Ideas Dump

[ThisIsNoName]

So imagine you're some kind of adventurer/explorer and you stumble across an isolated community that's extremely hard to reach, and it seems to be almost entirely populated with very friendly, very lonely women. They've all been condemned there for some reason, but some were innocent victims, some were criminals, and some were more nebulous (like the discarded mistress) and they've all learned to live together... but the insertion of a strange man into their midst turns everything upside down. Some of whom just want you to pay attention to them, and some of whom want you to get them OUT of there, but none of whom want to tell you the truth about their pasts or the real nature of the village.

That sounds like an awesome idea. Personally, one thing I would change is to have it take place in a POW camp after a war, where all the prisoners are being freed. Part of the plot would be trying to figure out if the person was in there for political reasons or criminal reasons, whether they are looking for revenge, etc.

Another idea I had was to have a basic BxG plot where in the first act you choose the which girl to romance, then in the second, you play from the girl's point of view to get the guy. One thing that's always bugged me in BxG (or really any harem-type) games is that you see why the guy is in love with the girl, but rarely you see why the girl is in love with the guy, except that he's super attractive or something.

[sciencewarrior]

One thing that's always bugged me in BxG (or really any harem-type) games is that you see why the guy is in love with the girl, but rarely you see why the girl is in love with the guy, except that he's super attractive or something.

In most garuge, every heroine has a "deal," as in, "What's the deal with Sakura?" Once the player discovers and solves her deal, she falls in love with his character. Realistic? No. Great to pull at heartstrings? Oh, yeah. If you haven't yet, watch The World God Only Knows to see this structure dissected.

It would be interesting to see this structure reversed. The game begins with an interview (or something more subtle,) in which the player character tells about his deal. From this point on, he meets several (mostly) well-rounded girls that will help him overcome his problem, some of which may have romantic endings.

[dorne]

I have an idea for a fantasy drama.

You are an 18 year old knight given a task by the king to go find his missing step-daughter and bring her back. Because of the laws of the land, the next female in line will be crowned successor rather than by eldest. The queen at the age of 29 is ill and it is unknown if she will recover. When you reach the princess (aged 13) and her escorts inside some ruins, suddenly, assassins jump out of the shadows and what you do determines the fate of the princess, and of the kingdom.

A possible prequel exists where you, as a fresh knight of 12, fight in your first battle between two countries in disputed lands.

[Mink]

Boadicea.

That is all.

[sciencewarrior]

I'll save this one for NaNoRenO 2013 (gotta... finish... Love²!)

It's Not Like I Want You To Be My Girlfriend
Do you know that horrible prince character every otome has to have? You play him. In the prologue, you fall in love with the game's heroine, this clutzy, hard-working, and idealistic girl, after an Act of Random Kindness from her.

Skip a few months ahead, you are in both in class 1-A, and at each other's throat. It isn't her fault, of course. It just happens that, you are so conditioned to saying mean things, you can't express yourself:

Code: Select all

"What should I say?"
menu:
  "You look gorgeous today.":
    bocchan "Wow, you finally managed to match blouse and skirt. Did you get help from someone with a minimum of taste or did you just luck out?"
  "I love you."
    bocchan "It would take a very special kind of brain-damaged, emotionally crippled, affection starved individual to like you. But hey, keep watching."

But not everything is roses (or should I say thorns?): her grades aren't enough for her to stay in class A, and you have to do something about it! So how about you tutor her, and in exchange she could... she could... date you. It's not like you want it or anything! It's just that there are all these crazy stalker girls the started a fanclub, and if you have a girlfriend, they will probably give up and move on to the next target.

So you start dating studying, you learn why her grades are falling (family problems and a part-time job), she gets glimpses of your softer side, and... disaster strikes, in the form of a very jealous and very vindictive fanclub president. Senseless violence, amnesia, confinement in tight spaces, meddling relatives, a chase, and a moment of truth follow.

[Greeny]

I'll save this one for NaNoRenO 2013 (gotta... finish... Love²!)

It's Not Like I Want You To Be My Girlfriend
Do you know that horrible prince character every otome has to have? You play him. In the prologue, you fall in love with the game's heroine, this clutzy, hard-working, and idealistic girl, after an Act of Random Kindness from her.

