Game Idea: The Flaming Monkey Game

[salstadt]

Hey all,

 

Here's a new idea for a game. As with my previous mockups, I might be starting a little too detailed, but that can always be toned down later. The idea of this game is that you are a flame, a little bit of fire, and for whatever reason you need to set every monkey in the near area on fire, too.

 

 

What happens is the first monkey touches you, and catches aflame. He begins running wildly and there begins the game -- you control the monkey, sort of. The monkey on fire will always be running at full speed, frantically (because of course he's on fire). You can control him by making him run left or right, and can make him jump, but you cannot stop or control his run beyond that.

 

As I said before, the object of the game is to light all the monkeys on fire. When you as the flaming monkey run past another monkey, the previous monkey will turn ashen white, and you'll then be controlling the new flaming monkey. The difficulty comes in because monkeys will only burn for a few seconds before they go out. So like Crazy Taxi did with the fares, you must string together monkey after monkey, without going slow enough to exhaust your monkey. This requires some amoun of planning because if you're on one side of the level, and the last monkey is on the other, it's unlikely you could reach him in time.

 

To beat each level, you must light every monkey. Monkeys would ideally be wandering around, but that would depend on the coding. I also played with the idea of them atacking you as you near, but that's probably too complex. There will also be trampolines, which can launch you to areas too far to leap from, or to simply make leaping easier. I was playing with the idea of having a mini-map at the top to show where the remainign monkeys are, but it would probably be more fun to make the player search them out.

 

So that's the idea in a nutshell. String monkey to monkey together without running out. At the top of the screen would be a monkey counter, and possibly a timer left on your flame (maybe difficult mode gives you no timer).

 

So give me your thoughts on this, suggestions, etc. And as with my last few ideas, I'm not a coder so if this idea sounds interesting to anyone who is, let me know and maybe we can team up to work on it.

 

- Adam

[Shortly]

Flaming monkeys?

 

I'd buy that for a dollar!

[Kuddy]

[Blackbird]

Suggestions... well, first of all, you'd do much better to have every sprite mono-colored, at least per scanline, especially with the setup you have there.

 

For the amount of sprites you have, you probably have two routes. Either you can design each level so that every platform on screen at any given time never has two monkies on the same scanline. That way, you could use one sprite for the character, and one for each monkey. The harder route is if you programmed it so that the kernal drew sprites according to when it's drawing the platforms. You could use one sprite to draw a monkey, and if there's another monkey parallel to that one, have the kernal update the registers and draw him as well. Again, one sprite would be used for the character-controlled monkey.

 

You should eliminate the clouds completely, they'd never work out. The timer, maybe, as long as you don't have monkeys going behind it or relatively close to it. You might do better by having no platforms at the top at all, so that you're always insured you can draw the timer.

 

You'll probably have to make the platforms less detailed, so there's only one playfield color per scanline. Mainly that's only relating to the darker ends of each platform...

 

I actually think its a cool idea, for a minigame at least. What'd you get the idea from, when Wario's on fire? Same controls.

[Blackbird]

With all that in mind, here's a concept idea:

[chadtower]

Speaking strictly as a gamer and wannabe developer...

 

YES! I love to exhaust my monkey!

 

Monkeys on fire... I would buy that. I would preorder that. I think it is a great concept. I love it.

[pmpddytim]

Technically I think what you have there are flaming Apes. The picture was not clear enough that I could examine their dental pattern but a primate with no tale = ape or human

 

Just &^*@ with ya. Might be a good game. I think I played somthing like it back in the day on a computer game called "humans" except you had to light the little cavemen's torches.

 

Tim

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I actually think its a cool idea, for a minigame at least.

Yup, very cool idea!

 

But definitely much too complex for a 1K minigame.

[salstadt]

Blackbird, I really love the monkey counter! Great job, it adds a lot more flair than another number set. So, anyone wanna try and work with me on this?

 

"What'd you get the idea from, when Wario's on fire? Same controls."

 

Haha, maybe subconsciously, yeah. Wario 4 is definitely one of my favorite games, although I didn't make the connection as I created this. More, I had the idea of someone doing a connect-the-dots puzzle rapidly, or kind of a Keystone Kapers with multiple opponents. The monkey's been my mascot for a while now though:

 

 

 

- Adam

[uosipa llamxew]

Oooh! I want to box a flaming monkey! :-) Gee, I never thought I'd hear myself say that! HAHA!

 

I'd like to see some of these ideas be put into effect. If nothing else, I love looking at your great pixel-work!

 

BTW, I picked up an early demo of Fadeout a while back... great stuff! :-)