Bullets

Lets have a shooter, 2D or 3D with only a limited number of bullets and no ammo pickup.

Weave

There is something fascinating about the genre of shmups, and particularly some of the ideas of free moving shmups where you’re also in control of your direction of travel. This mechanism alone could be perfected in a number of ways (ie bring the ease of maneuvering around enemy bullets and bodies to the genre, include things like bombing runs and create a sense of strategy, create drag physics, perhaps even a two player game between movement and shooting) But I think there is another direction that this could be taken, the planar nature of the genre creates a certain aesthetic sense of position and motion, that is likely unattainable in 3D, but what if the 3rd dimension was something like jumping above or below the board? in many ways it would function like flow, but where shifting of height was much more dynamic – a means of escape, of navigation, of reward collection, or of powerful attacks – it would also create a sort of puzzle feeling from the insides of buildings. The problem seems to be that it would need to work in free directional movement which would make it difficult to get the kind of flow going that this mechanism needs. Perhaps a sewing metaphor would be perfect here – and the idea of a tether could make the movement interesting. This needs more thought, but promising development of shooters.

PS – Ikaruga, SYNSO 2, and Warning forever break down the three primary components of shooters – aesthetic sense of place, aesthetic disorientation of place, and target focus.

Witch poem

I’m trying to think of ways to make IF puzzles less based upon lock and key object puzzles and more related to the mechanisms of the form itself, that is text. My first idea is to incorporate the various mechanisms of poetry (rhyme, meter, alliteration, stanza forms etc) in order to create a series of word objects that can be combined for various effects. It would function as something like a magic casting system, so you might have a rhyme word ‘cold’ and could make other rhyming objects cold. (cold gold, cold mould etc). You could combine these in poems that would have more complex effects. Not the most elegant solution to the puzzle problem but a step in the right direction I think.