TiddlyBoom - Explosive Golf Game

We're back and this week a nice open ended episode after last episode's 'Dating Sim' hell. This week we're trying to make a sports game from open world and survival mechanics. The result is a golf game the likes of which the world has never seen! 

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Chapters

• 0:00 30 Second Intro
• 0:30 Main
• 3:00 30 Second Outro

Transcript

0:00

very good. Hello, hello and welcome back to the Gaming Blender, the podcast of hypothetical video games. I'm your host today Scott and I'm here with Matt. Matt, how are you? I'm very well, Scott, it's lovely to be here. ah Words. Words, other words? I'm sure you have some. I can get your dictionary if you like, if you run out of them. Well, it's a very very good question. Well everyone, thank you. Welcome back to uh the Gaming Blender. As I said, the podcast of Hypothetical Games, what we do each week is we take a randomised uh gaming genre, mix it with a couple of randomised mechanics and then throw in a narrative, all within about 20 minutes and then by the end we have a hypothetical uh video game pitch as it were. Yes, it's essentially an elevator pitch. Imagine this very time you're stood next to us in an elevator. So Scott, do the elevator music now. I dunno, what is that music? Yeah. Yes. Elevator music I imagine is... Just really non-offensive, it's in the background and you're there and you stood with us and we're going high. You're in an elevator. Mm. He was stuck in an elevator with us. an elevator and at this stage we hit the emergency stop and go, do we have a game for you? And at which stage you probably try and claw the doors open desperately with your fingers. Yes, yes, like, I just want to get home, I just want get back to my apartment. No, you must listen to our gaming pitch. Indeed, that is pretty much what we do. But Matthew, what's new in your world of gaming? Well, I'm going to steer clear of foot manager because we discuss it on this podcast a lot. that is a particular tire fire. I'd like to burn out and then come back and reflect upon it. So I feel like it's not fair. Every day is a different thing. So we'll let it burn and come back and maybe talk about it in a few days. What I want to talk to you about is while I was away in Japan, actually, we need to discuss that firstly, Japan. Oh my God. I love that place. It's one of the few places you can go where gaming is loved to the extent of it's our talk. tour guide took us to a full blown arcade and was like, this is where you want to go. So parking that Japan amazing. However, while I was there, you sent me a game, didn't you? You sent me the link to a game. I certainly did, it looked very very funny. And you have played it, I have not played it yet. So it was called RV there yet. if you, I don't know if it's early access, can't remember if it's just, I think it is early access. But it's a game where you fundamentally are driving home with your mates, you're to be on a location, a location, vacation, and you jump in your RV to go home and things start to go a little bit wrong. And the idea, it is a, essentially a physics game. And I started playing it yesterday after your recommendation, it's six pounds on Steam. So I'd encourage people to go and tunt it down and take a punt. But I played it for about five seconds and thought, this is a game where I love the world. And as the world reveals more to me, I want to experience that with someone because you kind of go in, it drops you in with no tutorial, no nothing. There's a book on the bench, which you can pick up and it teaches you what to do. But there's so many lovely little touches you realize are going to be very funny. For example, you could accidentally leave the manual behind. There's nothing telling you to put the manual in the RV. There's nothing telling you to not forget your hammer and leave it on the side. And also I won't spoil anything, but you can tell that there's lots of physics elements in this world that will make driving difficult. An obvious example of something that's not a spoiler, this one isn't a spoiler, but it is a manual gearbox. So in a co-op game, you can imagine yelling at your mate to put it in the right gear while trying to traverse some choppy terrain. I love games that sell themselves slowly to you and let you discover more and more of the world. And my favorite game that did this recently was Sea of Thieves, which we played together. My reason for loving that was the way that we realized, we'd only realized things as they happened in game. So like the ship could sink. Yes, the first time we realised the ship could sink was when it was sinking. And we went downstairs and went, it's full of water, and then it just went. we had this thing where I wasn't allowed to drive after that, or steer more appropriately in a boat. believe if from memory you crashed the ship into a very large rock, which, I mean, I am no sailor, but I'm certain you're not meant to do that. So at the time, we just thought it was, haha, that's funny. And then we went down and realized