Total (dis)Order

I’ve been stuck on the whole 2D/3D concept since my Blogs of the Round Table post.  In particular, I’ve really been thinking about how 3D games are presented.  I’m not really talking about style or meaning or mood, either.  I’m talking about how they’re presented in a physical sense, as in a screen.  Think about it: all the fancy shaders and intricate models in the world can’t change the fact that everything gets projected onto a 2D plane.  We discussed this briefly in a course I’m taking on human perception, and it got me thinking about how that limitation can interact with gameplay.

Flatland Shooter would play very much like a top down shooter, a la Geometry Wars or Vector Effect.  Players would control a ship confined to a 2D plane that must survive an attack by shapes from 3-space.  Each shape would appear first as a dot at a random point on the screen, grow slowly to the full cross section of the shape, and then disappear back to a point.  The overall effect should be that the 3D shape is passing through the plane of view.  If the player finds himself directly in the path of a shape, he is pushed out of the plane and dies.  However, if he is slightly out of line (e.g. slightly off center of a sphere’s path), he is pushed out of the way.  The player must survive for as long as he can.

Would you play it?  I might prototype this if I get some time, just to see what it’s like/how frustrating it is.  I feel like there’s a big source of frustration in the fact that you can’t actually see the enemies until they’re already on the screen.

Posted in: Games by Ted /