*Copy and Pasted from my messy word document, page is due to be proof-read and refined.
My first two ideas came from a very initial understanding of Hypercasual genre meaning it just needed to be a lot lighter on the mechanics that players engage with, and the controls needed to be simple.
FIRST IDEA:
Exploration game: Make difficult to navigate terrains (UE5 landscapes?) that the players can navigate using various tools, think like hiking equipment:
- Levels: Canyons, mountains, rapid waters, deep caves, cliffsides
- Tools: Rope grapple system [Tether a permanent line from point A to B and climb between, attach to safety line to catch falls] climbing hooks, ?Camera(to take a glamorous picture of the low poly dev-art),
- Make a collage with these ideas
- Inspiration: Deep Rock Galactic (each class has a different piece of equipment that helps navigate procedurally generated terrain),
Goal? Maybe the player has to find a special item then escape, a little like slenderman or many scare triggers in Amensia: The Dark Descent.
I’m not too sure if the gameplay would end up being simple enough to fit the brief, or if the gameplay loop would be short enough to be considered hypercasual.
SECOND IDEA
Potential mobile souls-like idea because why not (It’s not very hypercasual imo that’s why not):
- 2D idea, side scroller perspective, player on left hand side of the screen with enemy on the right side.
- Player can make swipe actions on screen to fight in the game, however their actions are different based on if their swipe over their character or over the enemy.
- Self-actions: Swipe left to dodge backwards, down to duck, up to jump, right to block/parry.
- Attack actions: right to lunge, down for an overhead swing, up for an underhand swing, I don’t know left.
- Could include other actions for tap and counterclockwise circle or clockwise circle, more attacks that aren’t needed to succeed but help?
- Enemy attacks need to be either dodged with the right action based on the telegraphed enemy attack, when their player is attacking, their damage will do standard damage unless the enemy has a critical weakness or less if struck on their telegraphed blocking animation.
Regarding that second idea, I think having 2 different sets if inputs being defensive / offensive is way too complicated for hypercasual, to mitigate this the player could automatically attack after successful dodges. A simple prompt with 3 steps could easily show the controls as well [Warning / React / retaliate], enemy broadcasts its attack -> the player reacts with the correct action -> upon successful action, the enemy is automatically struck back.
With this new idea, we need to break down what we want the controls to be again, keeping it simple.
Duck, Jump, step-back step-forward are my main ideas, enemy makes a clearly projected attack – a number of games I recall [FURI], and other souls-like titles show the area a boss is about to hit so that the player may dodge.
FURTHERING this idea, I still think it’s too complicated, a lot can be done with very simple game inputs, I think the BEST solution for the game is to have a left / right action input. My idea is that the player is in front of an enemy, an attack is projected/warned to land on either the left or right hand side of the screen and the player has to dodge to the other side of the screen to avoid the attack. If the player is hit then they lose health however if they successfully dodge the attack then they perform an auto-attack to fight the enemy.