since Goliath is a robot and doesn't have to worry about aging after all, and each chapter features a new master/driver to command Goliath (except near the end, when Goliath is so free-willed he needs no master.) More importantly, each chapter has a new designer/writer and a new storytelling style entirely! In my ideal version of the game, each chapter's designer would be a bigwig in the storytelling universe, and of course they would include figures like Joss Whedon, Tim Burton, Charlie Kaufman, and others of my personal idols. It should be noted that my earliest version of this list included the likes of the Wachowski brothers and M. Night Shyamalan, which should give you an idea on exactly when I came up with this game!

So, yes, the sad part of me would make this game just so I could hang out with my idols and work on a project with them, is that so wrong? It's not like I think that the idea of the game is lacking by itself. The anthology idea alone could be brilliant, but mostly it's the setting, the city of Unaris, that inspires me. Sandbox setting plus future has been done before (including the recent Crackdown, which I haven't played yet. I will, I will. Sorry. Shut up.) For example, Jak 2 and 3 for the Playstation 2 directly aped the Grand Theft Auto design for its own city. But I found it lacking. For one thing, unlike the Grand Theft Auto settings, the Jak cities never felt real to me. They were too labyrinthine, too lacking in notable landmarks, too empty of activities and stories and life beyond the slack-jawed pedestrians.

I wanted Unaris to be different, so I spent much of my development planning time on its design. What else could I do, after all; I was planning on making a multi-contributor anthology, so detailed plot work was impossible. Unaris is notable in that it is a much more vertical location than modern cities. Buildings and entire districts are stacked on top of each other, which both makes for a nice visual motif of having the most affluent parts of the city being the only ones to have regular sunlight and making city navigation much more fun for a character more capable of platforming than the average sandbox protagonist.

Admittedly, there were a lot of clichés in this version, from the surface-level slums that barely sustain themselves on reflected sunlight to the top-level church designed to encourage the rich and powerful, but the sheer visual and gameplay possibilities were endless. There was Angle City, a mini-community all of its own created underground and run by madmen. Or the White Noise, an industrial district permanently shrouded by fog and hazardous to human inhabitation. Or the floating sphere that represents this city's equivalent of Wall Street. My favorite, though, is the mercantile district, and empty shaft stretching from the city's depths to its peak, showing an easy cross-section of all of Unaris; a dizzying view even before the artificial rivers built midway up the city and other landmarks. Even simple things like swimming in the city reservoir could be amazing in the right environment, and there are very few environments I made that I'm more proud of than Unaris.

Even in the very realistic view that I'll never make this game alongside the creators of Buffy and Edward Scissorhands, I would place this idea among the top ideas I would ever create. Just the image of Goliath struggling its way onto a floating saucer owned by the inevitably corrupt government officials, or leaping his way through the city's launch bay on his way into space, or simply bounding to the roof of the tallest building in the city and howling like the urban carnivore that he is still gives me chills years later. It's an idea that I not only want to share with my idols; it's one I want to use to become one of their peers.