Time Hoppers - The Racing FPS

This week we have returned to the world of Racing and First Person Shooters. Throw those together and add some Time Travel and you have quite the insane racing game on your hands!

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Transcript

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together. Okay. I don't know when that pause is going to be! Hello! Hello! Welcome all to the Gaming Blender, the podcast of Hypothetical Games. I am your host today, Scott. I am here with Matt, as always, and today Matthew is going to be creating a brand new hypothetical video game. That's what we do on this podcast. We take randomised genres, randomised mechanics and a randomised narrative and try and squish all of that together in about half an hour into a hypothetical video game. This week, Matthew has a racing game with permadeath, FPS style multiplayer mechanics and a revenge narrative. great. That's your pause. There we go, thank you. Take it away whenever you see fit. So Matthew, how are you feeling about today's choices? Well, that was all slightly surreal because I know I came up with this intro idea, the sort of cold intro and fly in, but still, I mean, I just sat there and made some notes and now I'm into it and now I'm straight in. So we've got a racing game. So that's fairly self-explanatory that involves racing things. We have permadeath, which is essentially you die, you go back to the start, roguelike or road light, which I... discovered recently are different things, which is very difficult for my brain. And then they are, they are different things. They're a rogue-like and rogue-lite. So a rogue-like, yeah, I know, I thought they were the same thing as well. It's very embarrassing. We've been doing, this is episode 79 of this podcast. And I think I've said, I've said both of them almost all the time. It's really bad. So a rogue, I'm pretty sure one of them essentially means dungeon crawler. And the other one means the permadeath thing. And I can't remember which way I think there's buzz over it. I'm editing this. That's a bit, I'll edit it out. So we've got that. So that's like similar to Hades. We've got FPS mechanics. Was it FPS mechanics you said? Oh, style multiplayer apologies. So sort of Call of Duty. So what would you, what do you think of when you think of, I think Call of Duty capture the flag is the one that jumps up in my head. It's always, it's the, it's the. or Team Deathmatch is a classic, but that's about as imagined. That's got the imagination of a stuffed toy. Yeah, bit you have to, I reckon, be novel about here is the FPS-style multiplayer. That's the... Because the permadeath stuff, everyone gets that, that's quite hard to make original. Racing game, you can do a lot to make that original, but FPS-style multiplayer, think... Difficult. Difficult. mechanics, revenge, storytelling. So very similar to the Barbie movie. Obviously. Have you seen the Barbie movie? Have you not? No, it sort of passed me by. no, you should definitely watch the Barbie movie. And I think the Barbie movie would make it also an excellent video game. Feel like that because it jump. I think so. You're jumping between the real world and the fake. Well, I think that's I think that's a good it's very similar actually. And I mean, this this this combination will make sense in your brain when I when I say it. It's very similar to the watching a film with the Sims. Oh, right, okay. And now I can see how that would be quite interesting. So, a free guy is kind of a bit like that. Yeah. film, actually. I quite like Free Guy. It makes me chuckle. We got distracted, I'm sorry. an interest? We always get distracted, it's fine. The racing game. So let's start from the beginning. So in terms of the racing game. It's a very good place to start. What I'm going to ban you from is you are not allowed to make a racing game about trains. No. I've put my foot down on this because I've told you time and again that racing games with trains doesn't work because they're on the same bloody track. So how are they going to get round each other? And you keep trying to pitch me the idea and I keep swatting it down. No. No train racing games. Pull over! I can't pull over, I'm a train! Pull over! play a blimp racing game where you overtake someone at 0.5mph. a racing, and I'm sure we've spoken about this before, there is actually a train racing game that exists that was on PS2 and it was great fun. It was called Extreme Trains because you went between points to overtake. I'm not going to argue with you about this point, we've argued about it far too much already. But, other than... Other than trains. game with first person style multiplayer. So first person style, the first thing I thought immediately cars capture the flag, capture something because you were traveling to someone. Does that count as a race in your opinion? How are we defining racing games? Is racing games just the presence of vehicles or does it have to be a start and an end point? I feel like there has to be a start and an end point for a race. Okay, so... Here's an idea. No it's not. Maybe it is? The most nascent idea. Here's an idea- no, it's dead. I've killed it. I've killed it in my