Emperipolesis

[Weregoose]

Disclaimer: This is one of those "ideas about programs that you would like to see in the future" scenarios. I don't intend to begin working on this.

Last night, I dreamt that I was playing a computer game. My mind portrayed it as an intense and immersive 3-D experience, but the gameplay is actually rather nice and simple: it's sort of like a time-delayed Tron meets Pac-Man.

Imagine that you are a spaceship orbiting (Tron-style) over a massive alien computer network, where each system is represented by a tile on a hexagonal grid. As you pass over each one, you can hit the space bar to drop an EMP time-bomb, which will (hopefully) grant you some distance before the bomb detonates and changes the tile's state. If one of these should go off at a place that you're occupying, well, clearly, you've lost a ship.

There are also a number of drones on each map. Their role is identical to yours, but their behavior is sporadic (which is dangerous, given that you can be dispatched by each other's explosives). Occasionally, a super-bomb pickup will appear at a random tile. Once collected, these can be fired like normal, but with a different key. It'll destroy everything in a 1.5-tile radius, though, so be sure that you can get away from the blast site in time!

Other game specifics:

The ship has a constant velocity. The up/down arrow keys have no function, but the left and right keys will send a signal to turn the ship 60° in the proper direction at the center of the next tile. By some rules of play, the player may want to make use of the auto-repeat feature of the space bar and simply depress at places where the strategy is appropriate.

Maps can be chosen from a set or randomly generated – in any case, looping in all directions, even if sections are cut off by "collision" tiles. These gaps in the playing field—which are not walls exactly, nor would falling through them while driving a spacecraft make any sense—will cause the player to lose a ship. Perhaps they can be gravity wells, or super-heated/radioactive.

An "annihilation" mode would pit the player against one or more drones of a preselected AI. Other modifiers may be involved, such as whether a dropped bomb will remove a tile from play. A "puzzle" mode might use a step-based ruleset, where the player must avoid the aggressive drone(s) while clearing every tile. This would require some level planning on the author's part.

About the title:

EMP = Electromagnetic Pulse; Emperipolesis = One cell passing through another cell. There's a little bit of a misnomer there, but I thought it might be catchy. (Sugarcoat: check!)

[dxfan101010]

Sounds Pretty fun

[Harrierfalcon]

Apart from figuring out which letters to omit in the name to still achieve readability, this is a pretty neat idea. I'm guessing the biggest problem would be handling the hexagonal tiles and the character's interaction with them.

[DigiTan]

Those revsoft renegades Jim e and calc84maniac have some cool Mode 7 projects that might go well with this.