Concept 2 - Memory-Management FPS

Movement-based FPS game where everything about a character - health, position, weapons, and so on - is stored in a block of "memory" mimicking computer memory in the form of number "bytes", which can be overwritten by damage dealt by enemy bullets... or your own shots, which fill up your memory as well, if you aren't careful.

Core Loop: Find enemies, fire at enemies to try and damage their memory and overwrite things like their health and weapons (perhaps with an "advanced targeting system" that lets you target specific pieces of "memory", whereas normally you'd just be overwriting random bytes with each hit), run garbage collection to clear out your own shots from your memory to avoid them overflowing and overwriting your health and such, perhaps "repair" your memory by fixing overwritten bytes with health packs, repeat with next encounter in the level until the level is complete, repeat with the next level


Similar Games:

- ULTRAKILL - similar aesthetic (low-poly 3D) and general shooting mechanics, but more tactical and with a different focus as damage comes in the form of corrupted memory, not losing health directly.

- Baba is You - similar mechanical concept of being able to overwrite properties of objects and even the rules of the game itself to solve problems, with potentially disastrous results - but instead of pushing specific blocks around, you're shooting property-overwriting "blocks" at the opponent to replace what's already there in hopes of breaking them.

- Fallout - Similar "advanced aim" mechanics that bring up a screen to help you shoot at a specific part of the opponent, only instead of body parts, the options are memory addresses/values in their "memory block" - effectively a giant rectangle of hex values, overlaid on top of what they represent for readability (the opponent's health, their location, their weapons, and so on).

- Old, buggy games - The aesthetic of arbitrary code execution and memory corruption, where games would accidentally misinterpret data meant for one thing as another thing (like misinterpreting a random chunk of other game data as a sprite for Missingno, for instance) and could accidentally overwrite data in the process (like how encountering Missingno could overwrite your Hall of Fame data since it just happened to be in the way), except as an actual game mechanic.

The hook here is hopefully in the gameplay shifts opened up through “memory manipulation” and management of a unique resource, as well as the player’s creativity in strategically overwriting their own code and their enemies’ - could be tested with a simple level or two plus a simplified “memory block” system, implementing basic movement and shooting mechanics alongside simple enemies while seeing whether the “memory block” concept works well for combat and testing ways to make it easy to understand and interact with. Directly correlating certain values in the "memory block" with properties and variables stored in the game (like an object's position and rotation) should make it possible to mimic actually altering the code itself.

I could also prototype the game as a top-down shooter, since 3D movement doesn’t necessarily impact the core concept of the game and I’m more familiar with how to implement it, but experimenting more with 3D level design is probably worthwhile.

Challenges:

• I suck at FPS games and should not be allowed to design them
• Being in 3D means a whole host of design challenges I’m not as familiar with
• I don’t know how to use 3D modeling software
• Memory block mechanics are only half-formed and come with a lot of potential design problems to figure out
• How to display player’s memory in an easily readable way?
• Requires designing enemy AI
• Evidently, I need to figure out how to make the concept more intuitive to explain and grasp, because I'm having trouble describing it!