mind. one of the biggest exports of our little island for a small period of time and a sad period in our history was Top Gear, where it was a start and end point and it was raced across multiple continents. And these sort of long style races involved different styles of driving or traveling around. But I'm thinking of that sort of long race checkpoint system is perhaps something to commit to where you have to go and pick something up. Now, does that therefore count as the FPS style multiplayer? you're taking something or am I stretching the capture the flag element too far? Okay. think you have to do a first person shooter. There has to be a shooter element to it. So I think it probably has to be something... There has to be some violence. I think that's what you've got. You've got violence. end of National Treasure where it's think it's Harvey Keitel's character says to Nicolas Cage's character, someone's got to go to jail. This is the equivalent to you saying someone's got to get shot in the head. Whenever this is pulled. Yes, so this is this is the angle we're going down. Okay, exactly that. This is exactly that situation. You definitely not overreacted. I'd entirely forgotten about the permadeath. Right, okay. Gameplay style. god, how does permadeath work with multiplayer? So, I'll tip my hat into the ring here. Before you do, I just want to give the viewers the image that I'm currently looking at, because this is obviously an audio podcast. I have been sat perfectly upright, thinking about what I'm going to be suggesting next. The tension is high. I'm committed. I'm zoned in. Scott's in his pajamas leaning back on his chair with his feet on his desk. They're on the wall actually, correction. But I also have my crocs on as well because I'm... I'm that sort of... I'm that sort of... I'm that sort of man. But as I... I said tip my hat into the wing which is completely not the right phrase. But... Picture an incredibly violent Mario Kart. Okay? my hat to you. You could set it the real world or could set it in something fantastical, it doesn't really matter. this is Twisted Metal, isn't it? Twisted Metal is... did you ever play Twisted Metal? There was a pause? No. Twisted Metal was a sort of vehicle, vehicular combat game from the early 2000s. It was remastered for the PS3 as well. PS1 was the original games where essentially, I think it's very convoluted the storyline. I'm going to get shouted at by our reviewers. Please don't mark us down for this. But I think it's... all terrible people get resurrected and they have to fight for something, some sort of great race. There's a TV series about it now starring Anthony Mackie, second series of which is just coming out. Okay, okay. that is the vibe, the sort of Mario Kart with guns. What I've just thought of is, you could have some sort of, I don't know how you'd work this narratively, but let's say obviously it's multiplayer, you work in... Teams of four usually at the moment is what's working in video games, know, you've got Helldivers and things like that, people are used to teams of four, and because of games like Helldivers people are used to working together in teams of four and not working against one another. So, I'm trying to think of a... a way where, I'm not sure how you do it narratively like I said, where you could basically get almost like, almost like portalled in to a different time period each time, okay? And each time you've got the race is set in a different time period, we're in completely different mode of transport, and you have completely different weapons each time. So let's say one time you get put in and it's medieval times and it's Horse and cart you against you against another team and you've got like crossbows and bow and arrows and lances and stuff and then you've got you know one that's in Set in the 1920s and you're in like Mafia style Cars and you've got tommy guns and all this sort of stuff Maybe you could do something that's quite fun like that where you were like moving in and out of different to give it a bit of me, but I have a suggestion from there. Did you ever play, I think it was on the original GoldenEye, I can't remember where they brought it over to Nightfire. There was a mode in multiplayer where if you shot someone, your gun got upgraded or moved to the next gun and you had to consistently keep killing someone. Imagine your idea, but each time you kill someone, you move to a different vehicle. So you go through an entirely different vehicle. So say you kill someone. in permadeath, that person has to, let's maybe say the permadeath element is more of a, you have to get back to your garage to start again, to get something new out, to get a new vehicle. So the permadeath doesn't necessarily apply to the player, it applies to the vehicle. Now what happens is when you're playing in said vehicle, you're leveling it up and each time you... kill, get a kill, you unlock something, maybe it'd be a new gun or new element, you keep on you keep on knocking, keep on knocking. However, if you die, you obviously get that vehicle goes back to the start. Hmm. I see. I see what saying. How do you get... Do you have to travel back? How does it work with the... How do you get