Ludomancy

A good part of Portal doesn´t involve avoiding being shot, it´s just solving puzzles.
The last part of Half Life 2 also feels like god mode with the modified gravity gun.

But it´s an interesting thing to think about, what would a god do? I think gods build, destroy and observe, but there is never a threat to them (or they wouldn’t be gods). Like real life for many of us. And most games try to take us out of it.

By Marco Mustapic on 05.23.08 11:31 am

9 in the morning, you open your reader, the first feed says:

“The Raveler Alien & the Heartbroken Uruguayans”

Inmediately, a lot of testers are seeing the idiot who laughs a lots, lonely on his desk. Thanks for the good moment.

I like to think about smoked stuff before start working so, I think is not so hard do a shooter in permanent god mode, as you say, must be exploratory. To keep shooting, you must unlock new places or zones, by eliminating all enemies (similar to dragon ball sagas for PS2)at the time, you could need do that to recover munitions because you are god, but that not implies to be rich or control the matrix to create infinite bullets. If you need an enemy, well, gods can be killed by other god/s following theories of greek mitology, religion changes in egipt (they killed a god to become lost of god, and then kill the gods to be monoteitas again) and Saint Seiya

Tattoos are pixel art, pixels on skin

cant wait tosee tig games, cant wait for next ghallenge (i’m thinking i will participate) cant wait for 18:00 go home and sit in playstation all night looonnggg (chorus) all niight all night (singer) all night looong

By Matias on 05.23.08 1:42 pm

The permanent god-mode shooter is an interesting idea; it’s a similar constraint to Braid: what if you couldn’t die in a platformer?

Naturally I’m led to think it would be puzzley, like Marco suggested with Portal. Although Portal got rid of shooting as the core mechanic, really. If you wanted to keep shooting the core mechanic you might want to do something that gives you a lot of stylistic expression (a la Max Payne but better).

Expression through shooting style is the only way I can think of to make the shooting element still really matter in a game where you have infinite health and infinite bullets. Puzzles and exploration will de-emphasize the shooting: obviously you could play Deus Ex on God Mode and still have a blast interacting with the environments and the characters.

By Darius K. on 05.23.08 4:14 pm

Well, perhaps for change the player can shoot to save someone instead of himself. If you save him then he will acknowledge you as his savior, his family will be devotional to you and you get to know his story. Let him die and you miss all that.

And I think that if you are god, in a game ammo should not be a problem, dying obviously shouldn’t be a problem too. Also I wouldn’t put and objective that would give you the feeling that you lose, because god can’t lose (anyone seen dogma?) so if the player loses the opportunity to save someone at some point I’d give him the opportunity to go back in time (because god should be able to go back in time).

By Fran on 05.25.08 12:02 am

Well, now that I’m thinking more clearly the game is about the player being unable to die, not being God (my bad). That was an assumption of mine (after reading Matias’ post).
In that case, players can’t die but lose because they lost an objective or even be out of ammo. But I maintain my “idea” of having the player protecting something that it’s not him because that would make the player focus his attention on shooting something and not just wonder around not caring on what’s happening.

By Fran on 05.25.08 12:10 am

I think you raised three different ideas:

1) Gods can be killed. I agree. They are unbelievably tough, and can only be killed with trickery or inifite force (I just came up with this).
2) Replacing the vulnerability of the player by having to protect other vulnerable entities or conserve ammo would defeat the purpose of being in God Mode.
3) I think Darius hit a major nail on the gameplay…(probably, because he is playing Everyday Shooter too and that puts us in the same vibe) I was, too, thinking about using style as a replacement mechanic for having to protect yourself. Being capable of withstanding brutal aggression is already stylish. So I think this is venue is the most interesting to explore. I can think of a possible prototype for this, involving Bullet ML and ear-bleeding soundtracks. Which means it’s going to take a while to become a reality. Oh well.

By Daniel Benmergui on 05.28.08 12:42 am

About the FPS and the “God Mode”:

- the “shooter” part of FPS has to indeed include shootin? Cause you know Portal can be described as an FPS but you don’t actually shoot.

- I would try something different than puzzles. I would make a game based around heavy interaction with characters and the action and story would move forward pushed by the choices of the player and that choices would all be narrative or moral choices. In fact, that would be like 3D interactive fiction (which is usually associated with literary fiction, in this case I suppose it would be associated with film fiction).

In this case the shooting could be kept relevant with story purpose.

- What you’re saying about style makes me think of the astonishing trailer for Mirror’s Edge.

-There are some variations on FPS that I’d like to see:

*A roguelike FPS
*A turn-based FPS
*A good implementation of the second person shooter
*A completely psicodelic non sequitur oneiric FPS

By Darío on 06.06.08 5:47 pm