I do have a game idea in mind, and I’m hashing out details of another game that I was approached to program. We’ll probably see that one first, but the engine improvements in the course of making that one will definitely help out in creating the “bigger” game I started out to make.

Just as an aside, though. This idea of mine, on some level, started out way back in 2000, after getting a copy of RPG Maker (PS1) and playing with that. What always bugged me about RPG Maker was that I hated the Dragon Quest-ish battle system. Now that I think about it, if I’d had this advice back then, I probably would have given some more effort towards creating the custom engine while I had tons of free time to devote to it… It’s a regret, but only a small one, because quite frankly the XNA tool makes things much, MUCH easier (and is documented far better than DirectX EVER was).

At its most rudimentary, that work lends itself forward to a game like Secret of Mana, Legend of Zelda, or Crystalis before it lends itself to a turn-based RPG. For a turn-based RPG you’d end up needing to pull out a lot of the “react this way on tiles” work you’d already done for the Pac-Man clone and program up a whole separate battle interface including the mathematical underpinnings that decide things like when a battle comes up (FF3j would come up with an integer and decrement it one for every time you walked on a grassy tile and 3 for every time you walked on a forest tile and let it run down to nothing to decide when the next battle would be – therefore forests had more frequent enemy encounters) or come up with the mathematical underpinnings for turn order (in agility order plus or minus luck value to variate the results a bit if agility values are close to each other for different actors in the battle, calculating probabilities, etc.). You might head toward a turn-based RPG eventually, but something that just has you wacking enemies onscreen using existing collision detections as an underpinning sounds like it would, at least, be the inbetween step to go from a Pac-Man clone to a deeper 2-D top-down game (most of which were either action RPGs or RPGs due to the apparent complexity of game play). That is to say, you’d first get it thinking like an RPG but using action gameplay, THEN you’d probably go through the work to convert the action gameplay to something else.

The bomb was made out of a hunk of Uranium, a Microwave, a bunch of Bottle Rockets and I believe a fourth item which eludes me.

Anyway, each item would also net you a weapon which would subsequently net you the ability to enter a new area (making it linear). I think the order was Baseball Bat, Golf Club, Chain Saw.

Oh yeah, and the house was inhabited by Zombies.

Anyway, that was random but you could always run with something random like that.

PS, I really need to learn basic game design, not that I have time for such a thing.