back if you're dead? No, maybe we do this as some sort of arena thing. I'll work on that. I'll work on the narrative for later. I'm kind of trying to flesh out the narrative because we still haven't even got the race bit into this yet. No. No. We're not doing very well at this. We've done this for how many episodes? So the way to balance this as well is that instead of getting better, in theory, you get worse, your vehicle gets worse because otherwise you're gonna be stuck in a permanent loop, aren't you, of your vehicle. okay, okay, this is gonna be a technological nightmare, but I think I've got it. So you start off in terrible, as you said, you start off early. medieval period or whatever it is, or you go around in horse and cart, just sort of whipping someone with a yarn of corn and you kill someone and when you get killed, you get teleported into the next phase with all the players in the world who have also reached that next phase and you jump into the next vehicle. And each time you die, you go back to the first phase. So it's 10 phases you've got to work your way through and each time you die, you go back to the start. So it's kind of almost a battle. a staged version of Battle Royale. Okay. So each time you're upgrading, you get a new vehicle and maybe there's a few vehicles you can pick and it's that classic thing of you get dropped in somewhere and you have to run around just trying to find a vehicle and you end up getting in one. you get to end up, you get to end up. yeah, but, it's chow. So maybe that leads quite a fun solution where you can drop into a game and be lucky and get a good vehicle. But also if you die, you're like, right, okay, it doesn't matter too much. Or if you get a rubbish vehicle, you go, well, I might get a good one in the next round. know this and the permadeath element is just sending you all the way back to the start. That's the battle royale. when you win races? you then get to upgrade yourself, your vehicle? How does that work? races is when it transports you to the next level. Okay. So maybe I have the image in my head also of each race being very different. Like maybe one's a completely straight line. So you go, okay, well, I'm on the fastest vehicle, but the fastest vehicles have no armor. So a tank, maybe if you had a really slow tank, you'd be like, I can easily snipe them off and I can slowly make my way across. And then some will be like a rally circuit. So maybe if you literally got a really small vehicle that was tidy, you could just zip, zip your way down. And that does bring the race element in. But permadeath is like the dying, there are two ways, aren't there? There's you win the race to go through, or you die and go backwards. So losing the race doesn't, okay, actually, that's a question. If you lose the race, do you go back? Or do you stay in the same round till you die? No, I think you get knocked down. I think you get knocked down one. Okay, so knock down one for losing the race, but all the way back to the start if you die. So okay, hopefully that's a risk reward thing and people will be a bit twitchy. I've just had a thought. So I'm going to tip my hat into something. Imagine this. Imagine in the future time travel exists and these people are called, let's say this is a sport and it's called time hopping. And what happens is, a bit like gladiatorial combat but racing. all these players are obviously the people who play these time hoppers and they get thrown randomly backwards into time to participate in these races and there is an overall leaderboard there is an overall league table okay and as you as you go through you get more rewards and stuff you go up and down up and down up and down the table and you know the the the more wet rate rate...waces? the more wacky races Wadoon Wacky Waisers! win... If anyone hasn't seen Wacky Racers, do watch it, it's excellent. God, I haven't watched that for... Could you do the dusted... What's your best... Give us your best dustedly. Dustedly? Dustedly the... No, no, no. No, but isn't it dusted... Dustedly? Dick dustedly is it, okay. going into oncoming traffic, for example. can you think we can put the joke in somewhere if we get sponsored, we can call it RuPaul's Drag Race. Have a literal Jagrace a bit there. okay. a different thing entirely. For anyone who hasn't seen RuPaul's Drag Race, can watch it on Netflix. It's not... Do you know what? It's quite good. But anyway, moving on. I know, I know. I know. Anyway, moving on from this time RuPaul's Drag Race. For any new listeners, this is perfectly normal. We can't really stay on topic. We do eventually get back there. But anyway. Yes. And let's say this is almost like a spectator sport. So the general public watch people get thrown back in time and they sort of just appear in 19th century Vienna going, bicycle! I don't know if bicycles were there in the 1600s. That's probably incorrect. But let's say they were. And then, bicycles, horse and carts, a horse and all that sort of stuff and then... Scott's miming of horses and carts and bicycles is all exactly the same. Just lift your hands up and move them up and down a bit. This, this isn't my bike. Nay. yes, it's a horse. forget sometimes that they can't... the