this is even funnier because I've caused a massive hole in the ship and we didn't know. And the only way we realized that was where I think you said something along the lines going, have we always been this low in the water? Yeah. And I love that about games where games won't tell you that happens and then it all goes, it all goes horrendously wrong because of that. Now, up to that point, I enjoyed the game far more for ages because I thought whenever it was a storm, And whenever the waves washed over the boat, it was more likely to make a sink. Turns out that's not a mechanic in the game, but I didn't know that at the time. So I was getting, every time there was a storm, I was getting really excited because I was just laughing my head off at the thought that waves, we were just getting slower and lower. But as it suddenly revealed itself and the game said, no, it's not actually a mechanic, that did actually lessen the fun slightly for me. Can you think of any games where you've like played it and gone... I love the potential here, because anything could happen. That's a really really good question. It's a good point. I think the best game for showing the sort of things that could happen, two I would argue. The first is the Shadow of War games with the Nemesis system. That is just like, see patented so not going to be touched for a while. that's the first one I brush from. The second one is the NPC interactivity in Red Dead 2. So the fact that you could just go along and just a random NPC that is not really part of the game could just derail you for the next like 10 minutes just because of a weird interaction that you have with him. Like he could just be an NPC that's just programmed to say something to you like just like a drunken guy and then you're not really concentrating what you're doing you aggravated reply to him and then it leads to like a 10 minute escapade where you end up dragging this guy behind you on your horse because he's punched you or something. Like I love that sort of, you have no idea what the people in the world are going to say or do when they come across you. So I find that really interesting that you've gone NPC based for both of your examples where mine are much more physics and world based. So I love the idea of you versus the world where it turns up in the world goes well, which if you can listen to plenty of podcasts, I'm sure we've designed ones where the world gets difficult to the world, but I like the idea of there's a storm coming, therefore you need to think about it like this, this, this and this, which hopefully is what this RV thing is because yes, I was driving the car for. 20 seconds and then something happened that led me to go head first into ravine and as I was sat there in the in the RV while it was upturned at bottom of the ravine I thought Scott would like this. Yes, most of the games that we play together, listeners, end up in disaster, ruin, fire, blood, court case, death. Well, death, then court case. Yeah, court case and death is a weird way around as minority report-esque. No, I don't. But yeah, no, I... That's very interesting question. It is very interesting that I've gone for more NPC things than you. I think we enjoy different things in games, though. I do enjoy... I enjoy a world that feels real, and the way that I interact with that specific is via the NPCs. I think you're the same, but you interact with, like you said, the... the physics and the of the feeling that you're actually in a real world. um No, that's cool. That's cool. Yeah. Did you? Which one was that? oh, trailbla- yeah, I remember. I do recall. I do recall. No, we have. But it is around about that time that we start generating this glorious, glorious game. Are you... What's the word? Are you confident in the choices? Given what you gave me last time, are you confident that I have had the moral integrity to not give you Dating Sim as one of your mechanics? Um, I, after the pain I put you through, I think anything is possible. there uh is evidence to suggest that I could have, let's say, been morally corrupt and accidentally gone, oh no, dating sim has fallen in! I know, you weren't aware of quite exactly, exactly well, quite but you'll be pleased to know dating sim did not appear and I did not manually insert it so, what you have today for your genre Genre... ooooh a la FIFA or Madden. Insert any, you know, NBA 2025, whatever. quickly interlude. I do find it funny when people say madam, because as somebody who doesn't play it, all I can hear is madam. So when people say it in a list, it just sounds like someone's offering a woman something. We FIFA madam. That's what it just sounds like to me. Yeah, all I hear is madam. that. I see that. I've also never played it. I have played it. I played it on the Wii. Because on the Wii it was quite fun because you just lobbed the Wii controller at your wall and got a touchdown. going to say a quick apology to our American listeners. We just don't get American football over here. It just doesn't happen. I have seen a game, but it's not very common. We're