Of gears and valves

I came up with a neat game mechanic that I thought would work well in a First-person shooter. This mechanic would would in any setting of a FPS, but the one I had in mind was a Steampunk game. I think the Steampunk genre is under-served in todays marketplace. Many people are perhaps not aware of the genre, while at the same time I think there’s an intrinsic appeal to the whole Steampunk concept. My intuition on this is fueled by the popularity of works such as LXG, Van Helsing, and even such oddities as Steampunk Starwars which recently drew the attention of notable bloggers on Boing Boing and Wired’s Table of Malcontents.

In most FPSs, there are a series of various weapons you can aquire. Typically there are pistols, and shotguns, and machine guns, some type of rocket launcher, etc. Defining these as known weapons makes the artists life easy, as well as the game designer, as the tools the player has at hand are always known within a certain range, and levels can be planned accordingly. What I propose is to instead of finding weapons, find parts, and build your weapons. You might find, for example, some type of stock, which would have slots you could put other parts into (a mundane example would be a barrel, some type of ammunition container, and a trigger mechanism). The parts you use to build the weapon would result in different properties, range, damage, etc. The individual pieces would have to be animated by an artist, and programmatically joined on the fly. One might also have special parts which are rare or hard to find, or have different types of technologies which might give bonuses when interfaced together, or penalties when interfaced with alternate types. Another mechanism which might be interesting is to have the parts wear out, so that the player is not continually using one weapon, but is forced to rebuild and try different tactics (I’m not sure whether this would be fun or not though).

In a Steampunk setting, this could result in all manner of strange, steam-powered, gear whirring weapons and systems. A System Shock type game could be reborn, but in a Difference Engine-like world with characters such as Charles Babbage and Lord Byron. I think a game thus designed could be very beautiful, and a lot of fun to play. The mechanism itself though would easily work in a futuristic or modern setting as well.

Things to do in the future perhaps.

Update: I told you so!