Hey folks,
So recently I have been toying with the game concept of sound. Lot of new video games recently have really been playing on the whole sound concept and many gamers admit that they do end up loving the soundtracks and music for most modern games and think that it really pulls them into the game. I also agree with that statement and find that good music and or soundtracks can really make a game and even helps players play the game better if they actually have good music to listen to as well as get into the mood of the game.
With that idea in mind, I was actually working on a game idea that allows you to actually literally surf music. I was always a big fan of the SSX game serious back in the PS2 days and I know many gamers out there like the idea of surfing/riding giant waves, objects and or pretty much anything else out there as well as doing really cool tricks. For the game concept, which I am going Soundwaves, I wanted to take that idea and apply it to music.
Instead of riding on snow, cement or water, players would actually be riding on music waves. Much like any other surfing, snowboarding or skatboarding game, the player would control a character from a third person persepctive and the character would be more or less locked towards the bottom of the screen much like other games of this type. You can move forward a bit, but the whole point is that the character isn't going all over the screen.
Now the real kicker would be the fact that players are having their characters ride music. Coming from a focused point way down the path from the player's character, sound waves would be coming out towards the player and the player would then be able to use his/her character to surf these sound waves. Now the waves would sort of looks like those pin art toys that were made really big back in the 90's thanks to the Sharper Image and science museums everywhere.
So bacially imagine the player's character standing on a surface in the game that looks much like the image above. Where the ground is all bumping looking. Now imagine the ground going up and down forming little hills and edges while coming at the character from a long distance all the way to the bottom of the screen. Like I said though, all those little hills and edges though would be based on music and or sounds.
In the game would be a program that reads music and then based on the rythem and beats of the music, the program would then create all the hills and edges in game and send them speeding at the player's character. In a way, its like Guitar Hero, but instead of having to play the music beats on your guitar, your character is having to surf over these "sound hills" all the while doing all sorts of crazy tricks to gain points.
Now the game itself would come with 25 different songs of course to give people a feel to the gameplay. But once they get use to it, they can download and or add their own tracks to the game since the game will have the hill building program already built into it. This way players can add whatever songs they like to the game and try to see what sort of scores they can get with the music they like.
Of course they can take the game online and there would be scoreboards for all the main songs that came with the game as well as scoreboards for user uploaded songs as well. That way other players from around the world can see what songs others are playing and may even decide to go check that song out for themselves. Since their are millions of songs out there of course, there will be lots of scores. But we can break them down into genre and rank them by how many scores were submitted for each song. That way people can see which ones are the most popular to play.
Art style wise, I was thinking of using something similiar to the manga series, Soul Eater. A light playful type style that is a bit sytlized and looks like a mix between Japanese and American art styles. I am debating about if the game should be very bright or very dark, but I think either could work really. Most likely dark backgrounds with light characters would work I think. That way the characters pop a bit more and people won't loose their vision trying to focus on things going on in the background.
Anyway, its just a idea I was toying with. I think it could be a cool little game since it would allow players to use their own music as part of the game and would have a highly stylized look to it as well. Music games have really become hugely popular as of late and I think this one could step up and be a good contender as well since it would be easy to make and fun to play.
-P. Knight
