I'd like to work on a lot of games in my lifetime. And, in general, I see myself as a sort of creature; or perhaps more of a manager or trainer of such creatures. But there's still certain games I would especially love to work on at some point, some more and some less fully formed in my mind.
Starting off with two big ones...
I'm a huge, huge fan of Street Fighter 3 in basically every aspect; more than any other fighting game, it's the one I keep coming back to when I get tired of feeling like I'm at a wall with modern games.
I don't especially want to be the main battle planner! ... But, in terms of gameplay, it'd be cool to take the broad strokes of SF3. Generally short, snappy combos; no cinematic supers; simple meters, EX/Super at most, at least for most characters; if not literally just parry, then something to serve the save purpose of aggressively, free-formedly calling out predictable attacks.
I think maybe my biggest single issue with SF3 is the throwtech lockout after parry, but I understand the desire to not have a parry-tech option select. It also bugs me a bit to not have a universal jab→jab→special option, but I'm willing to concede that I might simply be a salty anime-turned-Elena player.
Finally, and I understand that this is a wild take to just drop without a full article, I think that six button games are kind of outdated. Six whole standing buttons, plus six crouching, plus command normals, plus another six+ for aerials? Some of those moves are gonna be redundant, especially the aerials. And I think that's actually great for hard to patch arcade games! It gives the designers extra chances to have moves that cover certain situations. I'm not sure of the exact direction I would take this in, though. Leaning slightly toward two punches and two kicks, but I think that having light, medium, and heavy has a wonderful simplicity to it.
Aesthetically, I'd love a primarily nighttime urban setting. I've always, always loved light-on-dark stuff (I think Black Velvetopia started that). So, on some level that's purely a stylistic thing. But I also always really appreciated the utility of how much characters in Melty Blood and Under Night pop against their predominantly dark backgrounds. Jet Set Radio is another franchise that I've always loved, and it'd be cool to take that kind of direction, but it really is a bit of a jump from Third Strike to JSR.
I have a lot less to say about this, but a bit more to show... in paper notebooks. Maybe I'll go through and collect all my old notes together later on.
The initial inspiration for this was pretty simple: I was (kind of) getting into Sailor Moon S: Jougai Rantou!? Shuyaku Soudatsusen released December 16, 1994 for the Nintendo Super Famicom while at the same time lurking in the community Discord server, seeing that one of the members was working on a translation for another old magical girl anime called Corrector Yui. The animal mascot character was a flying robot Tanuki with no legs. At the same time, I was (kind of) getting into Capcom's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future, and upon seeing Pet Shop I thought to myself "could you make a permanently flying character without making him complete bullshit?" And so the concept was born.
This game has a lot more things probably-decided for it: it's probably going to be two basic attacks, two single button specials, plus unique buttons for throw, dash, and a Roman Cancel type button, all anti-macroable to ensure that it's still playable on a six button stick. It's probably going to be a lot more air focused; I was even toying with the idea of giving everyone a 4-way air dash to avoid projectiles, with the pixie function getting either an 8-way or an air roll to allow her to go through them.
The goal (it still remains to be seen if these ideas will serve the goal) is to be a relatively simple game to get into, but still feel distinctly like an anime game.
Shoutouts to Tough Love Arena for making what they've made while I've been stewing on all of this. Not only is that game cool as heck, it's a good bit simpler than what I was aiming for while still having RC's, which in some sense makes it a bit easier for my game to hone in on the now-smaller gap in complexity level between TLA and, say, Type Lumina.
Maybe somewhat surprisingly, magical girls are not particularly my forte, especially at the time of conception! But as I've brushed up against more and more, I see more styles to riff on. It'd be cool to have a spin on Cardcaptor Sakura as a stance, install, or jacket character; a Precure boxer; a sword wielder pulling from the lineages of Princess Knight and Utena and Revue Starlight; and so on.
Now with the fighting games over, I have much less detail to say about the rest.
Rhythm Heaven is great, absolutely wonderful. The world needs so much more of it. I've always loved rhythm games, but I can get tired of the score-attack nature of scrolling note games like DDR and Guitar Hero. That's not to say I hate them — I go back to Bang Dream and Project Sekai every once in a while — I just think there's something special about games like Rhythm Heaven where it's more about experiencing the little vignettes and seeing what fun rhythms you can explore with just one or two buttons.
Bits and Bops absolutely has my eye; from what I've seen, it's just about exactly what I would want to do myself... but there's no reason we can't have more! Especially because this feels like a sub-genre of rhythm game very dependent on aesthetics, on the particulars of the composers and animators.
Even though it's a bit off topic, I'm looking forward to the full launch of Scratchin Melodii. I didn't grow up with Parappa, but the demo still charmed me endlessly for a weekend.
Warzone 2100's campaign completely stole my mind as a middleschooler obsessed with customizability, the post-apocolypse, and long range combat. Later on in life, I sunk a ton of time into Starcraft II's and Tooth and Tail's multiplayer modes, but their campaigns felt... just fine. Just okay. I'd love to work on a game focused on the campaign, maybe with a focus on the artillery vs anti-artillery, vision-reigns-supreme that Warzone featured glimpses of (or featured in the theater of my mind, anyway).
In a very different direction, probably, I'd also really like to make a game vaguely in the style of Pikmin. The series is living on much more healthily than Rhythm Heaven, but something about the atmosphere of the very first game just never quite got matched by the later entries, in my opinion. The loneliness contrasted with the beauty of the planet. The desperation to get home. Olimar's dry humor to service nobody but himself.
Pretty simple, really! I really love the Mystery Dungeon games; I need to play some more of them, because I've only touched bits of the original on the SNES and of Shiren, but Red Rescue Team holds a really special place in my heart, and it's one of two RPGs (Along with Mother 3) that I've replayed to completion.
This one is maybe the toughest of them all, because it goes against the idea at the very top of this post of the creature. I don't want to be merely a creature, here. I want to write it myself... maybe at this point in my life moreso read it, but I wouldn't mind writing it. The biggest (non-skill-based) issue that I may run into is that this is a story I thought about a lot, but in high school. I don't know if a decade later I would still find those old notes or their subject matters very interesting; but maybe that's because with college and trying to find work, I simply haven't had enough time to worry about the same matters.
The setting: a far future terraformed Mars, on an artificial island city with a mysterious origin, not sponsored by any Earth government.
The protagonist: a marine biologist bored with her now-routine observation work, currently just floating through life, who grew up in the city and was enamoured with the underwater observation tubes as a child.
The hook: despite being closely sheparded for centuries, strange patterns are beginning to show themselves in the wildlife she observes, and she must uncover whatever corporation, eco-terrorist, or other party is behind it.
... All while musing about the concepts of nature and artificiality, as only the character of a highschooler who grew up next to a very, very large artificial lake would.
I say highschooler, but I'm thinking that maybe first couple years of college might be more right? I may have even written little conversation blurbs into my senior year during the time between classes. At some point, I was really inspired by Va-11 Hall-A, and I know for sure I played that the senior year of highschool. I'm not sure if the original concept was older. Actually, for that matter, I'm not sure if most of the thoughts were even older. I was stuck inside playing League of Legends during most of highschool.