Skip a few months ahead, you are in both in class 1-A, and at each other's throat. It isn't her fault, of course. It just happens that, you are so conditioned to saying mean things, you can't express yourself:

Code: Select all

"What should I say?"
menu:
  "You look gorgeous today.":
    bocchan "Wow, you finally managed to match blouse and skirt. Did you get help from someone with a minimum of taste or did you just luck out?"
  "I love you."
    bocchan "It would take a very special kind of brain-damaged, emotionally crippled, affection starved individual to like you. But hey, keep watching."

But not everything is roses (or should I say thorns?): her grades aren't enough for her to stay in class A, and you have to do something about it! So how about you tutor her, and in exchange she could... she could... date you. It's not like you want it or anything! It's just that there are all these crazy stalker girls the started a fanclub, and if you have a girlfriend, they will probably give up and move on to the next target.

So you start dating studying, you learn why her grades are falling (family problems and a part-time job), she gets glimpses of your softer side, and... disaster strikes, in the form of a very jealous and very vindictive fanclub president. Senseless violence, amnesia, confinement in tight spaces, meddling relatives, a chase, and a moment of truth follow.

A play on stereotypes. I like it.

[Anna]

Hahaha, sciencewarrior, that sounds like a really fun idea!

[gekiganwing]

What could be done with a similar BxG story? Let's start with an average harem game protagonist, who is a bit clueless, wimpy, and bad at making commitments. Now consider what could happen if we see this guy through the eyes of one of the following characters:

* An equally average girl who wants a boyfriend that's hotter and more proactive than this guy, though she knows that popular boys ignore her.
* A tomboy who is more self confident and athletic than this guy, though most boys just consider her a friend.
* A fangirl who's dedicated to one or more hobbies, and who has few friends outside her circle of fellow fans.
* A manic pixie dream girl who has psychological or plot-related reasons to make his life crazy.
* A lesbian or bisexual girl who doesn't want this guy to have a relationship with the girl who she admires.

Consider how these girls will act if they suddenly have an average boyfriend, a rival, or a lot more attention from their friends.

Just one of these characters could make for a good story. But if you want to portray a BxG love triangle or a harem from a woman's perspective, that can work too.

[ririruetoo]

A cute idea that popped in my head on the way home....



Yuki's Friends:

When Yuki Motoharu was a young girl, she was obessed with fairy tales. Her favorite past time was reading her favorites, mostly Japanese folk legends. She even swore that her favorite playmate when she was young was a tanuki in human form. Of course, ever since she got accepted into a local veternary vocational school, Yuki hasn't had time for such childish thinking.
She past the old shrine everytime she walked home. Ever since she was a child, she's felt like it held some magical purpose.
Becoming caught in a fierce storm on the walk home, she takes shelter in the abandoned shrine. It is this one moment that changes her life forever.
Inside the shrine, live a group of men. What she believes to be men though, are in fact shape shifting animal's from Japanese folk tales!
Confronted with mankinds lack of respect for nature, the group are forced to spend their times disguised as people, in order to not be found out, they rarely interact with anyone outside the forest. Still, they seem to be drawn towards Yuki, and in her they see a way for them to have some contact with the goings on in the human world.

Characters:

Yuki Motoharu:
Age: 20
Species: Human
A young woman on the cusp of entering into adult society.

Toru Nomimoto:
Age:23
Species: Human
Yuki's fellow classmate at school. An aspiring veterinarian.

Yumi:
Age:???
Species: Tanuki
Fun loving and a trisker, this tanuki will do anything to have a good time.

Tsuchi:
Age:???
Species: Badger
Serious and hardworking. Seems to be the leader of the group.

Yume:
Age:???
Species: Tapir
Mellow and easy going. Loves sleeping.

Himi:
Age:???
Species: Fox
Cunning, loves money above anything else.

Nezumi
Age:???
Species:Cat
A play boy who loves wooing the ladies. Hates birds with a firery passion.

Sora:
Age:???
Species: Crane
A calm individual who loves writing poems and watching kabuki theater.