more rugby and football or soccer, as you would call it, over here. Your two mechanics with your sports game, interestingly, are quite generic. You've got survival and open world. Survival and open world sports game. Yeah, not not... Sports games are usually quite tight. So I'm interested to see what you do with this one. So survival being obviously you need resources, you need to craft things, various things. Survival games I've always had a slight soft spot for, but I think they've always out-survived me by the end. I've always got sick of the sort of process of them. My favourite, I mean, Bellrise is technically, is Bellrise Survive? I wouldn't say Bellrise Survive, I wouldn't say it goes far enough. kind of somewhere in there. Valheim and Raft were my favorite two survival games. Valheim was good because it gave you really low health. Bellwarr does a similar thing, but to a not as big an extent. And then you had to eat before you're going out. I didn't mind that. The one that actually survival element put me off, I always go back to is Red Dead Redemption 2, where it told me I had to have a bath. And I was like, no, you don't tell me what to do. And then Open World does what it says on the tin, lots of places that you can visit and go. And sports game. On that note as an aside, Matthew is quite smelly in real life so hence his dislike of being forced to uh bathe whether that's in real life or virtually. He'll really bathe. so I am actually smelly as we speak. So I am. you don't know what he looks like, think medieval peasant. That's Matthew. I thought you were just gonna go medieval peasant and bald. I thought that was gonna be a description of me. No, you weren't gonna say anything. I've thrown it out there. Anyway, my liege, let me go back to tending my lands. Please do. What do mean your lands? I'll give them to you. up. It's open world. So something that jumps to mind is golf, because golf is kind of an open world setup, because you're going from place to place, obviously, jazz it up a bit, and maybe add survival mechanics and you You make the golf carts unrestricted. Do you know Mario, Mario Golf Party, Mario Golf? I don't know what they ended up calling it. But that is, there were open world elements to that because what you did is you hit the ball and then you just ran after it. So which is quite an old idea, but maybe you could do that. Could you do it over a much wider scale and essentially take golf to the umpteen degree and say you've got a bomb that you've got to put down the safety of a hole and you have a ticking clock element. and it's open world because you essentially have to find the hole in the open world each time you transport the bomb. Oh, actually, okay, I've got an idea. Okay, right. I'm in, I'm in, I'm in. I'm seeing the code. I'm seeing the code. Did you ever play Zelda, it is the kingdom. That's been the gaming Blender podcast thing. No, so it is the kingdom and actually its predecessor to a lesser extent had mechanics where you could fire things because the whole world was all interactable. You could throw things, you could fire things across the world. And Zelda in that, sorry, Link being a complete, there'll be Nintendo fans out there begging for my blood after that era, had an ability which essentially meant you could charge uh a force and say he had a giant uh boulder or something, you could fling it essentially across the map. You could pause time. You could do all these sort of things. What happens? You're in an open world and you're given a bomb. Said bomb can only move X amount of times, like it can only be fired X amount of times. You need to get that bomb into some sort of shelter or reinforced structure for our intents and purposes, a hole in as little movements as possible. And to do it based, just because we were talking about physics based earlier, I got physics based on the break. brain, you have to build essentially catapults and various propulsion devices, which are completely up to you as a physics game. And obviously the quicker you do it, the less likely is that bomb to go off. So you get a score and that's essentially the sport. So it's essentially absolutely mad golf and the open world element is the hole could be anywhere in the open world. So you might be in a situation where you go, the hole is really close to me, but it's in a really precise position. So I need to build something really specific to get the bomb up there. or vice versa, it's miles away. I'm going to have to build a trebuchet-esque thing. And the open world element, sorry, survival element, do we want to do, it's very easy to say survival elements because you just say your character needs food. So maybe we say the survival element is you need to gather all of the materials for your catapults, whatever, you need to build them. So survival element is also, and there's various different standards. of materials, so you can get rotten wood, so if you try and catapult with rotten wood it might snap and go nowhere. I have an idea. Okay. Just for all, just so people on the listeners know, you put your hand