The Everlasting Whiteboard

So the title of this post has two distinct parts:

After seeing Knocked Up with Laura today (which by the way was pretty good), we did some shopping and I finally picked up a decent sized whiteboard. I became obsessed with whiteboards while at Purdue and found them to essentially be my pensieve. Problems become so much easier to solve in front of a white board then endless meaningless scribbles in a notebook. This is also coming at a great time of need, since I need to push my engine efforts faster to meet up with this class's project. So thats the whiteboard part.

When I was in college, I got knee-deep into Warhammer. The game consumed an incredible amount of my time. I got so into it I would often stop doing homework to break open excel and start making army lists. My love for Warhammer was two-fold. I loved the numbers and I loved the lore. The guys and gals who put together the fiction of Warhammer do an awesome job and Army Books are incredible sources to keep around. My favorite army (after being through a few different ones) became the Dwarves. The art design and the story direction for them captivated me (and the heavy use of the world "ale"). The reason I bring up Warhammer is that as I get more components to my system created, I've been allowing myself moments to let my mind run wild with potential game designs. I've been fairly religiously keeping my thoughts to the ground where they lined up with what I knew how to do. I guess this is a side effect of getting so into the technical aspects of game creation. So I've been trying to indulge myself (as I used to do long before I wanted to be a programmer) with ideas of grandeur.

Part of the Dwarf lore in Warhammer is the huge Underground Kingdom they created that, for the most part, has been taken over by enemies or destroyed by nature. The premise is that the dwarves created several gigantic holds that were connected by a huge underground highway called the Underway. As nature caused several cave-ins, the enemies of the dwarves found new ways to infiltrate and eventually stormed and captured several holds. There are references in the Army books that other terrible creatures came out of the darkness after the quakes and are now roaming in parts of the Underway. Like many of the settings in Warhammer, the location of the Underway and the abadoned holds would make a great place for a game...and that is exactly what I would like to do.

My inital ideas were to have the game be a 2d action-rpg set in this enviroment. The player would create a dwarf explorer who would venture into the underway and explore different enviroments. I thought originally of a large adventure where the player would keep exploring one "metroid" style map but I decided (in my head) to keep the idea scaled back to a series of seperated levels. The idea behind each level is that the player is entering a different section of the Underway and will try to get some kind of key item that is located somewhere in the level while avoiding traps, monsters, and all other kinds of hazards. A key element to the game would be a grappling hook that the player could use in really anyway they chose. They could scale walls or make a quick escape. I guess a "dwarf spider-man" would be the best way to pitch it.

As for the rpg aspects, it would be nice to allow for use of a pool of skills. Off the top of my head, I am thinking a pyro set of skills where explosives are the name of the day or a melee set. These are just some example ideas.

So I think I will keep this idea in my head as I build the next couple of features for my system. I would like my demo to reflect some the navigation aspects of this idea.