[sciencewarrior]

Two silly but fun stories-within-a-story that appear in my current project:

Itamae-chan!
After months of intense training and a very rigorous exam, Alex received her sushi chef certificate. Yay! Sadly, she is jobless, penniless, thousands of miles from home, and without a place to stay. Childhood friend to the rescue: her nice friend George will let her crash in his three-room apartment, and will even leave the bed for her while he sleeps in the couch. Isn't he a gentleman?

But she still needs a job, and he knows where they need a good sushi chef. You see, he's been working as a bartender in this trendy place that is part sushi bar, part host club. Host club? What will a young woman do in a host club? She will crossdress, of course!

And it's a good thing that only George know she's a girl, because Max, her new boss, may look like a dream behind the cutting board, but in private he is a narrow-minded, misogynistic pig that believes that women can't make good sushi because "they don't have the right substances in their sweat" (really, there are people that believe this) and see them in general as animals with limited brains and loose wallets.

Still, the pay is good, George is a sweetheart, and she quickly learns she can tease Max for fun and profit (the clients go wild with the BL innuendo.) But what will she do when a new, all-girls sushi bar opens across the street?

Corsair
The country of Gallesse is in turmoil. Revolutionaries have executed the royal family, and militias heavily armed with muskets and sabers roam the land to pillage the noble estates and execute the remaining supporters of monarchy. This is a time full of opportunities for an outlaw, but the pirate simply known as Corsair won't be able to exploit them. Separated from his ship and his men and in the company of a beautiful young woman with a horrible personality, he finds himself with a huge bounty on his head, enough florins to entice every man, woman and child in the country to try to collect it by blade, poison, or trickery.

As you expect, the woman is the source of his trouble: she is the last living princess of the royal family, and only legitimate heir to the throne. Their only way to survive is finding a way to board his ship, evade the republican fleet, and reunite her with her betrothed, the valiant Prince Gallant, in the Kingdom of Albion. Obviously, some rewards may entice even the most loyal crew, but Corsair is confident that there will be an even greater reward from Gallant if they manage to get to get to Albion. Although, at some point, this cold-hearted pirate with a mysterious past starts to wonder if he is in fact doing all this for the gold...

[gekiganwing]

"Interface in Your Face": a Ren'py game where the interface is needlessly complicated. Doing anything in the game requires excessive amounts of button presses. And everything the player can do requires a different command -- in other words, no action is the same as any other action. Gratuitous keyboard commands and repeatedly clicking on objects are required in order to get through this game.

Is there a point to this out-of-control interface screw? Hmm, that's a good question. Maybe it should be a giant metaphor for something. If Interface in Your Face doesn't have some meta-meaning, then I can see it failing immediately *if* there's a professionally-made game which makes it look intuitive by comparison...

[papillon]

"Chatter Love"

Here's a very silly idea that is probably too fluffy for me to ever work on it.

Our heroine, for whatever reason (shy? bad experience?) has been avoiding real relationships and spending money to chat with her Virtual Boyfriend on her mobile phone. She insists to her friends that her Virtual Boyfriend is the *perfect man* - he's funny, he's sexy, he's supportive, he's challenging, he's sometimes snarky and other times incredibly sweet, and he's always available. No matter when she texts him, he always answers.

Only problem is, of course, that it's a paid service, and she's spending huge amounts of money sending and receiving texts from her perfect virtual boyfriend. Her friends tell her she's being silly, and that if this guy really is The Perfect Boyfriend, she should track him down for real... but it's probably all just a scam or a robot and so she should stop wasting her money on it. She sets out to prove that her dream man is not just a dream...

... only to discover that actually, the service she's been subscribing to isn't just answered by one guy. Every message she sends is received by _all the employees of the service_ and they take turns answering. Which is why her 'boyfriend' is always available, and sometimes mean and sometimes nice and all those other different things.

So the rest of the game is about trying to get to know and choose between all of these different guys, all of whom *already know her* because of everything she's said on the dating service, but she doesn't know anything real about them at all. She has all this past history with her perfect boyfriend, but no idea which of them has said what, or whether they were telling the truth. (And she may or may not be hiding from them the fact that she, the girl in the real world trying to ask them out, is actually one of their paid clients.)

