posted
Hmm... Might be a better strategy game... Personally I think an RTS of the Shadow series would be much preferable to another shooter.
Posts: 70 | Registered: Dec 2005
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A Battle Room would be interesting, but I was thinking of an online strategy game were you could play as toon leaders or as Ender going through the entire 3rd Bugger War.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Dec 2005
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Ender's Game, honestly, could inspire about a dozen different games, and if the movie is ever made, I guarantee you that it WILL Posts: 1539 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Personally, reading Ender's Game for the first time a few years ago immediately brought to mind images of the Homeworld RTS series. No other game I've seen has done 3D space combat so elegantly. And it's wrapped in beautiful, melancholy storytelling and artwork, to boot.
If no company ever makes a computer game based on the simulators of Eros, then perhaps a creative gamer out there might have the gumption to create a mod for Homeworld.
Posts: 6 | Registered: Jan 2006
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Be sure to try the search option on the forums: you can find some very interesting discussions that way.
Posts: 973 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Ender would be best as an adventure game I think. Of course with battle room sim and spacecraft battles later on eros. But not as Ender obviuosly. What fun would it be, having 200 IQ and knowing what's gonna happen Posts: 723 | Registered: Dec 2004
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No, I dont think it would. Its a great book, but that doesnt mean it would make a good game.
Very very few movies have been converted into good video games. I couldn't name a single book. And while EG might be well known to people around here, it is not exactly a household name to video gamers. Its close, maybe, but I dont think it has the name recognition to carry itself that way either.
Posts: 375 | Registered: Mar 2005
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And that is exactly why it would have to be a teriffic game if it were to make any money. It would have to prove itself to gamers through its great gameplay, and not by its name recognition.
:bows to the applauding crowd: Posts: 1941 | Registered: Dec 2005
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one type of game i can think of, tactical shooter think about it, the battle room is about strategy but a tactical shooter is more logical than an RTS(which is more or less designed for massive armies with multiple unit types) heck, it could be an online tactical shooter like america's army
Posts: 6 | Registered: Oct 2005
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Are you forgeting that Ender carried out an ENTIRE WAR?! And can really believe that any programer can do the Battle Room justice. No the logical choice would be to be in control of the Third Invasion, and maybe a multiplayer where you could play as the Buggers. Posts: 1941 | Registered: Dec 2005
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I can't really imagine Ender's Game's Battle Room making a successful FPS and remaining true to the novels, since frozen soldiers stay frozen for the remainder of the battle, and battles can last a long time (can you imagine getting shot in the first minute and then having to sit around and WAIT for the next half hour? ugh!).
As a RTS game, it would make more sense, since you would be in more of a tactical-commander type position and I've always viewed the Battle Room that way, but you lose a lot of the more interesting dynamics that way as well: individual soldier aptitudes, commanding and maneuvering a squad, etc. Then again, the "traditional" army training is designed so that an army can be "played" like a RTS game: click a button and your soldiers go into formation 13, click another button and they disperse in pre-determined patterns.
I can see it functioning best as a massively multiplayer (non-RPG) game, wherein you can sign up to play certain roles. Create a character that's a commander, and play only commander roles, with a RTS style omniscient view of the situation. Create a toon leader character, and always be in charge of a squad, with a limited-omniscient view of the battle and control of a single soldier. Or, if you function best in the traditional FPS role of things, play as a soldier, with only traditional FPS viewpoints and control of a single soldier, and no authority. Ranking could be accomplished in completely seperate tracks, just like in the novels: soldier rankings, commander rankings, etc. "Armies" in place of clans/guilds...the potential here is enormous.
Ooooh, now I'm all excited just thinking about it.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
in all honesty you can't really limit Ender's game to one game. you would need to include the mind game, battle room and invasion all as seperate games. The battle room can work as either A. an RTS B. A tactical shooter C.Battlefield 2 in 0 G the invasion is the part alot of people get hung up on, this is where we get the idea for an RTS. This would work, it could be a flight sim(ugh..) or it could be Galaga(kidding). no idea about the mind game. also to answer the question involving the idea of a tactical-shooter battle room and how boring it would be if you got frozen in the first minute, you can use hot-spots, another heads up to battlefield 2.
Posts: 6 | Registered: Oct 2005
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Well you could take the engine from Advent Rising and change all the character models and turn the gravity all the way off and you could have a decent excuse for the Battle Room
Posts: 110 | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
You could also do that with the engine from just about any other first-person shooter just as easily Personally, for this project, I'd vote for UE3.