lovely listeners can't see us, which is a shame. But do you think that could... do you think that could... I like the idea and I like the sort of progression and going backwards and forwards in it. And it kind of, it kind of seems like an absolutely off its rock at Hunger Games. And I like the idea of you being spawned into a general like normal area in time. Obviously it'll be designed. So it's technically a race course, but it will feel like when you land in, as you said, land in Vienna, that there's lots of Italians just looking at you going, what? Austrian, sorry. Sorry, I was thinking of Venice. Venice! I was singing in Venice. I was going to make a punting joke earlier. That would have gone down badly, wouldn't it? Matthew is not a geographer. He's ba- he's not a geographer. You are a class- you should know that Vienna is not in Italy, my friend. Austria is Italy adjacent, I'll grant you. Italy adjacent? I would argue, sir, that Vienna is Italy adjacent. I think you'll find. Your honour. it could be full of Italians, you don't know. Anyway, off of the city, off of where Vienna is, dear. I think, I think that, I think that works. I mean, I think it would be quite interesting as well having it, I think having it in first person as well makes it quite... name? I'm just gonna say it now, because we won't call it this. The name of the game will be, we have a Vienna. Does that help? That just about works, doesn't it? It just works. We have a Vienna. No, Kick me while I'm down. I think the first person nature of it will make it quite entertaining as well because you know you have to you get sort of parachuting like my gosh where am I and then you'll spend the first of 20 seconds going or do you think that's a bit cliche? feel like, I feel like, I feel, but how do you want to do it? I feel like this could be quite an interesting thing for us to do differently. Yeah. I have an idea, but it might be completely insane. I mean we normally do insane ideas, go on. As you get phased in, your body gets phased in from the feet up and it takes some time to face you in completely. So it starts off and you're just feet are wandering around the, just feet just wandering around and you slowly get zonked in so you can't get into your car, so your body's completely in. So you could have these people who go, I'd love to get in that car, but I haven't got my left hand for the gear stick, so it won't work. I think that would be quite funny. What if, what if in this, in this sort of future they're able to hijack people's bodies? So when you get pushed back, you get pushed back into some random person's body who just, whose conscious just gets pushed to the side while you're there and... dry... it... when the driver games did that? I don't know if it a driver game. I can't remember off the top of my head. you get pushed in and it could be... It could be, you know, just some... Yeah, it could be anyone. It could be anyone. It could be... And you know, it'd be quite nice, maybe you have like a little... I'm not sure, you probably wouldn't work on something. You could have a little teeny tiny cinematic before this person's body gets taken over. person's walking along, do do do. It could be like... He could be like a tourist. So could be like... It could be like someone in 19th century Paris who's going to visit Paris for the first time and he's just wandering along and all of sudden his body just gets taken over and he's like, aah, what's going on? you know the evil hamster video on YouTube where it and it looks straight at the camera. So what I'm picturing in my head is I'm picturing this, everybody going around their own vision and some sort of musical cue. And when the musical cue happens, the character has been taken over, looks at the camera wide eyed as if he's just... Maybe that's it, maybe you don't, maybe you don't, maybe you get shown a load of people and you think, is it that guy? Is it her? Is it them? And then all of a a forum, for example, just just looking around going on, I can be here, I can be here, I better not be the person stuck behind those tables and the person on the table. I think that would be quite entertaining. I think you've got a good breadth of history that you can roll from as well. could chariots and all manner of nonsense. idea as well of an expansion pack was released because it's such high pressure gameplay. Like you just have the race and you're shooting guns or whatever, whatever is attached to your car. But I like the idea of if you threw a new DLC in on the first release, no one would know what's going on and all get teleported in and going, what does this, what does this card, I don't know how to start it. it getting, what does it do? Like cavemen sell and just people just running around with a rock. Just, I don't know. Could you have some sort of like Hunger Games style thing where you could have things that aren't from that time period almost like given to you? you know what mean by that? So you know how there's that game, I can't remember what it's called but the game at the moment, however it's about to come out or it's doing really well where it's... you fight in medieval battles with machine guns. It looks epic, it's like