up there. That was incredibly polite. I have an idea. What if we use the survival cap mechanic literally? And what I mean by that is... So basically what you're saying is that you're playing golf with bombs. So it's a sports game where it's like extreme golf, okay? Part of, I think, the rules of extreme golf, let's call it extreme golf for the sake of this, part of the rules of extreme golf... I think we're done. to not kill yourself playing extreme golf. uh And so, because the bomb will have a certain... I think as you move around each stage, all the bombs have different yields, okay? And they'll have different effects as per the radius. So the blast radius goes out to this, this particular distance, the fireball goes out to this distance, the shockwave goes out to this distance, which will have different effects on you physically. OK. But here's the thing, obviously the closer you are to the hole, the easier it is for you to get it in said hole because you don't have to create as large a catapult or whatever device, flinging device. So what you do is you create a system whereby you can shoot this from wherever you like, but you lose if you die. So if you die in the... if you choose to go 100 meters away and the fireball happens to get you, well, tough, you're dead. But if you somehow manage to find a way in which you can, say, build some sort of shelter around yourself or use the ground to your advantage, i.e. let's say the hole is on top of a cliff and you decide to go 50 meters below the cliff and just fire over the top into the hole, in which case the firewall's not going to get you because you're below it, hey, that's some good work. I like this because also it means there is a risk element of going close to the hole because it's a really like, say you've got an easy shot to finish, your brain will be going, but I've got to make it because if I don't make it, it's going off in my face. Yes. I also feel like you could add a system whereby you can have approach play so you can... the hole could be several kilometres away, okay? But... you can do like low... em low angle uh throws of your catapult where the bomb won't go off so you could say each bomb has its own... has a certain sort of... em it will only trigger a certain angle of descent. So you can fling it at lower angles of descent and it will hit the ground and won't go off. So you can do approach play if you want to get yourself into a better position. So essentially you'd have a bomb and you go, know I can move this extremely, for example, five times. I can do five big throws, but you get to like say two or one remaining and you think, okay, I'm just gonna nip, I'm just gonna keep edging my way there. I don't matter about the hits. And I think... you can do it exactly like golf. So there is a par for each hole. And there is a literal... I was going to say something, can't remember what it was. No, I can't remember what it was. But yeah, you can do it exactly the same. that was it. The weather comes into it as well. So you can... launch it where you think it's going, where you want it to go. But the effects of the world are going to have an effect on it as well, i.e. know, the wind is going to move it and all that sort of stuff. And I feel like you could end up with quite an interesting... Yeah. This game is being played online or offline, but either way, there are other players trying to find different holes around the map. So you're in a constant battle for not hitting their bombs in midair or not accidentally colliding with them. And also making sure that you get the resources you want instead of them to build your things. Yes. Yeah, that could work. very much, I believe the phrase is scramble in the world of golf. Yeah, maybe that's a game mode, you call it scramble and then that's where you have everybody playing at the same time or you can play sort of around by yourself or a four bomb. A four bomb, go out for a four bomb or two bomb. I feel like that could be quite entertaining. Are we saying that in the world this is set in, this isn't actual sport? Let's wait for the plot. Let's see what you've drawn on plot. And if we get forbidden love between a man on his bomb. I think the way you do the survival bit, as I said, is you actually physically surviving and it's the final toss as it were. You basically do a right, there's no putting, you have one shot to get it in the hole and you sort of make that decision and go right, okay, I've got to the point now, it's gonna be a bogey if I get it in. So, rubber stamp, I'm going for it. And then that then triggers almost like a little build mode where you can build yourself wherever you've ended up. You can build yourself almost like a, not like a shelter, but kind of like a wall or like a... I feel like you can do that any, any shot, but maybe what you do is you have a shot clock. So the shot clock only starts when you essentially it becomes your go. You can assemble lots of things in advance. Maybe everybody has five minutes to assemble everything they need for the things. And then when it's your shot, you have