Nice Games Club - a gamedev podcast! Nice Games Jam: "Buttons and Triggers and Sticks, Oh My!"
It's another Nice Games Jam! This time, our boyfriend Dylan sent in a particularly interesting challenge, asking your nice hosts to design a game where the player's load-out impacts the game's controls.
After an aborted attempt to make it into a game consisting of physical props, we came up with a very strange concept for a video game where you equip and battle a bunch of different controllers as if they were Pokémon or something!
A controller of your choosing
Pieces to "slot" to your controller's buttons
"Buttons and Triggers and Sticks, Oh My!" (Prototype)
In this game, you control a "battlebot" vehicle that you configure using equipment and weapons that are auctioned off between players before the match. The twist is that your bot is a vehicle shaped like the actual controller you play the game with, and its capabilities are determined by the physical configuration of the input elements. Want a different bot, you gotta plug in a different controller!
Controllers
Each controller, from a knock-off Xbox 360 controller to a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con, has a list of "inventory slots" which line up with the physical controller's buttons and input elements. Items placed in these slots are "attached" to the in-game representation of the controller.
Each controller also has general properties such as hull strength and overall weight, and controllers with special properties like rumble, motion controls, or expansion ports would have additional in-game potential. Additionally, wired controllers would have different properties than wireless controllers, etc.
Equipment
Each piece of equipment has the following characteristics:
- Type
- Movement
- Engines
- Ranged weapons
- Melee weapons
- Traps/environment
- Shields
- Bonus/special items
- Stats: depends on type. Engines would have speed/power stats and weapons would have damage stats, for example.
- Input compatibility: Which set of buttons, sticks, and/or triggers can this equipment be attached to? For example, the Z button on a Saturn controller is a face button, but it's a trigger on a Nintendo 64 controller. A machine gun might be placed on a trigger, or it could be placed on an analog stick and work as a turret! Maybe certain items can only be placed on controllers that have a "Select" button, etc.
Auction
Players configure their loudouts from stratch before every match, at the same time, using an auction system. Pieces of equipment comes up for auction one-by-one.
First, players are given vague information about the next item up for bid, and may pre-bid for it, gambling that it will be something useful to them.
If no player pre-bids for the item, it is fully revealed and players bid normally for it. Certain items will be incompatible for certain controllers, but a player may wish to bid on it anyway to deny it to another player (maybe they can then "melt down" the unwanted piece of equipment for some other resource).
This process continues either until all players are out of resources, or all the items (some subset of the total items in the game) have been put up for auction.
Resources could be limited, meaning that high-bidding contests would result in weaker players and more tactical, less chaotic matches (since all equipment would be expensive). Alternately, resources could be plentiful, providing players with lots of options, and any left over resources could be used to power and/or upgrade equipment, providing some motivation not to overspend for equipment.
Gameplay
Battles would be essentially multiplayer deathmatchs, where each player operates the equipment they've equipped to thier vehicle by using the input element they've assigned it to.
Battles would be heavily focused on targeting other players various equipment, in order to disable or destroy them.
Play could work using a 3rd person "Mario Kart/Twisted Metal battle mode" style of skill-based play, or perhaps it could use a Fallout VATS style targeting system where players would need to assign targets in real-time but would only need to hit the other player (letting an RNG system determine how successful the hit was)
The game might include other genre staples like item pickups (energy, ammo, etc).
Campaign/Progression?
Outside of regular matches, perhaps players could run campaigns where the results of each match would provide winnings that they can later use to upgrade their vehicle or purchase new equipment.