massive, like thousands and thousands of soldiers and you're literally like riding around on a horse with a machine gun just mowing people down. I can't remember what the story is, it's time travel and stuff but you know it looks awesome, it looks really really cool. about what you have is you have special levels where you get teleported most of the time you fight with what's available. But maybe sometimes you have something that's time corruption and it flashes up when it's loaded going time corruption, time corruption. And you get ported in. So you go to ancient Rome, but it ports in the vehicles from the World War II era. So everyone goes, oh my goodness, there's a Jeep now. This Roman person in a Toga driving a tank. So we're saying, so I like that, I think that's cool. I think that would be quite fun. We've, no please do. The permadeath, so we're saying that the permadeath is basically if you die in the race, you are out of the race and you get knocked back, you get knocked back somewhere. right to the start and if you lose the race you just go one back. So that's the risk and reward. that happens and that affects your place on the overall leaderboard as it were. I've had a good idea for the revenge mix, we haven't touched on that yet. Could we do some sort of player v player nemesis system? Ooh, I like that, where you just sort of what are the chances for multiplayer that happens? So what we say is that as you go through, will obviously come up against certain people. And let's say that a person you kill someone more than once, or another person kills you more than once, you then get given the opportunity to declare each other rivals. Okay. Okay. And then what ends up happening then is every time you then log on, the game will put you together. The game will put you together in the same league table so then you get a chance to match up against each other. And then you will get rewards for winning that rivalry. the game will set, depending on how, I would say it would depend on how skilled you're, how leveled up, if we're doing levels, how leveled up your character is. But let's say... the game will set a threshold for how many kills or maybe like the first to 10 kills of the other one or something like that to win the rivalry and then once you've won the rivalry you get maybe what you get is some sort of really good consumable reward so go on to take your idea and make it more sustainable though. What you do is you pick, you pick a clan when you log on. And when I say clan, usually in these games, you pick one to two. There's not many. So let's say there's like... You pick one to two. One or... So one or two. Right, would you like red or white wine? it red or blue, sir? Do you want to be on the red team or the blue team? So my idea is you have loads of clans, so we're talking 10 plus. If you get killed by a certain clan enough times, or you kill a certain clan, you become their nemesis. So it becomes, and you use clan wars, and what will happen is that you get bonus XP for when you kill off someone that is a rival. So you'll have these battles, win battles, you go, I could cross the finish line now, but I do want to blow up the great Baldi Beard clan who's just following me behind. So you might have these little games, winning games that might work quite nicely with the multiplayer focus. I like it. And then maybe what we do is we just say, I mean, similar to Hunger Games, that we have drops of lore that floating around maybe in overworld, that these clans, I mean, it is very Hunger Games. I'm trying to think of a way to differentiate it at the moment that you have the whole, each clan was made up of an area of society. I'm just, how do we make that different? How do we make that cool? Well you can make it a bit like the old Roman chariot teams, you basically make it as though the society is at this very hedonistic stage and one of the main things that keeps people happy is watching time hoppers jump around doing these stupid races causing... and we can build it in that they literally don't care what happens with the whole... time paradox thing or you know a change of they literally did they don't care they don't care as long as they get to watch something funny happen with a horse and cart they they don't care It'd be quite funny to have little cinematics peppered through when it was loading of like after there is a time corruption, maybe there's a little shot of one of the ancient Romans digging around and finding the remains of the tank that was blown up in the previous level. Hmm. Yes, potentially. That would be quite interesting, wouldn't it? Okay. Oh, you could have a level where one of the, it could be over an Italian city and like Vienna. Yeah. So, and you could, one of the vehicles could be Leonardo da Vinci's wingsuit. Can you imagine it just by, it's the fastest vehicle and it's really hard to shoot, but you'd have to run up the tower to get it. So it would all completely rely on where you spawned. That would be quite funny. Would... Do you think we're at a stage where I can summarise and you can come up with an idea? Okay. Okay. So! What we have there, dear listeners, in the space of just half an hour, is a racing game with permadeath, FPS-style