We're visiting our daughter and her family in Kansas City this week. We have been visiting, on and off, since last August. While we've been driving around this week, it has been obvious that the roads around here had a hard winter: potholes, potholes everywhere.
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| Potholes, potholes, everywhere! |
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| Map of potholes in Kansas city |
While attempting to dodge the potholes, I got an idea for a great new video game. I'm going to call it "Potholes!". With the exclamation point.
Here's the basic idea
The premise is simple. It's a first-person point-of-view driving game. You are in the driver's seat, looking through the windshield as the road scrolls towards you. This should be easy to do in a 2D game engine, like Defold or Godot.
As you drive along, potholes appear in the road. Each time you hit a pothole, you register some degree of damage. The larger the pothole, the greater the damage. When your damage reaches a critical point, your car falls apart, right there in the middle of the road. (Use a cut scene for this.)
Scoring
Your car has an odometer. Your score is how far you can get before your car falls apart.
Details of operation
The point is to dodge the potholes. You can drive around them, or you can straddle them. Damage occurs when your tires hit the potholes.
You get an animated "bump-bump" when you hit a pothole. The larger the pothole, the larger the bump.
You can dodge into the oncoming lane, but if you collide with oncoming traffic, you crash, obviously. (Use a different cut scene for this.)
There is a rare, giant, car-eating pothole. When you drive into it, your car disappears, as you can imagine. This one gets a Warner Brothers Cartoons style cut scene, where you see the car drive out into thin air and then drop straight down, leaving a puff of dust at ground level.
Enhancements
Day and night. At night, you have wimpy headlights that may or may not catch all the potholes.
The headlights occasionally flicker, often at just the wrong time. If this is too annoying and spoils the game, I will drop it.
Fog! Potholes are invisible, until you're almost on top of them. Maybe I should add heavy fog, where the potholes are completely invisible.
Degrees of difficulty
- Easy: slow speed, few potholes (This will be the original game)
- Medium: higher speed, more potholes
- Hard: highest speed, lots of potholes, but density will vary at random
Steal this idea! It is NOT copyrighted.
Feel free to steal my idea and make it your own. Feel free to sell your game and get rich from it! Maybe just acknowledge me in the credits.
