Hey guys, I've been made a part of a game design team for the semester at my school, and I'm looking to pick your brains for good base ideas/gameplay mechanics to base a game around. Resources: 8 man team, including myself. We're all expected to put about 10 hours in per week.

Limitations:

It has to be made in libGDX
Deadline for release is beginning of May
Game has to be ludic focused, not narrative focused
Game has to be primarily our own work - we can use tools and stuff like the Delver framework, but we can't just design inside of an open source level editor for an already established game.
I've got programmers and artists with good experience, but no musician
RPGs and 3D games are strongly discouraged due to workload, but not outright banned.

I'd appreciate the brainstorming help. Due date for a non-binding initial concept is the end of the week, binding full concept doc end of next. I'm probably looking for 1-3 novel but simple core gameplay mechanics to base a game around - as ambitious as I'd like to be, shoot for the moon isn't the move here.

 

Street Fighter type game where instead of fighting it's a dance-off, with different characters for different dancing styles.

Rythmn-based game where you have to slap a woman to the beat of Slap My Bitch Up.

 

So it's written down somewhere easier to find than discord:

1) Play with Magnets - Puzzle/platforming game where the player character or some object(s) in the world are magnetic and you need to manipulate polarities, activation, and placement in order to overcome the challenge. Could start with "need to be pulled to that magnet to cross this gap" and escalate up to "gotta be pull;ed down by magnet A so I can be pushed to the side by magnet B, then toggle polarity so I'm pushed by magnet A up to that platform, where I toggle my polarity to turn a crank to power a super magnet that pushes me to the goal"

2) Competitive Tetris - Two players taking turns on the same tetris board, control swapping after each piece is dropped, but you only get points for completing a row, and there's an exponential multiplier for more rows deleted in a single move, incentivizing big elaborate dumps, but you have to also disguise them so your opponent can't steal them from you. Then once the board is filled, the game is called and whoever has the most points wins.

3) Flying Base Builder - A strategy game where you build a base in order to survive increasingly aggressive attacks from enemy hordes (think They Are Billions or thereabouts). The gimmick here, however, is that there's a semi-aware corruption behind the hordes, and it spreads poison toward your base over time. Meaning space to build is limited, and each "turn" (some unit of time, if real time instead of turn based) the available space gets even smaller.

However, your 'main' building, and the only one that needs to survive to continue, is capable of lifting off the ground and moving itself, and a decent chunk of your resources, to another place on the map, where the corruption has receded. The game is then all about building up your base and squeezing as many resources out of it as possible to advance up the tech tree as far as you can before you inevitably have to cut your losses and run away to build your base again elsewhere, with a higher tech level and more ability to extract value from the area before you get surrounded and cut off again. And all the while, you're sending out small search parties, trying to push through the blighted land to find the source of the corruption and do away with it.

The win condition would be to find and destroy the 'source' of the corruption, which is semi-mobile and roams around a certain portion of the map, and the lose condition is your HQ being destroyed.

 

How about a 2d tank/archery game. Probably wouldn't be too awful to implement and would showcase your ability to program movement and vector physics.

A card battle game a la Gwent or Hearthstone could probably net you high marks if you put in the work coding up the use cases.

 

In my experience, puzzle solving mechanics are fun and easy to logically set up. I feel like each level could be a puzzle, and the puzzle builds upon itself as you go up. Consider a chess setup where the player comes in mid-game, or other puzzles inspired by board games. You can use randomness to select different variations of each puzzle to ensure that each player has a slightly different experience.

 

Co-Op, fast-paced puzzle solving.

 

Co-Op isn't forbidden, but we're mainly going to be graded on the game as a single player experience.

Thank you for all the responses guys. I'll for sure make sure to let you know what we go with.

 

I'm a big fan of using classical music for games/visual novels. They set the mood brilliantly - you know exactly what's up when Dies Irae starts playing.

 

As a long belated update - we did end up making that game, last year. It's a platformer using umbrella physics with about 30 levels, check it out.

You can also see the other games that our school did that year. Funnily enough, I'm another team, this time making a mobile game.