multiplayer mechanics and a revenge narrative. Set in a hedonistic future. the society of the day entertains itself by watching the time hoppers a group of crazy, in this case, sportsmen actually who go back in time to participate in a variety of different time hopping races they may jump back in time and be thrown into the ancient Roman era and have to quickly mount whatever vehicle is about, be that chariot, horse or piggyback from a man. What will happen is they will get pushed back into time, they will occupy the body of someone back in that time and they will be set a start and finish point at which point they will race, obviously trying to murder one another at the same time, of course. If they die in the race, they are out of the race, there is no respawning and the timehoppers are ejected back to the previous race. There will be a leaderboard, a league table, think the new Champions League format if you understand football, where timehoppers will jump up and down the tables as the viewers of Earth watch them, completely corrupt time. There will be specific time corruption episodes where, due to all the mayhem they've been causing, time will corrupt and they will be using Bren guns in the the middle ages and and all sorts of other nonsense will be going on. There will be a clan wars sort of revenge-esque narrative within whereby when you join a certain clan at start of the game if you kill certain players of another clan the clan declares war on both you and your clan which will force the two clans together in a battle. within the races and this game is called Matthew kind just wrote down a lot of things. Of course I did. So the first one is yes, this is true. We don't often get to the stage and Scott goes, I have nothing for you. So my the one that is most sort of generica is a race through time. Racer of time... it... It does reset on the 10-bit's bit generic. yeah. So then time hoppers, because they are time hoppers. And then I started getting a bit silly. Of the silly things I down, the one that made me smile, and I don't think it actually makes any sense, but it makes sense in my head, is Charioteer AD. I mean, it only makes sense if they jump into... I know it doesn't make any sense, but for some reason in my head, it sounds like it makes sense. And the other one I was trying to play with is, you know, F1, obviously F1. I was trying to play around and you might be able to help me with this because this is jumping off point. This isn't the name I wanted because I feel like there's something in this because the F is for future. So I wrote F chariot. F chariot. F, Chariot. But that sounds more like you've almost been hit by a chariot when crossing the road and you're swearing at it. Yeah, as I was about say, that sounds like you're really angry at a chariot driver. I think Time Poppers works. time hoppers. Okay. coming to you on everything on everything all our games what no actually no we don't do mobile games no we don't no we don't no we don't damn it fine we do mobile games this is I'm sorry I have a pet peeve against mobile games and hmm news, don't we, for the next episode? We do. A mutual school friend of Matthew and ours, Tom, who has been on the podcast previously while I have been away, he has written a book, Blood in the Water, and we've invited him on to not only help us out with creating a book, but also to plug his own. I said, create a book, create a game, and plug his own book. You did. So the plan, what we're to do is we're going to bring him on for the next episode and he's going, we're going to make a video game of his book, which I think is going to be, it's going to be quite exciting and play it. So yeah, what you, what you did is you just said lots of words all in the wrong order. So he will be on for the next episode, which will be hitting your ears around March. And the book will also be going on sale at the end of this month or start of March, depending on your supplier, please go out. can pre-order now. pre-order it before you've even read it, leave them a good review and just say, cheers mate, we've heard you're a good bloke. So that's maybe a bit more detail, make it sound like you have read it. It's called Blood of the Water by Tom Meredith and can find it at Troubadour, it's probably the best site to find it on. can find it on other good book websites that are waterstones if you're in the UK or wherever you get your novella styles. That's our friendship obligations I think done. I think. think. I I know. Bastard. Anyway. Yes I did. Yes I did. Should I say it again? Should I say it three times in a row? give me bleeping to do. It's late at night and I've got an edit. dear. good, anyway. Listeners, we hope you enjoyed this episode of the Gaming Blender. Please do leave us a review on wherever you listen to your podcast. Please do write to us and give us challenges, set us challenges for what you would like us to make on the show. We would more than happy make whatever game you want us to make and we will do it. We can't guarantee its quality but we will do it. We will do something. But in the meantime... I have been Scott and we wish you a very good rest of your week and please keep blending. Bye bye. Bye now.