X amount of time to build, prepare and build and put your stuff together. Maybe longer. think the timing has to work because otherwise you'll just be stuck in someone's building a catapult for four days. I also feel like at any point if you encounter another player you can just be an arse, ignore the hole and just fire your bomb at them. Yeah, maybe that's what you call a gimme. If you take out another player with your bomb, you get their bomb. Yeah, that's not bad. Because then maybe you have different classes of bomb floating around and you go, that's a much less dangerous bomb. this one has a much lesser yield and it will much less likely to murder me when I hit it. Yes, no, I like that. I like that tattoo. I think that I think with this game, and I think you get this war golf games, you need a little bit of work out how do people take shots? Maybe actually you everybody has a timer on the bomb. There is there is the amount of times it gets hit. But then there's also just a general timer. So you know, you have 10 minutes to get in the hole. That could be one shot that could be 40 shots. So you then work out how you want to approach it. Yeah. And maybe par is the mean you do par by time and the more hits you take you essentially it reduces time on the bomb. I like this, this sounds very entertaining. It sounds surprisingly more tactical than you would consider. Okay, would you like your narrative? I would love an additive. Your narrative is actually, again, quite generic which actually, arguably, gives you an opportunity to make it more different for yourself. Adventure. So, a la Uncharted is a classic adventure game as a narrative. Okay, adventure. What my brain is fishing out. Hmm. is that you have, where this world is, maybe it's maybe show a bit of fun, should we set it in like an alternative steampunk-esque world? Maybe post industrial revolution, so bombs are a thing. So bombs around, gunpowders around. Yeah, yeah, which, yeah. I like that. Did you say steampunk? Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't say you mean steampunk, I said, so steampunk. steampunk. So yeah, so we said in that kind of world where essentially, but it's seen as the big sport, it's the equivalent of jousting. So did you get my, you get that sort of the slightly dark element of stupid, moronic. It's one of these things, it's really like, maybe you have Knights, like you have this weird dichotomy, where you have this slightly industrial advancing world, steampunk as well, but Knights in averted commons playing this sport and holding on to the old ways. Yeah, what if it's, what if it, as in like, I think, yes, have them as like the old nightly class, but they're kind of like now dressed as like Georgians. Do know what I mean? So it's just that they, so, you know, they used to do this stuff. Yes, they used to do this stuff. And now that these, is the stupid, like really dangerous TOF game. A bit like in the early 1900s when all the TOFs used to do racing and they all used to die on the weekend because they were doing, they were the... driving these incredibly fast cars on banked circuits with no seatbelts at all. That's the... um I'm afraid his head fell off at the last race. I feel like that could be entertaining. these are the very... This is the upper class game. and the player you choose, so there's got to be an element of like silliness to it. So you choose your golfer in inverted commas. And the idea is they maybe we saw model it on the night tale esque story for the film where you sort of set off to become and it is seen as a grand adventure, but the stupidity so you go meet the person who's hosting the games. And he says I just need one more to fill my games. And as just as like the arm of his nephew who had recently entered is dragged across in front of him. And your person stands up and goes, I am the knight, duh duh duh, from duh duh duh. I prove your worth. And he like makes a little cannon that fires a spitball. And it's like, yes, wonderful. You shall be in the games. Yeah, maybe you could model it on that idea of the grand tour, where people would go on this grand journey across Europe. it's like this toffee-nosed tour of the different... What we calling this game? Golf-a-morons. oh, feel like it's got to have a slightly stupid upper classy name that's more like, more stupid than the word golf. Yeah, yeah, is it that kind of vibe where the name is incredibly unscary? Tiddly Boom I feel like that's the name of the game I think we've so there we go this says we've sorted out the name of the game before we've even we've got to the end it's called Tiddly Boom spoiler alert you know, in the Lord of the Rings, no, it's in the Hobbit actually, there is a passage in the book where they talk about what the inventor Gandalf is pretend talking to telling the story about the way the game of golf was invented. And he tells that the way was someone beheaded a goblin and whacked his head miles away, which fell into a badger hole. That's the vibe I think this whole game should have. And it should have little notes in it about