Heylo everyone.
After watching the SNES TNT, particularly the Tetris Battle Gaiden portion, I thought to myself, "You know what would be cool? A community made GB themed/inspired version of that game." After letting the idea gestate a bit I figured I would reveal it to the community and see if anyone is interested.
The idea is for the community together a make an awesome/absurd/silly/etc but fun and balanced game in flash/unity/game maker, any game making software. Which software would have to be determined by programers. When I say community, I mean community. Anyone who has any sort of ability can/should help out. Even if it is just providing feedback and testing. What we would need is at least one of the following a programmer, artist, and audio producer. Why no designer you ask? Well that's because everyone and their mother's pet turtle are designers, but few realize how absolutely tedious and demanding the job actually is. Now I'm a composer and sound designer(I really need to update those sites), so I would most like to do the sound effects and collaborate with the music while taking more of a coordinator role.
I cannot stress this enough that this project would not be a money making venture at all. This project is something that will be done in the contributors' spare time and will probably take more than six months, perhaps way more, because of that. A project like this is a great way to start in game development. It would be pretty low stress and is something that could be put on a resume some day. The amount of experience isn't really relevant. I know we have our fair shard of talented musicians, artists, and programmers who are at all different levels and it would be great if many of them decide to help out.
OK! Now on to the meat.
Why did I pick Tetris Battle Gaiden and not some other game that GB is known for? Well it's very simple. The game was never released outside of Japan, is pretty crazy, and is fairly simple. When I said inspired by GB what I mean is something that has characters based of GB characters and things popular in the community. NOT people. I don't like the idea of having versions Jeff, Ryan, Vinny, Brad, and Patrick as playable characters. They could appear in some subtle way (in backgrounds perhaps) but that's it. I was thinking more like having LuchaDeer, Cool Baby, Lincoln FORCE, an Endurance Run themed guy, a Terrible Pilot, Big Jeffery, maybe a Trackmania-like car. Things like that. I don't think we should be too ambitious with the amount of characters honestly. No more than 8 or 9. 4 is more realistic.
Like TBG, each character would have four spells of increasing power and players would only be able to use their strongest spell. I think the general rule: Level 1 would be a Utility(Clear your lines, rearrange them), Level 2 would be Defensive (blcok on coming spells/lines, destroy opponents magic), Level 3 would be Offensive(freeze opponents board, bombs, inversion), and Level 4 would be a mixture of offensive and defensive (Switch boards, steal all magic, etc). There would need to be a lot of balance testing of course. We might find that having offensive spells at level 2 is better.
When it comes to thinks like art and music styles. That's a up in the air. I think there should be some sort of 16-bitness to the graphics in honor of the original and the music... Well there should be some amount of dubstep-esque music against my better judgement.
EDIT: OH yeah! How could I forgot. This would need some sort of multiplayer. Certainly local, but also internet based. I know that flash and other languages can pull this off, but I don't know how difficult it would be. Single player should also be included, but to what extent will have to be discussed.
If people are interested then I'll write up some expanded ideas in a google doc and share it. I hope so because this could turn out to be a lot of fun!
EDIT the second: There is now a rough and very incomplete draft of the Dev Doc. You can read it here.
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