In a Battleroom FPS, I'd let people respawn after they got frozen. An 82-man match is way too much for your average FPS to handle, anyway. Make it a 32-player game, but let people respawn back at their home gate while their body floats around and gets in people's way. If you want a really hardcore game, you can say that each team only gets 41 spawns, total, so it's like each army has 41 soldiers — they just fight with 16 at a time, and replace frozen guys with benchwarmers.
[ January 14, 2006, 04:31 AM: Message edited by: A Rat Named Dog ]
Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I vote for using the game engine off of Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. Now there was some tricky angles in that game. And it work great on both the Battle Room or the Simulators, but I stick to my view on just a game on the war. I just don't think any body could do more than that and not lose all the greatness of the book.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Dec 2005
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posted
Well the reason for usiding a third person shooter like advent rising is because with an FPS you would never see you graphicly beautiful jumps and rebounds, and on the subject of respawning I would let them respawn but in a thing like starwars battle front where you had a certin number of lives and you cant use more than that number.
Posts: 110 | Registered: Jan 2006
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Desc, I agree with you wholeheartedly about the third-person perspective for an Ender's Game shooter, though I submit that pretty much any FPS engine is perfectly capable of making a third-person game.
Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I could see a Battle Room game and a Battle Sim game both using similar properties - in single player, you can center in on specific players, or you could be a Toon leader and command the group of 4 or 5, or you could be the commander and direct the Toons (with such parallels for the Sim). You could throw in an RPG element and have different skill sets to level... shooting, movement, strategy, etc.
It would be pretty tough to do, but someone might be able to pull off an EG MMORPG. Along the same lines of World of Warcraft, have the Battleroom similar to the Battlegrounds... it'd be tough to pass the time/level with NPCs, though. I'm sure if a good company (*cough* Blizzard *cough*) got a hold of it, they might be able to pull it off. If they did it well, I'd definitely switch from WoW to WoEG.
Posts: 162 | Registered: Dec 2004
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Good ideas, all of you. A Rat Named Dog, what would would you most like to see in a strategy game of the Third Invasion?
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Dec 2005
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Hey, when it gets made into a blockbuster movie (I am surely hoping anyways) are you going to help bring it to EA Geoff?
Posts: 980 | Registered: Aug 2005
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YOU!!!!!!!!!!!! Shawshank, my archnemisis.... at last we meet again. How dare you show your face back on one of my topics after all the disrespect you have shown me in my other topics.
I demand that you apologize to me for all of the disregard for my views in our previous interactions, such as ruining my Speaker for the Dead forum, laughing at a simple newbie mistake of being suprised at talking to one OSC's children, and finally at the disrespect shown towards my forum on Ender.
If you apologize for these actions then all is forgiven.
So please let us not be enimies, just apologize for the way you have treated me (after all I don't want to have to stay mad at the one person on Hatrack who named themselves after my favorite movie of all time).
posted
I read half of the thread (changing classes again) so excuse me if I post something already posted. I once played an Ender's Game map in Unreal Tournament, it was awesome, not exactly what I would picture, but fun nonetheless (how is that spelt, with hyphens or what?). So I suggest that if an Ender's Game game were made, then it should be called "Ender's Game: Battle School" and be an FPS, and then another can be called "Ender's Game: Eros" and be based on the simulators from space, one final game could be "Ender's Game: Fantasy Game" and be like the Fantasy game, with tons of different avatars to choose from, then an online environment that resembles either Ragnarok or Maple Story.
I want to become a programmer when I set off in the real world, but until then I have dabbled a bit in code, I might be able to make demos with a friend of mine of what I picture.
Post Scriptum: Sorry for typos
Posts: 141 | Registered: Jan 2006
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I think the best thing would be a strategy game based on the battle room - most people seem to associate it with shooting games, but I see that as level one only.
Level two, you'd control an entire toon as well as your own character. You'd have to direct them all appropriately, target them towards the enemy, guess the correct trajectories and spins that'll put 'em in a position to actually shoot stuff... the opportunities for micromanagement would be endless. I'd tend to envisage this as a semi-turn-based game - you only get to control your player when they're hitting the walls or being approached by the enemy or whatever.
One point would be that, to gain full first-person control over your toon leader (as opposed to the restricted set of options that you'd get from viewing him/her as just another toon member), you'd have to drop into first-player, real-time mode, with the result that you wouldn't be able to control the other toon members while you were moving/firing/whatever. As with the simulator game in the Ender books, controlling the squad as a whole would be the only reasonable way to win.
