Design Journal - Game Concept Red Rover

Going back to what I said in my first journal entry about how I used to come up with ideas on how to make the kids game Red Rover better by introducing more rules.

Recently I had the idea, what if Red Rover could be made into a computer game. Obviously I’m going to go for a casual game because its something I personally could create using flash but this game could very well be made in 3d as well using say people on quad bikes. A game I think this concept would work well with is the Burnout series. Already you have the concepts where there are people controlling cars with reckless ambitions so it wouldn’t be far of a stretch to consider this concept for the game.

You would have to have a lot of people playing otherwise it might be boring but what would happen is this: you half the teams except for 1 person, the person in the middle stays and everyone drives their cars as fast as they can to get to the other side without being hit by the car in the middle or the oncoming cars from the other side. If they touch the person in the middle they are now part of the centre team next round and if they hit the oncoming traffic then they very well might be caught because they would be broken down in the middle.

This game could also be done in 2d from a top down position. I had the idea where instead of running and getting caught you just had the 2 teams against each other. You have a massive grid of squares in a rectangle and on either end of the field you have the player’s avatars. The goal of the game is to get to the other side while blocking the other teams advance. You use the wasd keys to advance your player and use your mouse to attack or defend.

By clicking on the grid you create a blocker with your colour which your team can freely walk through but the opposing team cannot. There is a way around this though, by clicking a multiple times on an enemy block you change it over to your own colour. At the beginning of the game there is a mad rush to click to add your block colours all over the place but once the game is full you really only click to make a path for yourself. The other catch to the game is, people can click on you to destroy you to stop your advance. The game is over when a single team is either all rescued or killed.

Once a player makes it to the other side or is dead, they no longer can click. The game would be a multiplayer game with many people playing up to 20 per team.