To my knowledge, this is a pretty unique game design plan. If another game has already used this concept, then I've never seen it, but I sure would like to. Either way, very little could deter me from doing this project.
In a different thread over at Geek Culture, we were discussing games we'd never want to see. Somehow, a conversation about Myst lead me to re-visit an old idea I've had for quite some time now... and I'm pretty sure I'm going to go at this concept full force now.
The idea is to construct a game using photographs of the real-world locales in my area and using them to act as literal first-person views of the play area. I'd shoot in Binghamton, NYC, Syracuse, Ithaca, and several other cities in the New York area. I might even mix it up and go international... find someone in the UK who could take photos for me and mix up the play a bit
If you've played the original Myst, then you're familiar with the control schematic of clicking on an area that you want to travel to, then being taken to that area. This would be virtually the same thing. Take a look at this visual example, and note the numbers I've imposed on the image:
Each of the three numbers marks a clickable area, where the player can make a choice. If they click "1" (one), they'll head west (left) along the street. If they click "2" (two), they'll head east (right) along the street. And if they click "3" (three), they'll enter the building and see the foyer area. This is just a random picture I pulled off the net with a few seconds of MS Paint spent on putting the numbers down, but it should give you an idea of what I'm imagining. At any rate, when you click on one of these regions of the photo, the game would load another photo of the respective area that you're headed to, and all of the functions you could perform in that area.
It gets interesting when you enter a building. For example, let's say you enter a living room. There's a TV and a computer. Well, you could click on the TV and actually turn it on, or click on the computer and read an e-mail or something. Using sprite images of objects in the scene, you could move large objects, open doors, etc. And clicking on some objects might bring up a video segment, where you see the character conversing with someone or interacting with their environment in some way.
So far I'm still in the "how hard is this going to be" phase, but I already know I want it to take place in a ghost town... say, you're playing in a major U.S. city after some apocalyptic event or something. Taking photographs in an urban environment during the day means you'll end up with cars, birds, clouds, and people moving around... but Tinkergirl came up with a brilliant idea to resolve this issue: take multiple photographs at various intervals, then crop together the various images to eliminate the people, animals, and objects moving around in each image.
So here's a few questions:
* Assuming the videos created were shorter than 5 to 10 seconds and shot in a low resolution, how large would each video segment be in terms of file size? Have any of you shot videos similar to this?
* Assuming that each image is in .png or maybe even .jpg format, how many images would be too many?
* What's the largest game (in terms of file size) that you've ever downloaded to play?
* Assuming the game were made well and it were set at a reasonable price (say, below $9.99 and just enough to offset costs), would you consider paying for a game like this?
"In an interstellar burst, I'm back to save the universe"