Level three, you'd have to really start trusting your people because you'd only be able to directly control yourself and your toon leaders (unless dropped back into toon leader mode, in which case the other toons would start to die). The latter would pass orders on to their toons. You'd have the opportunity to create custom instructions (formations) that could be practiced beforehand then implemented at a moment's notice by toons.
On that note, on the lower levels, your commander would presumably be an AI. He/She would have a distinct personality - strictness, respect for innovation, courage, idiocy, etc. He/She would come up with formations to drill you in, and a strict commander would lambast you if you broke formation during a game.
As a commander (and to a lesser extent as toon leader) you would of course be able to influence all the usual sports leadership stuff - transfers, training, morale - that have been in pretty much every football computer game ever produced. There'd be a league, and it'd only be as you rose to the top of it that you started getting presented with more evil challenges like two teams at once or weird layouts of stars or regenerating enemies.
You could also have subgames covering all the usual leisure stuff, as well as the other military events alluded to in EG. "Battle for Eros" in particular would be very cool - tunnel warfare, a la Dungeon Keeper. If this was done properly, you'd end up with a very cool suite of strategy/fps games, with a few weird ones thrown in for good measure.
On reflection, this would be brilliant. I want! (Especially if there's a version for Linux)
Posts: 11 | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
I think the toon/commander part could be similar to that of BF2. The command basically sits in a corner and drops artillery and supplies and can give orders. Each squad can have 6 players including the leader. the leader can act as a mobile spawn point as long as he remains alive. I don't know how this might be applied to an Ender's Game Game, but I think you should all check out Battlefield 2.
Posts: 18 | Registered: Jun 2005
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I don't know where you guys are getting ideas for making a shooter. It's just completely impossible for the following reasons and remember, you have to make the game appeal to people who have never read Ender's Game:
1. You would have to invent things that are not in the book, unless you plan on making a shooter that involves a pistol only. (Big problem for people who are not Ender's Game fans)
2. Flying in three dimensions, rolling, spinning, landing softly, etc require so many buttons and control functions that's it's either impossible to create or will be very difficult to use. (MIGHT be solved with creativity, but doubtful)
3. How would you make it more than just a simple "shoot em up as fast as possible" game unless you add more control options like strafing, tucking knees under, pop-out shots, etc.
Now consider a battleroom strategy game. This is more conceivable than a shooter, but still will never appeal unless you add more capabilities for each army other than pistols. Would you like to play a chess game with all pawns? Even if you added formations it wouldn't be any better because everybody's going to stop using them as they learn how useless they are (and so they become more useful as a result of this...but the point still stands).
So, the only game that could be made is the Human vs. Bugger simulation game, and even then you can only get close to what the simulator was like in the book. The goal then, is to make a good multiplayer simulator game that has lots of replay value.
Posts: 102 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Thank you Gosu. This is what I have been trying to explain so many times to the readers of this thread
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Dec 2005
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I don't know about you guys but I'm waiting for a real Battle School game. Virtual reality. That would be so awesome. It would probably be a Top-Secret Military thing though. For practice. But if something like that ever goes out in stores, I'm first in line.
Posts: 1164 | Registered: Feb 2006
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quote:1. You would have to invent things that are not in the book, unless you plan on making a shooter that involves a pistol only. (Big problem for people who are not Ender's Game fans)
My solution would be to add a bunch of stuff, but then offer a "hardcore mode" that adhered to the limitations of the books, so that purists could get the "real" experience.
quote:2. Flying in three dimensions, rolling, spinning, landing softly, etc require so many buttons and control functions that's it's either impossible to create or will be very difficult to use. (MIGHT be solved with creativity, but doubtful)
It will be interesting to see how Prey plays in multiplayer with all the wallwalking and portaling. But if people have been able to achieve intuitive multiplayer dogfighting games with starships, then it isn't much of a stretch to incorporate similar elements in an Ender's Game shooter with flying kids.
quote:3. How would you make it more than just a simple "shoot em up as fast as possible" game unless you add more control options like strafing, tucking knees under, pop-out shots, etc.
What's wrong with more options? Check out games like Brothers in Arms and kill.switch to see how straight-up shooting can become much more tactical with the clever use of a few simple mechanics like crouching behind cover, blind-firing, and commanding a squad. The more you use context to shape the actions and commands at your disposal, that more depth you can cram into a simple control scheme.
Posts: 1539 | Registered: Jul 2004
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