Saturday, August 28, 2010

More Ideas for Games that Won't Get Made

In The Gadget, you play as "The Gadget," a superhero cleaning up the streets in a world where traditional law enforcement has been banned in favor of "metas," men and woman with superpowers reporting to a government agency. People without powers are strictly forbidden from fighting crime, so there's no Iron Man or Batman at work in this world.

As The Gadget, you turn in criminals for cash which you use to upgrade your gear and you fight for XP which you can use to train in the standard attributes (fighting skill, strength, intelligence, endurance, speed).

Your gear is upgraded along many tiers in pseudo-scientific disciplines, such as Explosives (traps and bombs), Chemistry (gases and poisons), Electricity (ranged attacks and electrical control), Ballistics (guns and knives), and Pneumatics (exoskeletons and other devices like a grappling gun), which constitutes the main focus of the game.

The Gadget plays like a sandbox game, so you're free to build up a network of contacts and informants who give you missions once you do certain favors for them. There'd also be a small investigative component, enough to satisfy gamers who like solving puzzles but not enough to detract from the action-oriented flow of the game. A multiplayer mode is unlocked after you accomplish certain objectives, and it allows you to build up a character in advance and take on people with similar interests (eg, people who mostly play king of the hill or only play deathmatch) and similar skill levels (time played and win/loss records).

The story revolves around the Gadget making the streets a safer place first by cracking down on protection rackets and other criminals, then by addressing white-collar crime that traditional supers aren't equipped to handle, taking care of corruption in the metas, cracking a serial murder case, and finally facing off with a dangerous mutant which evolves in response to the gadgets you create.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does the Gadget have superpowers? If not, does that mean he has to contend with other metas trying to shut him down?

Theron said...

The Gadget does not have superpowers, so yeah, he'll have to contend with metas. However, as with many NPCs in this game, Gadget will be able to build up his reputation with certain metas and befriend them. Others won't be so nice.