how the game Tiddly Boom came about. Yes. essentially going, and then what happened was Jeff ran off with the bomb and dropped it in the hole, but exploded. I feel like death in this game should be treated incredibly juvenile, it's a juvenile, it's like, he's dead! Anyway, it's just like, it's a non-thing. It's just like, dear. well. idea, is, I don't know, this may be controversial. Oh, come on. I feel like it should have a female protagonist who's not allowed to play Tiddly Boom because it is a man's sport. Oh, so we're doing a 12th night, are we? Well, yeah, and I think what you do is you then have all of the men being absolute morons around this woman who's like, I know exactly how to do could you please stop doing and just the men, what ho fire the bomb. Yes, incredibly toffee idiots, yes. I like this idea. and your character every stage and there's like, but a woman? A woman doesn't understand bombs? oh A woman? Tilly boo- I will not- and then he explodes. Yeah, it's like, yeah, and I hope you have a lot of like very, very crusty players who have been playing for like 70 years. They've never, they barely speak to their wives, let alone seen a woman on the Tilly Boom course. Yeah, I like it. I like it. I feel like it's a very good because you could just have every man be an absolute moron. Is, is, are we doing Twelfth Night where she's pretending to be a man? Or is she an- that I feel like you can start off pretending to be narrative wise, start off pretending to be a man, the 12th night story. And after about three or four, your helmet gets knocked off by an idiot's blast who just blows up nearby and your helmet gets blown off. And they are woman and then you could because I think that does introduce a lot of comedy, where you've essentially to a woman on the course of tiddly boom, because actually, isn't that I'm going to do a bit Googling in the background here, entertain the entertain the audience. You me to vamp for a bit? Yeah. Thanks for the warning. It just dropped me in it. Yes. wasn't it, women weren't allowed to play golf for a long time? Or is that me, have I made that up? Have I made that up? very potentially uh... i don't think i think yes women were historically banned from golf many clubs prohibiting female members or strict in that way yeah you are quite right who was the first known golfer. But there you go. There is a source to this tale. I really like that. I like that. Well, I will summarize but you I feel like you don't have any more names to get I feel like it's called Tiddly Boom. So I'll try and think of it like maybe a suffix or prefix. Yes, so there you have it ladies and gentlemen, is uh a... how to describe it... a sports game with survival and open world mechanics with an adventure narrative set in a steampunk version of Earth where the upper knightly classes used to partake in the sport of jousting. Now along comes this new steampunk world with, factories and steam power and now the art of jousting has gone out of fashion instead the game of tiddly boom has come into the fray which is essentially a ridiculous version of the game of golf where essentially you construct various different apparatus to throw munitions over a great distance into the holes as opposed to using a golf club and a ball. It functions pretty much exactly the same as golf except that the aim of the game is to not be killed by the own yield of your bomb when it goes off. That is pretty key. At any point you can launch your own bomb at other players whereby you then take possession of their bomb if you just want to be a bit of a knob basically. And this particular adventure would take you over the course of an open world, have to traverse that world to get to the holes, to get to the courses and of course you must construct when you finally take the shots where you're going to be unleashing the bomb itself, you can build shelters and walls etc to try and keep yourself alive when the bomb eventually goes off in the hole. And the name of this, as we've already discussed, Matthew, is what? It is called Tiddly Boom! It is called Tiddly Boom. I feel like you could play this on pretty much anything. A smart fridge, for example. And yeah, it will come to you as soon as this podcast is picked up by a publisher. Hmm, exactly. there, tiddly-boom. Right there publishers, and you want a game of Tiddly Boom, come to us, we will be... Yes, yes, a game of Tiddly Boom. Anyway, we hope you have enjoyed this latest episode of Tiddly Boom, I mean the podcast, I mean the gaming blender. We should rename this podcast Tiddly Boom. uh the- imagine the weekly roundup of tiddly booms. The tiddlers are having a chat. we uh hope you've enjoyed that. If you enjoyed it, please like and subscribe at wherever you get your podcast. Please write to us, our details are in the description. And please set us challenges, we do love a challenge. So please do get in touch if you wish to do so. In the meantime, I have been Scott. Hey Tiddle Tiddle. Hey, Tiddly Boom. And please do keep on blending until we speak to you again. Take care now. Bye bye. Bye!