(And yes, that actually is how some mobile phone romance programs work, although it's highly unlikely that all the employees would be hot bishies in your hometown that you could really date. )

[HigurashiKira]

"Chatter Love"

Here's a very silly idea that is probably too fluffy for me to ever work on it.

Our heroine, for whatever reason (shy? bad experience?) has been avoiding real relationships and spending money to chat with her Virtual Boyfriend on her mobile phone. She insists to her friends that her Virtual Boyfriend is the *perfect man* - he's funny, he's sexy, he's supportive, he's challenging, he's sometimes snarky and other times incredibly sweet, and he's always available. No matter when she texts him, he always answers.

Only problem is, of course, that it's a paid service, and she's spending huge amounts of money sending and receiving texts from her perfect virtual boyfriend. Her friends tell her she's being silly, and that if this guy really is The Perfect Boyfriend, she should track him down for real... but it's probably all just a scam or a robot and so she should stop wasting her money on it. She sets out to prove that her dream man is not just a dream...

... only to discover that actually, the service she's been subscribing to isn't just answered by one guy. Every message she sends is received by _all the employees of the service_ and they take turns answering. Which is why her 'boyfriend' is always available, and sometimes mean and sometimes nice and all those other different things.

So the rest of the game is about trying to get to know and choose between all of these different guys, all of whom *already know her* because of everything she's said on the dating service, but she doesn't know anything real about them at all. She has all this past history with her perfect boyfriend, but no idea which of them has said what, or whether they were telling the truth. (And she may or may not be hiding from them the fact that she, the girl in the real world trying to ask them out, is actually one of their paid clients.)

(And yes, that actually is how some mobile phone romance programs work, although it's highly unlikely that all the employees would be hot bishies in your hometown that you could really date. )

This is the making of a hilarious reverse-harem anime. Someone fund it.

A small snippet of an idea:
Roulette: Wheel of Fortune
A secret organization is hosting a competition pitting the best assasins in the world for a major cash prize. The catch? The targets are other assasins, picked at random in a roulette. A multitude of neat weapons are offered, and allaiances are permitted. But with a twist of the wheel, everything can change.

Should have quite a bit of characters (At the least it has to be 19, since a roulette has 38 spaces, and 19 is half of that. Unless of course you make your own roulette wheel, then you can BS it with how many you want) And should give a bit of diversity to the VN world besides Asians and Americans.

[ThisIsNoName]

A small snippet of an idea:
Roulette: Wheel of Fortune
A secret organization is hosting a competition pitting the best assasins in the world for a major cash prize. The catch? The targets are other assasins, picked at random in a roulette. A multitude of neat weapons are offered, and allaiances are permitted. But with a twist of the wheel, everything can change.

Should have quite a bit of characters (At the least it has to be 19, since a roulette has 38 spaces, and 19 is half of that. Unless of course you make your own roulette wheel, then you can BS it with how many you want) And should give a bit of diversity to the VN world besides Asians and Americans.

This kind of sounds like 5 killers (that's sadly been cancelled): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5jpA_yRuHo
except with a whole lot more characters.

Do you think it would be better to always have it from one character's point of view, or have the player choose the character, or possibly create their own?

[HigurashiKira]

A small snippet of an idea:
Roulette: Wheel of Fortune
A secret organization is hosting a competition pitting the best assasins in the world for a major cash prize. The catch? The targets are other assasins, picked at random in a roulette. A multitude of neat weapons are offered, and allaiances are permitted. But with a twist of the wheel, everything can change.

Should have quite a bit of characters (At the least it has to be 19, since a roulette has 38 spaces, and 19 is half of that. Unless of course you make your own roulette wheel, then you can BS it with how many you want) And should give a bit of diversity to the VN world besides Asians and Americans.

This kind of sounds like 5 killers (that's sadly been cancelled): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5jpA_yRuHo
except with a whole lot more characters.

Do you think it would be better to always have it from one character's point of view, or have the player choose the character, or possibly create their own?

OhmyGod. why would they cancel something as awesome as that ;_;

It should focus on one person for each "faction" though for some scenes it should jump for a while to another person.